> so I guess even for $2000 you won’t be able to have a 30 km altitude,
Does seem like it references some difficultly-ness
> flying object with perfectly controlled laser launched from a trebuchet
Does seem like it 'assumes otherwise' to (or its at least ambiguous to me and would be less so if there was a perhaps some separation between the laser and launched, but maybe that's a bit nit picky)
> The laser in the study is moving with the projectile,
And would be even more difficult than such (at least going by how much energy would be required).
But regardless, I'm not sure that 30 km altitude and first achieving mach 5 is a major constraint beyond that is probably not achievable at the $2000 price point (or its not clear to me that it is from the paper) and would be something that could be worked around with more iterations of what level of ionization of surrounding air around a projectile with a given density would give the desired amount of drag reduction (perhaps zeptosecond[0] pulses would work even better than femtosecond ones that were compared against nanosecond, or achieve similar results with lower mach number and higher density of air being ionized around the payload).
> flying object with perfectly controlled laser launched from a trebuchet
Is what I considered to be ambiguous because it wasn't clear to me that you were assuming the system would be either 'laser launched' or 'launched by a from a trebuchet' with the laser part only applying to the object, regardless of your mention of:
> The laser in the study is moving with the projectile,
Your comments after that made it clear that we are both on the same page regarding the laser part is referring to the payload.
The difficulty being your point is not that interesting to me when i made the post, but the possibility of being able to send something into LEO while minimizing drag effects on the payload to something negligible along the flight path of the payload.
The $2000 came from the cost of the trebuchet system, I'm more interested in at what price point would a system be possible (Ideally below the cost of hypersonic missiles [0] now that I assume use something like this) with a rail gun kind of system.
