How much does it take to launch a satellite? According to Rocket Lab's Peter Beck "You pretty much have to write a check for a billion dollars." Beck, along with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are part of a new wave of inventors looking to make this cheaper by developing low cost or reusable rockets for launches. The folks at Escape Dynamics, however, have a very different idea about how to make trips to space economical for people who aren't multi-millionaires. The company claims that it's successfully tested the engine for a reusable spaceplane that, rather than being stuffed to the gills with expensive fuel, would glide into the stratosphere on a wave of microwave energy.
With traditional launch systems, the bulk of the weight and resources goes to filling a tube with explosives. Naturally, that's quite wasteful, so the proposed vehicle would ditch almost all of its on-board power systems. Instead, it would receive energy from a series of ground-based microwave emitters which pump power right into a collector based in the plane's heat shield. That energy would then be used to drive an electromagnetic motor that ignites a small quantity of on-board fuel (hydrogen or helium, for instance) that would be used to get into orbit.
To read more, click here.