🚀🥄🐋 Atmospheric Scoop Divers
Kardashev range: 0.8–1.8
Instead of treating Earth only as a launch well, this idea treats the atmosphere as a resource layer. Fast scoop vehicles could dive deep, harvest volatiles, and move them outward for orbital or lunar industry.
Notes
Others have written papers on steady hypersonic flight in orbit, using atmosphere to maintain speed. This is a very hard problem and I believe it likely will not work.
What I am positing instead is that it might work in a non-steady-state way. That means using an elliptical orbit with a regular dive phase into atmosphere, followed by a coast phase back out of it.
That offers several advantages. One is active cooling, which can be refreshed in the coast phase. You cannot lose any coolant, so the vehicle needs to remain closed until close to perigee, at which point it can open its mouth and let the bow shock keep the new air and the coolant in place.
The drawback is a low collection ratio, but if it ran continuously it could still produce net positive mass.
When I was first writing about this, I kept trying to come up with a means of docking at higher orbit. That line of thought resulted in the L1 diamond stabilizer idea. I tried many other ideas for a mothership or for "jousting," but now I think the scoop diver works best on its own, independently.
There is some angular weirdness involved in thrusting, but I do not currently think that is the real blocker.
Links
- L1 diamond and nitrogen factory post - I do not think the writing is very good yet; it is more of a TODO.