The Old Days of Space Travel - Cont'd

...just to put a capsule weighing a few thousand pounds and capable of barely holding one or two men in it into orbit. And as the need to build larger capsules came, the rockets had to grow as well; the Saturn V rocket was an amazing 363 feet tall, and except for a tiny three-person cabin in the top, the entire thing is discarded during launch. This is incredibly wasteful. Even today's Space Shuttle has to carry a giant tank full of millions of gallons of fuel and then drop the tank into the atmosphere for it to wastefully burn away.

But what if there was a way to put a man into orbit without any rocket, or any fuel? What if all you had to build and use for each launch was the capsule itself? It may be more possible than you think, and using technology proven to work for hundreds of years.