Lifting your rocket from Terra's surface into circular orbit takes an unreasonably large amount of delta V. As a matter of fact, if your missions use Hohmann trajectories, the lift-off portion will take about the same delta V as does the Hohmann from Terra to the destination planet. As Heinlein put it:

From A Step Farther Out by Jerry Pournelle (1979)

"No," Bob said. "If you can get your ship into orbit, you're halfway to anywhere."

So it takes about 7.6 km/s of delta V to lift-off into circular orbit. This is a mere 360 kilometers or so from the Terra's surface. For an additional 7.6 km/s, you can do a Hohmann with a marginal capture to the planet Saturn. This is towards the edge of the Solar system, at an average distance of 1,433,000,000 kilometers. Gee, orbit really is halfway to anywhere!

Of course, once you have torchships you can stop all this child's play with wimpy Hohmann transfers and start doing some big muscular Brachistochrone trajectories. Brachistochrones typically require delta Vs that are hundreds of times more than the equivalent Hohmann. So any ship that can handle a Brachistochrone is not going to even notice the delta V cost for lift-off.

But even with torchships, the real bottle-neck restricting developing space resources remains the cost to boost payloads into Earth orbit.

For some cold hard reality read When Rocket Science Meets The Dismal Science.

From Space Jockey by Robert Heinlein (1949)

The Commerce Commission has set the charges for the present three-stage lift from here to the Moon at thirty dollars a pound. Would direct service be cheaper? A ship designed to blast off from Earth, make an airless landing on the Moon, return and make an atmosphere landing, would be so cluttered up with heavy special equipment used only once in the trip that it could not show a profit at a thousand dollars a pound! Imagine combining a ferry boat, a subway train, and an express elevator. So Trans-Lunar uses rockets braced for catapulting, and winged for landing on return to Earth to make the terrific lift from Earth to our satellite station Supra-New York. The long middle lap, from there to where Space Terminal circles the Moon, calls for comfort-but no landing gear. The Flying Dutchman and the Philip Nolan never land; they were even assembled in space, and they resemble winged rockets like the Skysprite and the Firefly as little as a Pullman train resembles a parachute.

The Moonbat and the Gremlin are good only for the jump from Space Terminal down to Luna . . . no wings, cocoon-like acceleration-and-crash hammocks, fractional controls on their enormous jets.

There are other ways besides rocket boosters and space shuttles to get payloads into orbit. These might take the form of rockets climbing rails set up the side of a mountain, a laser thermal launching facility (in THE MILLENNIAL PROJECT, Marshall Savage calls this a "Bifrost Bridge", that is, a bridge to space composed of colored light), launching loops, space fountains or the base of a Space Elevator.

For comparison purposes, here are the masses of a few sample payloads. This is to give you a mental image of the capabilities of the following booster systems.

Here are some currently existing heavy lift vehicles:

And here are some proposed surface to orbit solutions we will discuss:

The DH-1 is a fictional two stage to orbit re-useable rocket described in the book The Rocket Company (ISBN 1-56347-696-7). There are some sample chapters here. I recommend this book.

While the design is fictional, it would actually work. The authors have patented it. The small payload means the rocket is intended more for "space access" instead of heavy lift to orbit. The business model for the developers was more to sell the rockets (at an attractive price of $250 million) rather than selling cargo boost services.

There are DH-1 plug-ins for the spacecraft simulation Orbiter.

This is from a report called AFRL-PR-ED-TR-2004-0024 Advanced Propulsion Study (2004). It is a single stage to orbit vehicle using a LANTR for propulsion.

Details here, here, and here.

Sea Dragon was designed by Robert Truax in 1962 to be a low-cost heavy lift launch vehicle. To reduce costs for launch pads and gantries, the vehicle was to be launched from the ocean. It would be towed out to the watery launch site, and the ballast tank in the first stage exhaust nozzle would be flooded. This would drag the tail down and the nose up, orienting the rocket into launch position. The rocket would then float with the second stage cargo hatch conveniently just above the waterline, ready to be loaded.

