This technology can be built today with technology that is not developmental to deliver any human being from any place on planet Earth to any other place in less than an hour.
The article authors reacts:
Kwast’s comment is only one of several curious comments made by military leadership lately and they do seem to claim that we could be on the precipice of a great leap in transportation technology.
Well, I think this is an engineering issue. We can dump a payload anywhere on the planet in a half hour with a ballistic missile. This isn't a great leap in transportation technology. The issue is surviving the landing. Which is sort of a transportation technology, I admit.
And this concept has been discussed, with SpaceX offering its Starship:
The spacecraft/rocket combo can lift 110 tons of cargo into low earth orbit. That’s more tonnage than the U.S. Air Force’s C-17 Globemaster III transport. SpaceX believes the rocket, in addition to sending cargo into space, could serve in the “point-to-point” space transport role, transporting people and cargo between any two points on Earth.
Point-to-point starship would pretty much act like a ballistic missile: once launched, it would accelerate into low-earth orbit and then rocket towards a faraway landing pad.
Indeed, it has been discussed a long time:
In 1956, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency — under Von Braun’s direction — proposed to loft an 18-man troop capsule into space with a Jupiter rocket. ...
In theory, [with a 1963 ICARUS proposal] 1,200 Marines would board the 20-story rocket and blast off from Vandenberg Air Force Base or Cape Canaveral. They’d soar 120 miles into space, and land at their destinations in Asia, Africa or Europe within an hour.
Actually I was pretty sure I had blogged about this concept. But I can't find a post. [Ah, I found the post by chance--from 2008]
I don't see much use for such an expensive way to send such a small number of troops. Even if the engineering means the troops don't get turned into paste on landing.
