LOXLEO revisited

The most recent post in the series here.

Now that I've figured out a way not to have to use oxygen in order to generate thrust, then why not use nitrogen instead?  Nitrogen is plentiful in the atmosphere, nearly 80%.  A gas harvester in low earth orbit can gather this stuff up easily, I would imagine.  The tough part is to keep the ship from being overwhelmed by drag.  How to do that was covered in that series.  For a quick review, there may have been a proposal to do this with beamed energy which would have been affordable if it were built.

Keep in mind that the cost of space travel is directly related to mass.  Most of the mass needed is fuel.  These two ideas minimize the amount of fuel needed and gather it up without having to launch from the ground.  This should make exploration from low Earth orbit much cheaper.

Now, for the problem of getting to LEO ( low Earth orbit) itself.  There are a lot of people working on that one.

As for the government effort, there was a promising SSTO project (X-33 or VentureStar) that got canceled early in the Bush administration.  This would have been a re-usable spaceplane, but the critics called it a flying gas can.  That's right.  All rockets are flying gas cans.  Just aren't any flying gas cans that are re-usable with a fast turnaround.  That's what Elon Musk called the "holy grail" of spacecraft design--- re-usability with fast turnaround.  It would make space travel affordable.

You need to get people up there and this spaceplane could have done it.

It could have been part of a space infrastructure.  Here's how: High value bulky stuff could use conventional rockets.  For example, it makes sense to lift a billion dollar piece of equipment with a billion dollar rocket.  But it doesn't make sense to launch a million dollars worth of food and supplies this way.  Besides, a VentureStar could launch people and supplies.  Finally, you could harvest gases from the atmosphere in order to avoid launching from the ground.  This would be a blueprint for getting us into space on an economically sustainable pathway.