At 150 m long and 23 m in diameter, Sea Dragon would have been the largest rocket ever built. To lower the cost of the rocket itself, it was designed to be build of inexpensive materials, specifically 8 mm steel sheeting.

The project was shut down by NASA in the mid-1960's due to budget cuts.

Anthony Tate has an interesting solution to the heavy lift problem. In his essay, he says that if we can grow up and stop panicking when we hear the N-word a reusable closed-cycle gas-core nuclear thermal rocket can boost huge amounts of payload into orbit. He calls it a "Liberty Ship." His design has a cluster of seven nuclear engines, with 1,200,000 pounds of thrust (5,340,000 newtons) each, from a thermal output of approximately 80 gigawatts. Exhaust velocity of 30,000 meters per second, which is a specific impulse of about 3060 seconds. Thrust to weight ratio of 10. Engine with safety systems, fuel storage, etc. masses 120,000 pounds or 60 short tons (54 metric tons ).

Using a Saturn V rocket as a template, the Liberty Ship has a wet mass of six million pounds (2,700,000 kilograms). Mr. Tate designs a delta V of 15 km/s, so it can has powered descent. It can take off and land. This implies a propellant mass of 2,400,000 pounds (1,100,000 kilograms). Using liquid hydrogen as propellant, this will make the propellant volume 15,200 cubic meters, since hydrogen is inconveniently non-dense. Say 20 meters in diameter and 55 meters long. It will be plump compared to a Saturn V.

Design height of 105 meters: 15 meters to the engines, 55 meters for the hydrogen tank, 5 meters for shielding and crew space, and a modular cargo area which is 30 meters high and 20 meters in diameter (enough cargo space for a good sized office building).

A Saturn V has a dry mass of 414,000 pounds (188,000 kilograms).

The Liberty Ship has seven engines at 120,000 pounds each, for a total of 840,000 pounds. Mr. Tate splurges and gives it a structural mass of 760,000 pounds, so it has plenty of surplus strength and redundancy. Add 2,400,000 pounds for reaction mass, and the Liberty Ship has a non-payload wet mass of 4,000,000 pounds.

Since it is scaled as a Saturn V, it is intended to have a total mass of 6,000,000 pounds. Subtract the 4,000,000 pound non-payload wet mass, and we discover that this brute can boost into low earth orbit a payload of Two Million Pounds. Great galloping galaxies! That's about 1000 metric tons, or eight times the boost of the Saturn V.

The Space Shuttle can only boost about 25 metric tons into LEO. The Liberty Ship could carry three International Space Stations into orbit in one trip.

Having said all this, it is important to keep in mind that a closed-cycle gas-core nuclear thermal rocket is a hideously difficult engineering feat, and we are nowhere near possessing the abilty to make one. An open-cycle gas-core rocket is much easier, but there is no way it would be allowed as a surface to orbit vehicle. Spray charges of fissioning radioactive plutonium death out the exhaust nozzle at fifty kilometers per second? That's not a lift off rocket, that's a weapon of mass destruction. However, see the Nexus.

There is an interesting analysis of the Liberty Ship on Next Big Future.

This is from some fragmentary circa 1964 documents uncoverd by The Unwanted Blog.

A Convair concept for an all-chemical Nexus SSTO launch vehicle with a second stage using open-cycle gas-core nuclear thermal rockets. Presumably the designers thought that the chemical stage would loft the second stage high enough so that the twin plumes of incandescent radioactive death would be diluted into plausible deniabilty.

This is from some fragmentary circa 1964 documents uncoverd by The Unwanted Blog.

This monster is the Uprated GCNR Nexus grown to three times the size. The document says that it can deliver 453 metric tons not to LEO, but to Lunar orbit. Doing some calculations on the back of an envelope with my slide rule, I estimate that it can loft 4,600 metric tons into LEO. And also with a proportional increase in radioactive exhaust.

