Magnetism in space I am not an expert when it comes to physics.  I was looking at maglev technology the other day and a thought crossed my mind.  Would similar systems work for deep space exploration.  I understand maglev technology is one of the fastest means of transport on Earth and from what I read the speed of magnetism in a vacuum is "c" - 300,000,000 meters/sec.  Could this theoretically cut down the time to mars or other bodies in the solar system.  I understand some aircraft now use electromagnetic launch systems.  I have seen some rather unpractical designs for launching spacecraft from Earth.  I cannot imagine building a track to space.  In space though it's a different story.  I am not suggesting building a magnetic track to mars but rather a launching platform from say the ISS.  I imagine you could fashion the track to travel along with the craft or possibly build one at the destination.  I understand how revolutionary this sounds but it also seems to follow along with known science.  Pretty primitive deep space travel in the overall scheme of things but we have to advance to primitive prior to mastering anything.
Does any of this sound possible? 
 A: Speed of light has nothing to do with why maglev is fast. Maglev is faster because it levitates the train so there's no friction with the track. In space, there's no friction to begin with. So the "lev" in "maglev" makes no sense in space. You already levitate there.
That being said, electromagnetic launch (in a sense of a railgun or something) is just launch. When you get into space, there's no support, no tracks... and no way to anchor anything. You're pretty much stuck with action-reaction principle, you either sail on solar wind or "throw stuff backwards to move forwards". But ionic thrusters do use EM means to accelerate the exitting gasses to get the most from the least amount of fuel.
Space travel is limited by two things:


*

*Launch payload and fuel required to get into low orbit: there are numerous proposals how to reduce this: launch from an airplane, space elevators, plane-rocket hybrids, that's all been proposed numerous times, but it's a huge engineering challenge. Space elevator is almost exactly the "track to space". The first part of the journey is the most difficult.

*The long distance travel is problematic because you have to maintain acceleration for a long time to get to large velocities (and when you do, how do you stop again to land?). For this, launchpad in space doesn't help much. Largest acceleration is limited by what equipment and load can withstand, and it's not much. You need a way to accelerate for as long as possible, or use other tricks to pick up speed. Like the gravitational slingshot. Gravity assist from planets actually helps so much that it completely overshadows our capabilities to launch something with large initial velocity. We usually burn all our fuel to get to some velocity and only use low force thrusters to steer and correct the course.
In short: the hardest part of the journey is earth-orbit. There, we want something that can get a lot of payload for as little fuel as possible - tracks and airplanes will help here. For the rest of the journey, steady acceleration is needed. Solar sails, ionic thrusters, ponderomotive drive and so on... having a magnetic launchpad on the ISS woulnd't do much, and if it did... it would shoot ISS from the orbit into the opposite reaction. We don't want that :D
A: All good answers. We may be forgetting about a nearby satellite with enough mass to counter recoil, and only about 17% of the earth's gravitational pull. 
Enhance the rail gun's acceleration with a flyby of one or more planets for orbital acceleration. 
Developing the algorithms for sling-shooting an object (anticipating the gravity of the major players, planetary orbital acceleration, and trajectory changes) will pay off quite handsomely via nominal fuel payloads.
Utilize a relatively large solar array on the moon, and few hundred boulder launches for practice. Good luck!
A: Actually, a smilar approach was just recently proposed by S. Hawking and others. Using electromagnetic waves, as you correctly observed traveling through space with the speed of light, they plan on accalerating a light sail by shooting it with a laser based on earth. That kind of fits your discription of a "magnetic launcher". As the previous answer already mentioned, the "lev" part of maglev is redunant in space.
More infos can be found under the projects name "Breakthrough Starshot", e.g. on wikipedia
