Is it possible to reach the space station via trampoline?

In response to US sanctions aimed at Russia's space industry, Russian Deputy Prime MinisterDmitry Rogozin suggested that US astronauts get to the space station using a trampoline. Given a big enough trampoline, could that actually work?

Responding to new US sanctions to be imposed against his country in response to the Ukraine crisis, Russian Deputy Prime MinisterDmitry Rogozin took to Twitter on Tuesday to propose a novel way for US astronauts to travel to the International Space Station.

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"After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry," Dr. Rogozin tweeted in Russian, "I suggest to the USA to bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline."

Following the conclusion of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, Russia's space program is the world's only institution currently capable of manned spaceflight. When US astronauts visit the International Space Station, they travel via Russian Soyuz spacecraft, at a fare of about $70 million per seat. Given the heightened tensions between our two countries, it's not unreasonable for the US to at least consider alternative transportation.

So exactly how feasible isRogozin's suggestion? Could a trampoline furnish an astronaut with the one giant leap needed to reach the space station, which orbits 220 miles above the Earth's surface?

Doing so would require significant trampoliningadvances, but Americans are nothing if not innovative. Just three weeks ago, in New York City's Rockefeller Plaza, acrobat Sean Kennedy, propelled by the combined kinetic energy of his brothers Eric and T.J., set the Guinness World Record for the highest trampoline jump, at 22 feet 1 inch, or 0.0018 percent of the distance to the space station.

Jonathan McDowellof the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics calculates that, for a trampolining astronaut to be properly flung into space, we would need a hole about one kilometer deep for the trampoline to stretch into. But he cautions that ordinary trampoline fabric would not be up to the task. "That's a problem for material scientists," he says.

Even if NASA were to design and build such a trampoline, say, by stretching some exotic, super-stretchy material across the Grand Canyon, an astronaut still wouldn't be able to bounce into space.

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Is it possible to reach the space station via trampoline?