British Space Exploration project to rival India's and China's

[TimberWolf]

Space starts 62 miles up.

So it's only 43 to go. I could cycle that!

You could do, but unless you also manage to speed up to 9 km/s or so, you will plummet back to Earth straight after you stop peddling. Most of the energy you need is needed to achieve orbital velocity, not to gain height.

[DimPrawn]

You could do, but unless you also manage to speed up to 9 km/s or so, you will plummet back to Earth straight after you stop peddling. Most of the energy you need is needed to achieve orbital velocity, not to gain height.

I hate negative people.

[Cliphead]

I hate negative people.

I hate cyclists

[Mich the Tester]

You could do, but unless you also manage to speed up to 9 km/s or so, you will plummet back to Earth straight after you stop peddling. Most of the energy you need is needed to achieve orbital velocity, not to gain height.

Don’t discourage him. I was looking forward to watching him try.

[ace00]

You could do, but unless you also manage to speed up to 9 km/s or so, you will plummet back to Earth straight after you stop peddling. Most of the energy you need is needed to achieve orbital velocity, not to gain height.

But he could cycle a fixed gym bike attached to a giant battery powering a giant magneto-catapult and launch himself into orbit. Please provide the calculations. This could be just what UK needs to save the economy.

[TimberWolf]

I hate negative people.

Cooler than balloons would be rail guns or air breathing rockets.

[TimberWolf]

But he could cycle a fixed gym bike attached to a giant battery powering a giant magneto-catapult and launch himself into orbit. Please provide the calculations. This could be just what UK needs to save the economy.

The calculations are dead easy (contrary to the popular belief, rocket science is quite easy), but I can't be arsed.

[Mich the Tester]

But he could cycle a fixed gym bike attached to a giant battery powering a giant magneto-catapult and launch himself into orbit. Please provide the calculations. This could be just what UK needs to save the economy.

Right, I’ll start. If you’re fit, you can produce about 300 watts continually for an hour or so. Top cyclists on EPO might manage 600 or 700 for a while, that bloke Hoy who won everything in Beijing might hit 1200 watts for about half a minute or so.

If someone can work out how many kilowatts are needed to accelerate an average man (80kg) and the average home trainer (15 kg), so 95 kgs to 9 km/s then we have a theoretical idea of how long a given cyclist would have to ride to store enough energy in the magneto catapult. Of course, we’d have to build in a big margin, maybe as high as 60% to account for the loss of kinetic energy to thermal energy in the catapult and the pulleys.

[gingerjedi]

I once did a science project where we were going to use a giant water filled rocket and heat it up using ground based lasers so the steam would propel it into orbit, we calculated the rocket would need to be about 3 miles across and 12 miles high, even then we were probably miles out.

It's still better than the yanks idea of propelling a space station into orbit using a series of nuclear explosions, they only ditched the idea in 1971.

[Cliphead]

Try this, much more fun. SFW

Linky