Well surviving the acceleration is trivial. I figured a 50km track in the post up above, in 50km you can accelerate up to lunar orbit velocities at just 1g of constant acceleration. So if your probe can survive sitting still on earth, it can survive accelerating at that speed.

You’re right though, you do need a small amount of thrust when you reach the top of your arc, but really not much. 50 m/s of DeltaV would do just fine. In other words, opening a can of compressed air would basically do it.

Or alternatively, you could use a mechanical system; you could have the vehicle (basically a rail cart) separate from the cargo with a powerful spring, pushing the cargo up, and the cart down. That mechanical system is also more effective the higher the apogee is, so if you launched the vehicle into a higher, more elliptical lunar orbit, that small push at the top pulls your low end of the orbit up much higher.

No… That doesn’t add up. The falcon 9 didn’t get as many subsidies as you might think (and it only got that during development, it gets no subsidies now). And Arianne Space has some extremely expensive rockets. SpaceX is launching for 1/10 the price of their competitors (literally), and then they’re reusing the first stages…

Anyone who thinks SpaceX isn’t in a unique position right now isn’t being honest to themselves. They’re doing what was previously thought to be impossible, about twice a week.

I mean don’t get me wrong, Musk is a monster, an irredeemable human being. But spaceX is not just Elon Musk. And what they’re doing is something nobody has been able to do before and they’re doing it very well. If they can succeed at making a fully reusable rocket with their starship, they’ll have accomplished something truly transformative. The first fully reusable launch vehicle will usher in a new era for human civilization, I’m not exaggerating to say it’s one of the most important things happening on the planet right now.

I mean… That’s basically how you accomplish this kind of thing. You throw educated people and resources at the problem for as long as it takes. Often you can do it faster with more people working on the problem. How is that not how it really works?

I mean you can certainly save time by looking over someone else’s shoulder, espionage and defecting engineers have of course led to local advances, but the process is generally the same. Development takes time and effort, and that equals money.

The moon rotates too slowly (about once every 30 days), you don’t want a space elevator for the moon, the tether would have to be ridiculously long.

But there’s no atmosphere, so you have another good option: a linear accelerator, or mass driver. Basically you make a very long, very straight rail and use electromagnetism to accelerate a craft right up to orbital velocity. The only complicated part is constructing 50 km of rail, but I mean, it’s more time consuming than complicated. This is actually way more feasible than a space elevator.