Underwater nuclear cannons might launch the first lunar city on the moon

If you’re a lover of classic science-fiction movies, you’ve probably chuckled at the myriad ways in which Hollywood once believed space travel would be possible. Perhaps my favorite pre-Apollo rocketry solution is from the classic film When Worlds Collide, where a rocket is hurtled out of Earth’s orbit by sliding it down a huge ski jump on a big mountain.

But real-life beats even that for incredulity: a new rocketry concept is now exploring the idea of using huge underwater nuclear cannons to blast rockets to the moon. And it might just be plausible .

Here’s how it works: a kilometer long gun barrel would be built on the bottom of the ocean, and loaded with the launch vehicle. Then the gun is set off with a nuclear bomb as a primer. Once the nuke is detonated, all of the water in the gun’s blast chamber would be turned into hypersonic plasma, which would fire the launch vehicle out of the barrel and into space while simultaneously protecting the “bullet” from being vaporized by the detonation itself.

Obviously, this is a massively complicated solution to space travel, and it’s even more complicated by the fact that each giant, kilometer long “gun” could be used only once. But the pay off is also potentially big: a single launch from a system like this could send more raw material in space than every Saturn V rocket combined. How much cargo are we talking here? 2,000 tons… enough to build a sizable and futuristic space station on the moon. And it’s surprisingly affordable: it would only cost around $200 million, when all was said and done, which is less than even a single space shuttle launch costs.

Sure, it sounds like a Michael Bay pitch gone wrong, but forget the dangers of dropping nukes in the ocean, or the resulting tsunamis: this is the coolest thing we’ve seen all day.

Read more at Next Big Future (via DVICE)