10 years ago, I carried out research into the possibility of using a fixed wheel gym bike as a launch vehicle for Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space tourism project!
Initial trials were encouraging - in tests, I found that if I pedalled at 125 rpm for 10 minutes and then stopped dead to go to use a nearby Concept2 rowing machine, the kinetic energy stored in the bike's 50 pound flywheel was more than capable of lifting my lardy 15 stone body off the saddle and throwing me across the gym like a sack of spuds.
It soon became obvious, however, that a cadence of at least 275,000 rpm would be needed to attain escape velocity and that would have necessitated a training programme so intense that few would-be space tourists would be willing to contemplate it.
The gym bike launcher project was finally abandoned when finite element analysis revealed a fatal flaw in the concept - without 1,000 years worth of seriously nasty genetically-engineered modification, the human knee would never be strong enough to withstand the forces necessary to achieve low Earth orbit. Even stopping dead from a lowly 125 rpm cadence had been almost enough to rip my lower legs off. The last thing that the Branson organisation wanted was for their millionaire space tourists to be battered to death by the bloody ends of their legs flailing about like nunchucks from the pedals of the launch bikes!
