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Germany did build their gun but it got raided pretty much immediately after normandy and put out of commission.

The engineer from the original HAARP project (Canadian I think) was pissed about it being cancelled and went looking for a new sponsor. Saddam was the only one interested so he agreed to build him a super-artillery gun as an alternative to SCUDs in exchange for Saddam financing his satellite launch device.

He got as far as designing and manufacturing barrel segments while working out of the netherlands before he got killed by totally-not-the-israelis-thats-a-hecking-conspiracy-theory-goy!.

The barrel segments were shipped to Iraq as oil production equipment but got intercepted and seized. And that was the end of the program.

Speaking of conspiracy theories I genuinely think space is being kept artificially expensive to limit access. Other simpler and cheaper launch options like rocketoons, air launches and cannon launches either get defunded early or only get used for side-projects like satellite killer missiles or space tourism.

> rocketoons, air launches and cannon launches

All of that stuff doesn't work as well as you'd think, because you have to not just go UP a whole bunch, but you also have to accelerate to <insane speed> in order to get into an actual orbit so you won't just fall right back down.

An air launch from like the highest that a jet can fly reduces the rocket requirement by something like 5%, and in exchange for a lot more complexity.

Reactionless thrusters change the game though, and those probably have been suppressed...

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Rocketoons are low speed, and can get you halfway to the karman line. Air resistance at 50km is a few percent of what it is at sea level, essentially it cuts out the entire first stage at the expense of making the launch much longer (no use for military applications, but fine for civil ones which make up the majority of launches). They are being increasingly used for sounding rockets and microsatellites. I strongly suspect they're an overlooked research direction.

Aircraft launches don't save *as* much but they're much more reusable than other first stage options.

Overall just from reading the development process for the shuttle it's pretty obvious that the mil-industrial complex can happily head down blind alleys for decades before they eventually correct. At the moment they're mostly centered on multi-stage solid fuel rockets but I'm not in the slightest convinced that's the best possible solution.