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To deliver astronauts into space you need an incredible amount of fuel (for example, a rocket The Saturn V that launched the Apollo mission carried 770,000 liters of kerosene, as well as liquid oxygen as an oxidizer), so researchers have long been exploring alternatives to rockets – such as space elevators, kinetic launch systems or a railgun (essentially a huge catapult) .
The latter is currently being worked on in China. The idea of the system is to accelerate the spacecraft along a giant electromagnetic launch track to a speed of Mach 1.6 (and eventually up to Mach 5), and then it will fire its own engines and leave the earth's atmosphere, accelerating to speeds of about 7 times the speed of sound.
The Aircraft Technology Research Institute of China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) has already built a two-kilometer test track in Datong, Shanxi Province.
A rail gun that can accelerate a ship to Mach 1.6 with passengers on board would have to be at least 8 km long (and much longer at Mach 5). The problem is that this will require a large number of electromagnets, which will require cryogenic cooling (and therefore a huge vacuum chamber, which does not yet exist in nature), as well as a specific airlock so that the vehicle can go at supersonic speed (if the system does not works perfectly – a very unpleasant accident could occur, close in energy to a tactical nuclear weapon).
Another issue is that, for example, the railguns fired by fighters from the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford use 121 MJ to accelerate the aircraft to 241 km/h. To accelerate a vehicle of the same mass to Mach 5, a Chinese railgun would need a staggering 50,000 MJ (and the spaceplane that will be used in the future will weigh at least 10 times more).
That is, to operate such an electromagnetic gun, you will need a nuclear power plant that will generate a gigajoule per second, and to store energy you will need a completely new supercapacitor. (The Dresden High Magnetic Field Laboratory Hochfeld-Magnetlabor Dresden has a state-of-the-art capacitor bank that can withstand 50 MJ, which is a world record, but this is not enough for a railgun.)
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The Chinese claim that if the realsotron system is successful, it will reduce the cost of launching into orbit to $60/kg (SpaceX, by comparison, currently costs $3000/kg).
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