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by hinkley 1798 days ago
What are the delta V's for a ballistic trajectory taking off in Texas an landing off the coast of Morocco? France? Western Australia? Hawaii?

You don't need to go all the way around to have a story. Low earth orbit is apparently around 84 minutes per revolution. There's a lot of space in the middle for ballistic orbits of 5-15 minutes, right?

We got in a rocket in Texas and had a light dinner on a yacht off Morocco 90 minutes later.

1 comments

If that's your goal than Virgin Galactic, which can take off from far more places in more weather conditions, is more attractive. Or you could use a Dragon capsule on an F9 which can do the job reliably today.

For a 2,400km downrange though you'd need 4.2k of delta-v (a Thor IRBM). You'll be reaching a 450km apogee too. Forget Hawaii and Morocco, you won't even make Seattle from Dallas.

You'll need 5.6k to get to places like Hong Kong and Israel, with an apogee of 1500km. That's 3 times the New Shepard.

(delta-v calc from https://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/ABM/DeltaV_BMs.htm)