By day, Mathias Verhasselt works as a senior concept designer at Blizzard. By night, he is a superhero fighting against crime and a space lover who likes to come up with cool concepts like this full scale maglev-launched spaceplane.
Accelerated while magnetically levitating on a track. It’s not my idea either, it’s been proposed for a long time as a cheaper alternative for the first stage of a space launch. I think realistically it should be in a vaccuum tube but whats the fun in that?
It accelerates to high speeds and then something else needs to take over to get to the speed needed to get to orbit. In the case of the vehicle in my drawing, it first accelerates with the maglev track to lets say mach 3, takes off the track at an altitude of lets say 5000 ft, then an atmospheric ramjet/scramjet kicks in and accelerates the craft to mach 15 or so, and then finally a liquid fuel engine accelerates to orbital speed.
Here’s some more of his beautiful space work:
Mathias Verhasselt is senior concept designer at Blizzard Entertainment in Irvine, California. He also loves space. You can follow his work in CG Society and Facebook.