My third sabbatical in a row with convenient access to field sites for nonlinear wave studies! #LiveToSurf

If you can solve these issues with electromagnetic launchers, deep-pocketed people should be pounding a path to your door and dumping truckloads of money in your driveway. (FLF comes to mind.)

I think the limitations on coilguns are more significant than just the engineering of ancillary systems like storage and cooling. Hint on the keywords to search in the literature: “armature capture” (i.e., coilguns often turn into decelerators as projectile velocities exceed 1 km/s).

“I would bet good money the primary issue here is zero real interest…” During the peak of SDI in the 1980s, plenty of funding was poured into the correct talent (including at LANL), but no clear path to achieving speeds beyond a few km/s was ever found.

I believe there are fundamental challenges to EM launch, which are fundamentally different from those involved in accelerating charged particles. Coilguns rely on mutual inductance between the drive coil and the projectile, leading to issues such as current ramping, back-EMF, and precise timing.

This isn't my wheelhouse, but I've followed the development of EM launchers for 35 years, having read every volume of the proceedings from the International Symposia on Electromagnetic Launch Technology forwards and backwards.

“6 km/s was supposedly easily achievable.”
Yet, more than 30 years later, wasn’t achieved.

I’ve come to believe that the secret sauce of being an experimentalist lies in those long, tedious hours in the lab—they grant you the luxury of time and focus needed to fully immerse yourself in the experiment.

Thankfully, my current students indulge me and never ask, “Professor Higgins, why are you wasting your time? I can laser-cut dozens of diaphragms for you in minutes.”