Truax was ahead of his time and undercapitalized. He died in 2010.
He was a proponent of sea recovery of first stages. When SpaceX tries to splash and recover a first stage, I think of him. Perhaps the recent attempts to recover the Falcon first stage would have been successful, if they had been pressure-fed stages with strong tank walls, like Truax advocated (the most recent stage landed on the water successfully, but the stress of falling over and flopping on the ocean was too much, it seems, and it ruptured.)
I can't say the pressure-fed approach (which Beal also tried) is the right one now, particularly if they plan to recover the stages on land.
On maglev: Gerard O'Neill was a proponent of these (probably because of the relationship to mass drivers.) Designs since then have changed to use permanent magnets (so-called Halbach arrays) not superconductors.
Elon Musk's Hyperloop proposal can be thought of as the result of hybridizing hovercraft and maglev.
no subject
He was a proponent of sea recovery of first stages. When SpaceX tries to splash and recover a first stage, I think of him. Perhaps the recent attempts to recover the Falcon first stage would have been successful, if they had been pressure-fed stages with strong tank walls, like Truax advocated (the most recent stage landed on the water successfully, but the stress of falling over and flopping on the ocean was too much, it seems, and it ruptured.)
I can't say the pressure-fed approach (which Beal also tried) is the right one now, particularly if they plan to recover the stages on land.
On airships: Helium Hokum: Why Airships Will Never Be Part of Our Transportation Infrastructure.
On maglev: Gerard O'Neill was a proponent of these (probably because of the relationship to mass drivers.) Designs since then have changed to use permanent magnets (so-called Halbach arrays) not superconductors.
Elon Musk's Hyperloop proposal can be thought of as the result of hybridizing hovercraft and maglev.