First: a catapult launch with no vibration and no shock wave. The engines ignite in the air at 500 km/h.Second: no propellant burned on the hardest leg of the climb. We preserve the engines, doubling their service life.Third: a heat-resistant thermal shroud instead of tiles. We don't repair the ship, we quickly dress it in a new shroud.Fourth: tanks with no trade-off between weight and strength: pressure is held by a thin shell of ultra-strong fibre, stiffness by a pre-tensioned radial rod structure. Our tanks are three times lighter.Fifth: we catch the ship instead of waiting for a pinpoint landing. Our capture zone is 200×200 metres at 5 m/s.
Our gravitational catapult uses massive water counterweights to accelerate the vehicle up to 500 km/h. Engines ignite in the air. No launch pad. No acoustic shock. No destructive vibration. No wasted fuel.
When it returns, we catch the ship. We don't expect a vehicle that has survived a flight to space and back to touch down in a strictly designated spot at near-zero speed. It only has to reach a 200×200 metre working zone at 5 metres per second, requirements that are far easier for the ship to meet. Most importantly, this saves 6 to 12 seconds of engine burn, which corresponds to roughly 20 tonnes of propellant, or the same amount of payload that could have stayed in orbit.
The market charges $5,000 to put one kilogram into orbit. That price exists because rockets are expensive to build, expensive to operate, and most of them are thrown away after one use. We built a system where the hard work happens on the ground, the rocket flies every day, and nothing gets thrown away.
The current market rate is $5,000. We are 50 times cheaper.