Review of Net Assets, courtesy of Kent McManigal.

12/26/12: For a book that no honest publishing house would touch, Net Assets still gets an amazing amount of attention (and downloads). I ran across this discussion from earlier this year, a decade after NA was first published:

luf-team: "Possible yes, a lot depends on how it's done. Is Carl's version simply using a land based Mach-2 aircraft? Part of the "reason" for going to a sea-plane type vehicle is the limits of growth due to landing-gear and/or runway requirements for larger payloads. (See the Stato-Launch concept) "

The ground effect launcher was adopted for the novel not because it was particularly effective (although it would beat the hell out of NASA's STS), but because I was looking for a hook, something to catch the reader's attention and make him say, "Now wait a fricking' minute..." Basically, it was done for laughs. But that said, the arguments for the system in the novel are real and do support some variant of the idea. While a high altitude spaceplane release would have drag advantages (over ground level release), the surface launch system has some fuel economies from not lifting the whole shebang to high altitude. Being a ground-effect-machine, the launcher doesn't require a fully developed, full length runway, and being rocket-powered, doesn't suck FOD into jet engine turbines.

But if you think the GEM launcher is wild, you should have seen the SSTO LTA dirigibles that appear in later stories. They first appear some 30 years after the events in Net Assets. I based them on a combination of "rockoons" (balloon-launched sounding rockets, "ballutes" (inflatable reentry heat shields), and shuttles from The End of the Empire (Alexis A. Gilliland). They start from the surface on electric-drive shrouded props, climb for altitude, then fire a He-3 fusion rocket (think of it as a fusion-powered version of NERVA). For reentry, they just reverse the process by firing the fusion drive to kill orbital velocity and settle comparatively mildly into the upper atmosphere.