Cannon fires giant projectile to low Earth orbit

Orbit shmorbit. Escape velocity or bust!

It is a little known historical fact, but this was done in the late 18th century

A farmer and amateur physicist in upstate New York built a cannon to try to prove Newton's laws. As a cattle farmer, he used the only logical projectiles - Holstein cattle.

Sure enough, after much experimentation with angle and propellents, he was able to fire 18 of his cows East, and after orbiting the Earth once they landed in his field from the west.

This great achievement in physics is now just a footnote in history-- The herd shot 'round the World.

Niel, are you the one who is going the lug that 900 foot cannon up Mount Everest? Because it isn't going to be me.

Why not just launch them from a large Helium balloon floating at least 3 times higher than Everest? The highest unmanned ballon (not carrying a whacking big canon) was 51,000 Metres vs Everest at 8850 Metres. The atomsphere would be far less dense then at the top of Everest.

The flame from the rocket motor might destroy the balloons, but then the recoil of the humongous cannon may also destroy the balloons, and the boom may shatter 10 million windows. sigh Neil

A 17,700.0 MPH orbit is the one with the hight of 1.9965 times of the radius of Earth (of course measured from the center of Earth).

Woulndt firing a cannon that large from the top of everest have very serious ramifications? Like avalanches or something?
And i dont know much about this sort of thing, but the recoil on a cannon that large would be huge, so coulndt that to some damage, or something?


I really am shooting in the dark here

Assuming a large mass ratio between cannon/projectile, the momentum gained by the cannon will be dissipated slowly by air friction.
We are talking 1 : 100000 at least, if we want to shoot with 20 km/sec, gaining 0.2 m/s for the cannon.

The problem with cannons is they can't shoot in that velocity range; max speed is limited to speed of sound (in gasses produced in cannon), and even using helium as the gas for the cannot you cannot reach such speeds.

So it has to be a mass driver system, which requires a lot of electricity to run. How will we get so much electricity to the helium-based baloon 20 kilometers high?

Also the projectile mass would be quite small (because of energy req. as well as cannon size&mass).

While the air friction up there is small, the shockwave resulting in high air compression creates a meteor effect even in such high altitudes. The thing would burn up as a meteor, unless protected by 'miracle ablative material'.

The accelerations involved would be extremely large for a reasonably sized cannon length. With 1kilometer cannon length, you get 40.000 g's !
It's like crashing driving 100 km/h into a brick wall, and still much worse.

You'd be better off building a 20 km or so high rail shooting off into space..

Neil


Sigh, you mount the canon on a platform under 4 giantic balloons in the shape of a cross. If you were to use a rocket you'd simply drop it and wait for a 500 yards seperation before firing your primary engine. Mind you this would take some engine re-design - becuase in the old days - tilt a rocket more than 10 degrees from vertical and its propuslion system would explode.

Hi relative: A quality car battery can supply several kilowatts repeatedly, if you let it cool between launches. Modest solar panels can recharge the batteries unless you need a billion watt-hours per week. Some of the newer battery designs are significantly better. Perhaps 20,000 watts per cubic foot for a second or two. So a mass driver attached to balloons might work good. Neil

Hi kevin: As relative typed, A very long cannon barrel has perhaps 100,000 times the mass of the projectile, so recoil will damage Mount Everest only if it was already very fragile. Now using CNT = carbon nano tubes for the barrel would reduce the mass of the barrel a lot, if the very optimistic specs for CNT prove to be reality. Neil

Hi sat: Where did I go wrong? Don't I recall orbit speeds between 17000 mph and 18,000 mph for low Earth orbit which is about 1.04 earth radius? seems like it should be about 12,000 mph for 2 Earth radius? Can you calculate the altitude for staying over the sun shine terminator, which would be good for power satellites as this is the peak demand time of day. How far would it wander (from the terminator) in semipolar orbit swinging as far North as Washington DC? Neil