sigh

I know how badly Musk wants to be The Man Who Sold The Moon. He's said as much. And I know how badly his cult wants him to be. You said as much. But Tsiolkovsky won't be cheated no matter how badly Elon or you or anybody else wishes it to be so.

Elon thinks the Heavy will be $1700/kilo to LEO, and argues that he can get it down to $20 with reuse. But he's full of shit. With full reusability he's still looking at somewhere on the order of $1200 a kilo. $1200 a kilo is "rich people launching cubesats." It's a cost of $200k to get 150 kilos into space - that's for you and all the shit necessary to keep you alive.

But let's shoot the moon (literally). Presume Hyperloop is a stealth-mode launch cannon. Presume the capsules are going to be made out of diamond-fiber unobtanium and use unobtanium-alloy magnets that weigh nothing and have 100% quench. That's 811 megajoules per kilo for escape velocity. With zero loss, that's 225 kW/h per kilo. And all that energy needs to be delivered before you let it out of the gun - not over an hour, but over a matter of seconds.

Per kilogram.

You know who's doing more to get your happy space colony? am_Unition. At least he's researching fusion.