MTS — Magnetic Transportation Systems · published as it happens · misses included
Launch without chemistry.
Magnetic machines, beamed-energy propulsion, and a minimum-chemical space transportation architecture — analyses, buildable hardware documents, and measured results, with the git history as the timestamp authority.
Chemical rockets win ascent by power density, not efficiency — the propellant is the power plant. To launch without chemistry, either leave the power plant on the ground, or deliver all the velocity on the ground. This program studies, and is benchtop-prototyping toward, an architecture that does both: ship the dumbest possible mass; add energy at the point of use.
Bulk freight
A mountain-exit coilgun delivers dumb mass — water, metals, propellant — to LEO at the ~$150/kg class. All the velocity, delivered on the ground.
§5.1 · 4.9 km track · 1,000 g
Beam Line — Maglev + LaserDelicate cargo
Maglev exit plus a ground laser and a hydrogen heat exchanger: 30 g ride, payload fraction ~21% versus ~2% chemical. The power plant stays home.
§5.2 · Isp 900 · relay-vertical beam
Depot — Water NetworkThe orbital layer
A LEO water depot and beamed-steam tugs extend the line to escape, the Moon, and Mars — water is cargo, propellant, and market at once.
§5.4 · §11 · passive docking, no catching
Documents
Space Transportation Architecture Study
The master document: physics ground rules, rejected branches and the numbers that killed them, three launch systems plus an orbital node, risk register, demonstration ladder, and a live work-item ledger.
Program Gate Plan
Phases 0–7 with entry conditions, kill criteria written before data arrives, and the standing rules the program answers to.
Build Sheet 001 — Inductrack demonstrator
Benchtop eddy-levitation rig: predicted levitation onset, gaps, and the flat-drag signature, with gate criteria and safety envelope.
Build Sheet 002 — Droplet thruster
Acoustically levitated droplet as a micro-thrust balance under laser illumination — predictions committed before data collection.
Beamed-line availability — flyable days
NM cloud and wind statistics against Laser Clearinghouse windows: ~200 flyable days/yr first cut, and where availability binds the economics.
Citation & uncertainty pass
The document that closes the loop: sources for every cost figure, uncertainty bands on every result. First cut, maintained live.
How to read this site
Dollar figures are [I]-grade bands, ×2–3 wide with honest midpoints, until the citation-and-uncertainty pass closes each one — and every headline claim carries a 3× survivability test. Documents are corrected forward in dated commits, never silently rewritten: the commit history is the record.
Status
Authorship & method
This research is drafted in human-AI collaboration: analyses are AI-drafted under the owner's direction, then re-derived, red-teamed, and adopted or rejected by the owner. All decisions, inventions, and commits are Christopher Brotherton's; commits credit AI drafting via Co-Authored-By trailers. The dated commit history is the record of human contribution.
Technical critique is welcome and useful — open an issue. Errors that survive review get corrected in a dated commit.