Because what matters for getting into space / orbit is velocity to achieve orbit. An object without that velocity will simply fall down to earth instead of orbiting.
I believe his suggestion is to use the dirigible to lift the Slingatron into the high atmosphere where the tremendous atmospheric drag will be substantially reduced, thus making a crazy idea slightly less crazy and at the same time, more crazy.
Newton's third law gets in the way of that proposal.
When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to that of the first body.
If you plan to generate acceleration using mechanical force like the reference design, you'd need a massive counterweight. An equal and opposite energy would be transferred to the counterweight, so you need a lot of mass, which would require an even more massive dirigible. You also need somewhere to dissipate that energy. In the reference design, the Earth is used as the counterweight.
Alternatively, you could generate the circular motion using something like a rocket engine, in which case you might as well just use a rocket for linear acceleration and ditch the gyration mechanism.
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Since it's such a crazy idea, why not build a gigantic dirigible to take it up to high altitude? No problem, right?
Because what matters for getting into space / orbit is velocity to achieve orbit. An object without that velocity will simply fall down to earth instead of orbiting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit
I believe his suggestion is to use the dirigible to lift the Slingatron into the high atmosphere where the tremendous atmospheric drag will be substantially reduced, thus making a crazy idea slightly less crazy and at the same time, more crazy.
All I can say is I love the kind of crazy going on in this thread and all of you should buy kerbal space program.
Newton's third law gets in the way of that proposal.
When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to that of the first body.
If you plan to generate acceleration using mechanical force like the reference design, you'd need a massive counterweight. An equal and opposite energy would be transferred to the counterweight, so you need a lot of mass, which would require an even more massive dirigible. You also need somewhere to dissipate that energy. In the reference design, the Earth is used as the counterweight.
Alternatively, you could generate the circular motion using something like a rocket engine, in which case you might as well just use a rocket for linear acceleration and ditch the gyration mechanism.
I love it!