Lightcraft flight handbook : LTI-20

Over the past eight years, Professor Leik Myrabo's Lightcraft inventions have found their way into 20 television documentaries and over a hundred print media articles, worldwide. His vision: create a revolution in space access - based on ultraenergetic spacecraft that ride Highways of Light. His obsession: Cut launch costs by 1000-fold, increase safety to commercial airline levels, and transform orbital flight energetics into an easy "stroll in the park". Opening his new Age of Affordable Space Flight -- for everyone -- will require sizeable investments in global energy-beaming infrastructure, and 'green' satellite solar power. Myrabo believes this revolution is now clearly within our grasp, solidly founded on todays physics, and simply a 'matter of will'. In this handbook, authors Leik Myrabo and John Lewis reveal an intriguing preview of Next Generation, manned lightcraft technology. Based on todays physics and real engineering, this very detailed technical manual is conjured up for a presently fictitious (but eminently buildable), 20 metre diameter ultra-energetic disc, designed for a critical mission facing the U.S. Space Command in 2025: The LTI-20 lightcraft must transport 6-12 space commandos half way around the world, loiter in the atmosphere, on-station for 1-2 weeks undetected, and return to the continental United States (CONUS) without 'refueling' in the conventional sense. At hypersonic speeds, the LTI-20 is propelled by gigawatt level beamed power and MHD slipstream accelerators -- designed to annihilate the crafts own bow shock wave when traversing the atmosphere. The stealthy vehicle is completely silent, ultra-quick, and produces no sonic boom. The very same microwave lightcraft concept is seriously under investigation in NASA's Advanced Space Transportation Program (ASTP) -- as one of only two viable options "now on the books" for cutting launch costs by 1000X -- within the foreseeable future.