Cheap access to Space

I've been looking at Birch's space schemes yet again... everything from the orbital ring system, to dynamic suspension members and terraforming Venus and Mars. I don't have the math or engineering background, but I like how he talks about actually paying for all this blue sky!

Basically, there has to be a way to provide and pay for cheap access to space. My Solar Power Bubbles provide highly mobile power generation and is a 'mad scheme' which should pay for itself, without really being 'blue-sky'. Modifying the idea to build a soft, inflatable version of the Billig Tower, to provide localized climate control, starving hurricanes of moisture and steering them away from cities and coast-lines, while also providing drinking water and hydropower, is 'blue', but a logical next step. Launch services from altitude for micro-satellites is a deeper blue, but most 'blue-sky' of all is a mass- or Free Electron Laser-beam launching orbiters.

That's what I'd expect of the nano-slick; in fact, I've been there, done that, and I'm going to run through it again. A massive flock of 60 meter nano-slick bubbles, each with a free-electron laser or maser, focusing power on the underside of a myrabo lightship, or ablating carbon-fibers or polymers off of the backside of the orbiter... how do you make FEL??? I'm going to wave my hands and assume carbon-stuff can be formed into a phased array FEL and go back to the flock, lighting up the backside of a dense plastic disk, or cone for stability. Power wastage is a major sin, but we have a lot of capacity...

A meter cone orbiter is 1m*1/2m^2*pi/3 or pi/12m^3, approximately 11/42, call it 1/4m^3 and density of 1.2 g/cc, or 300 kg. We're leaving the engine at home, ablating material off of the orbiter and guesstimating a specific impulse of 260 seconds, call it all of 250 m/s^2 (which sucks! 8-), but our fuel and payload are one and the same for this example; payload is just what's left of the cone when it reaches orbit and re-circularizes, somehow... nearly 8 kilos to 9500 m/s, a payload fraction of a little over 2%. Scale up, make the thing a double cone 3m wide and 3m long,and it's 8 1/2 tonnes at launch, 200 kg into orbit (Vinny-rated, in other words...).

Power to feed the drive is ~10 times (250m/s)^2*8500kg, or 553 billion joules, 154 MW-hr of electricity, over four hours output from a 585m nano-slick bubble. The polymer and payload are trivial outputs for one of those; they produce 99 tonnes of nano-slick material or other carbon-stuff every day. Even for 1km solar power bubble, that's still over six hours of electrical production, worth over $15K at ten cents a KW-hr.