Those are valid points, and I appreciate you taking the time to make them. To clarify, when I misspelled "cannon" I just meant "big gun" rather than a literal p

Those are valid points, and I appreciate you taking the time to make them. To clarify, when I misspelled "cannon" I just meant "big gun" rather than a literal piece of primitive weaponry. More importantly, I would like to point out that while all of your concerns are valid, many of those problems were already solved in the 1960's. Project HARP[1] was able to use a 400 lb projectile to launch a 185 lb payload to a height of 111 miles... in 1966. We don't need anything close to 185 lbs of payload. You'll note that 111 miles up is considered suborbital space. HARP was built mostly of 1950's era technology, and cost between $1000-$3000 per payload to fire. It had a 16" barrel and could be reloaded in about an hour. The payloads were encapsulated within a "sabot" to protect them, and the sabot seemed to do it's job, because primitive electronic instrument packages were deployed without being destroyed and weather balloons were deployed with success. The long term plan for that project was to add a second stage which would push the payload into orbit, or beyond. There is no reason to believe it wouldn't have worked, but the Vietnam war happened and people lost the taste for funding space exploration. It was shut down. The enormous gun is still there, rusting where it was abandoned after firing nearly 100 ballistic payloads into suborbital space Now, if we could fire ballistic payloads into suborbital space in 1966 what do you think we could achieve today? Honestly, the engineering isn't even that difficult, it's just a matter of figuring out how to pay for it. The rest is an incremental improvement over something we could already do in the 60's. Sure, I'm glossing over a ton of minor issues (like the entire second stage), but those problems are also basically solved and we've learned a few things in the last 60 years. I not only think it's possible, I think someone should give it a shot (pun intended). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP