Successful or not, news of the test is a pretty big deal given that it was just a few months ago that reports emerged about China’s other proposed super-powered rail gun, which is intended to send astronauts on a Boeing 737-size ship into space (NASA had begun building its own astronaut-shooting railgun in the 1990s, but had to abandon it due to lack of dinero.)
I thought EM-powered launching of fragile things like people was thrown out decades ago. How do you fire something up at high Gs without having high Gs? Projectiles and even some cargo may not care, but people might.
You can launch people out of a mass driver.
They’ll die, but you can do it.
There’s an amazing novel series called The Hyperion Cantos where they have these space ships that accelerate so quickly they turn the passengers into goo. Then over the course of the trip the auto-doc regrows the people. Their memories are wiped, so they aren’t aware of what is happening to them.
