Yes, it's not a rail line from LA to San Francisco, or Osaka to Tokyo. It's more complex, and in a more hostile environment. It's a train from nowhere to a point 70,000 feet in the air, on a maglev train 50 times longer than any existing maglev train, using an as-yet undeveloped re-entry vehicle, requiring the power…

In the original report, the passenger version involves a levitated tunnel going to a height of 70,000 feet. The side-of-the-mountain one is just for cargo. "Passenger spacecraft enter the atmosphere at 70,000 feet, where deceleration is acceptable. A levitated evacuated launch tube is used, with the levitation force…

Ok, I'll try again, slowly. People get into a vehicle of some sort, which goes zooming down this train track, and off into space. How do these people return? In this same vehicle? Is this vehicle reusable? Does it land, then go back on the track for more trips?

Spaceship One is suborbital, though. It doesn't have to deal with the stresses that the shuttle did. This is orbital, which is a whole different level of problems. This is more like the shuttle as a vehicle than Spaceship One. This is also for payloads much bigger than Spaceship One. It's a much bigger engineering…

You know this thing points up, right? Like a ramp? A ramp thousands of feet high? See the picture? It's not like the maglev train in Japan, which goes along the earth's surface.

The largest SMES unit today can handle about 1 MW. Megawatt, not gigawatt. So, this would require an SMES system thousands of times more powerful than any existing today. Plus, what's generating the power that the superconductive magnetic energy storage system is storing?

Nobody is saying "OMG trains don't work." It's the infrastructure around the mag lev track itself—like the miles-long levitating vacuum tube built in earth's most hostile environment—that seems to make people skeptical. Also, the price.

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Which is how, exactly? Does the space train land like the shuttle? Plunge to the earth like the Soyuz? Plummet into the sea like Apollo? How are most things recovered now? Well, the only vehicle we have now is the Russian's and it bashes into the ground in Kazakhstan, and is not reusable. I'm guessing the space-train…

Read the article and look at the picture.

I'm getting it from the article. "While most of the tube would be at sea level, the exit point would need to be about 12 miles high."

The most powerful nuclear power plant on earth generates 1.5 GW.

I was skeptical before but now I'm sold.

I wonder if the dollar figures include developing the vehicle itself. Developing a space vehicle from scratch would be super pricey.

This would be 50 times longer than the longest maglev train ever built, yet it would cost the same? Even though it goes up to a height 5 times higher than the highest thing ever built?

The real estate acquisition was about three billion of the 99 billion. Where would the Antarctica workers live? How would the gizmo be powered? Do you have to build housing and a powerplant? California already has electricity and houses and hotels.

Only $50 dollars a kilogram, eh? The shuttle was supposed to cost less per kilogram than expendable rockets, but it ended up costing more—and the shuttle didn't require building a 12-mile-high thingamijig in Antarctica.

Antarctica is the most expensive place on Earth to build anything. The hassle of zoning is nothing compared to the hassle of building something TWELVE MILES HIGH in the most hostile environment on Earth.

So, California's bullet train is going to $99 billion and take 20 years to build, but a train with a THOUSAND MILE TUNNEL that goes 12 MILES UP INTO THE AIR can be built in a frozen continent with no construction infrastructure, where everything has to be shipped in through Earth's most hostile seas, for $30 billion…

There was a draft of the 89 Batman that had Robin in it? Hmm. KS would have been ok, but I'm not sure how a Batman AND Robin origin story would have been.