The spacecraft remains attached to the launch sled as it accelerates in the horizontal acceleration section and then coasts up the ramp. It detaches from the launch sled at the end of the ramp. The spacecraft continues to travel ballistically through the Elevated Evacuated Tube (EET), and the launch sled is decelerated in the EET, using eddy current braking against a "braking guideway" so that it can be reused. The braking guideway is attached to the inside of the EET by numerous actuator struts, and the actuator struts dynamically adjust the offset between the braking guideway and the EET to enable the braking guideway to achieve a straightness target that is more stringent that the straightness target of the EET.

The Launch Sled must decelerate from 11,121 m/s to 0 m/s over the 102 km length of the EET, so the required deceleration is

For a 2000 kg sled, the braking force is

The braking guideway in the EET differs from the guideway in the ramp and horizontal acceleration sections. The EET guideway's primary purpose is to slow down just the sled rather than to redirect the trajectory of the sled and spacecraft, so it primarily experiences a tensile load from decelerating the sled, and supports minimal perpendicular loading. Therefore, it is engineered to be much lighter than the guideway in the ramp. If the guideway, like the rest of the EET, is made from an aero grade aluminum alloy (e.g. 7075 Aluminum) with a yield strength, $\sigma$, of 500 MPa at room temperature.

Temperature                     Approximate Yield Strength (7075-T6)
Room Temp (24°C)                500-525 MPa
100°C                           460-485 MPa
150°C                           300-350 MPa (30% reduction)
300°C                           70-100 MPa

The minimum cross-section that the guideway needs to handle the tensile load, with an engineering factor, $\gamma$, of 1.5 depends on the temperature rise that the braking guideway will experience due to eddy current braking. For example, if the braking guideway's maximum temperature not exceed 150°C, then

If the guideway's cross-section was a tube with an inner radius of 5 cm, then outer radius would be

In practice, the braking guideway will be attached to the outer shell of the elevated evacuated tube, which will have a much larger cross sectional area and thus will be able to easily bear most of the tensile load.

Deceleration is achieved using eddy-current braking. Magnets in the launch sled induce changing magnetic fields in the braking guideway, converting the sled’s kinetic energy into heat. The strength of the magnetic field generated by these magnets will be adjusted to achieve a constant braking force, even as the sled's speed decreases. The sled’s kinetic energy is

Spread uniformly over the 102 km tube length, the energy deposition per meter is

If the density, $\rho$ of the braking guideway material (Aluminum 7075-T6) is 2810 kg/m3, the braking guideway's mass per meter is

With $c_p \approx 930 J/kg \cdotp K$, the guideway's temperature will increase by

This is only $24+77-100 = 1 \degree C$ higher than our allowed maximum temperature.

If we assume that four launches per day, in rapid succession, followed by almost 24 hours before the next set of launches, there will be plenty of time for the guideway to cool down between sets of launches.

The sled adjusts its magnetic field strength as it decelerates so that the net braking force remains approximately constant. Other than this gradual adjustment, the magnetic fields in the sled are unchanging. The sled’s magnets and power electronics still incur some resistive losses, but these are small compared to the heating in the guideway and can be managed with conventional thermal design. The dominant dissipation occurs in the guideway, where the induced eddy currents convert the sled’s kinetic energy into heat..

To prevent the sled from stretching the guideway during deceleration, the guideway is pretensioned by internally pressurizing it with a nearly incompressible fluid such as water. As the sled decelerates and imposes additional longitudinal stress, valves release the pressurized fluid into an internal reservoir, relieving an equivalent amount of stress and maintaining approximately constant tension. Once the sled comes to rest, the guideway is rapidly repressurized using distributed pressurized water supplies along its length, so that it does not snap back.

Initially, when the launch sled enters the EET, it is travelling at the same velocity as the spacecraft and therefore imposes no additional load on the guideway. As the sled begins to decelerate, an increasing fraction of its weight must be supported by the EET. To distribute this load more evenly, the 10-meter launch sled separates into ten one-meter segments. Each segment then decelerates at a slightly different rate to increase the inter-segment spacing and thereby spread the launch sled's load over a longer section of the EET.

After sufficient deceleration, the sled segments can exit the elevated evacuated tube through their own airlock. At that point, it could deploy a parasail and glide down to land in the water near a recovery ship, after which it would be retrieved and returned to the start of the launch system.

A variant of this approach uses a smaller, dedicated evacuated “sled tube” that branches off from the main EET. This secondary tube can be redirected downward along a controlled arc and tethered to the ground, allowing most of its length to be supported by low-altitude lift fans or conventional steel towers. Portions of the sled tube could even transition underwater, further reducing the amount of high-altitude aerodynamic support required.