A bit over 122 meters tall with the second stage having a diameter of 37 meters. Total wet mass of 10,900 metric tons. Second (nuclear) stage wet mass 5,900 metric tons for the Lunar orbit configuration. Dry second stage at Lunar orbit has a mass of 450 metric tons. The LEO configuration will be different.

The chemical stage has a total delta V capacity of 2.4 km/s. The gas core engines have a specific impulse rating of 2,220 seconds. The gas core stage in Lunar orbit configuration has a total delta V capacity of 21.8 km/s.

Verne Gun - 280,000 metric tons payload to LEO Karl Schroeder has come up with an innovative concept. He mulled over a couple of articles from The Next Big Future (specifically this one and this one). Remember that one of the best propulsion systems for boosting huge payloads into orbit is the Orion drive; were it not for the fallout, the EMP, and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Then Mr. Schroeder thought about Jules Verne's novel From The Earth To The Moon, and the giant cannon Columbiad. You set off one solitary ten megaton nuclear device in a deep underground salt dome. Perched on top is an Orion type spacecraft. All the EMP and radiation is contained in the underground cave (as has been done with historical underground nuclear tests). And 280,000 TONS of payload sails into low Earth orbit. Not pounds. Tons I say "sails into orbit", but it is more like "slammed by thousands of gs of acceleration", so this has to be unmanned (any human beings on board would instantly be converted into a thin layer of bloody chunky salsa covering the deck plates). But 280,000 tons? That's about one thousand International Space Stations, an entire Space Elevator (see below), an entire Lunar colony, an orbital fuel depot that would make future NASA missions ten times cheaper, a space station the size of the one in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, or about one-tenth of a ecologically clean 1.5 terawatt solar power station. I know that nuclear-phobes will have a screaming fit, but this concept deserves close consideration.

From Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert Heinlein (1947). Thanks to Thomas Gagnon for suggesting this.

"What's wrong with that? Never mind," Cargraves went on. "I'm not trying to be a smart-Aleck. The misconception is one of the oldest in the book, and it keeps showing up again, every time some non-technical man decides to do a feature story on the future of space travel. It comes from mixing up shooting with rocketry. If you wanted to fire a shot at the moon, the way Jules Verne proposed, it would have to go seven miles per second when it left the gun or it would fall back. But with a rocket you could make the crossing at a slow walk if you had enough power and enough fuel to keep on driving just hard enough to keep from falling back. Of course it would raise Cain with your mass-ratio. But we're doing something of that sort right now. We've got tower to spare; I don't see why we should knock ourselves out with higher acceleration than we have to just to get there a little sooner. The moon will wait. It's waited a long time.

ed. note: of course the reason the Galileo can take its good time getting up to seven miles a second is because it is a species of torchship, and thus does not have to worry as much about mass ratios.

This extreme heavy lift vehicle appears in Beyond Tomorrow by Dandridge Cole of "Macrolife" fame (Amherst Press 1965). The best place to watch lift-off is from an adjacent continent. That engine looks like it could accidentally vaporize Florida. They better work on the cargo handling system, though. Loading it crate by crate by helicopter is too much like eating a bowl of rice with tweezers one grain at a time.

Mr. Cole assumes that the economies of scale would dictate such a huge rocket to keep up with the orbital boost demands of the far-flung futurstic year 1990. The wet mass would be 50,000 tons. If the propulsion system had a specific impulse of 3,000 seconds, it would have a propellant fraction of 0.7 and a payload mass of 60 million pounds (27,000 metric tons). If the propulsion system was weaker, say a specific impulse of 1,500 seconds, it would have a propellant fraction of 0.5 and a payload of 20 million pounds (9,000 metric tons). That propellant fraction doesn't make sense to me, I'll have to do the math.

The design is winged, for controlled aerodynamic Earth landing (now that would be a sight to see). Water take off and landing because there isnt' a runway in the world that could survive that monster.

To Be Added