<font color="yellow">There’s really no point in stretching the magnets out from here to the moon. Just put them all at LEO and at EM-L1.</font><br />LEO looks like a good point to build such a system.<br />You can just launch a cheap ship to the orbital height, like Space Ship One, and let the system accelerate it to orbital speed. The station orbit will be a little lowered due to momentum exchange with the ship, but it could be slowly re-raised with ion rockets or other high ISP thrusters. To return, the ship can be accelerated in the opposite direction to return part of the momentum it gained, and reduce the amount of thrust the ion rockets must need.<br />The ship itself would not need a very good heat shield, but it would be wise to have a capsule with heat shield rated to orbital speed, just in case the system fails, you will loose the cheap ship, but not the astronauts or expensive cargo. <br /><br />I think at L1 they are not needed, you can launch a ship from LEO to the Moon and put the magnets on Moon surface. You will need the Moon ones to land there using or not L1. They will be easy to build with lunar material (well… after there are some mining operations there) and easy to keep in place: just stick them to the ground.<br /><font color="yellow"><br />A series of circular electro-magnets in LEO powered by a space based nuclear reactor. This space ship passing through the magnets could be easily accelerated to the moon. At EM-L1 there would be another series of circular, nuclear, electro-magnets to catch the space ship by accelerating it to orbital velocity at that distance. <br /></font><br />I think the nuclear powered will be a political problem…<br /><br />Solar cells may be a solution, but they reduce the time window when you can launch:<br />To have sunlight in a thousands of kilometers path, you need to launch near sunrise.<br />If this must match the time where your location crosses the plane of the station orbit, and the time the fi