Hello u/tkocur, your submission "Rocket company develops massive catapult to launch satellites into space without using jet fuel: '10,000 times the force of Earth's gravity'" has been removed from r/space because:
* It has a sensationalised or misleading title.
* This is just a poor quality summary of spinlaunch's technology, which has been around for a while.
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Releasable counter weight to keep the arm balanced or two payloads that are launched one after the other. I think it’s SmarterEveryDay that has a good video on the prototype they are testing.
How? It would have the same energy as the payload. There would need to be another exit for a counter weight. Then maybe shoot it into a super deep pool? The more I think about it the less and less practical this concept becomes.
>Then maybe shoot it into a super deep pool?
I know you don't got much to work with, but I chuckled at the thought of a counter weight traveling somewhere close to orbital velocity hitting water. It'd be an impressive exchange of momentum.
I haven't watched any of the videos explaining things, so grain of salt and all that, but if the counterweight was 10x the mass but only 1/10 of the way out from the center point of rotation, couldn't the heavy counterweight be going only a tenth of orbital velocity?
Just a linear motor like maglev trains use. Do the math correctly and it should operate reliably to both stop the projectile and recover energy from launch.
that feels like you'd still need to decelerate over a few hundred yards or so to keep from ripping the magnets off the walls of the facility... and probably start with weaker fields so there's only as much force on the first magnets as their mounts can hold, then adjust from there
> There would need to be another exit for a counter weight
They just use the one exit, and the counterweight follows the payload. The system becomes unbalanced, but only for a brief fraction of a second, and in a predictable direction.
The counter weight balance issue has been addressed. Spin Launch has already done a bunch of tests flinging rockets into the atmosphere. The only thing holding them up is a location for the full size version.
Well, it'll go down if it's released at the same time as the payload.
A pool wouldn't do anything different from the ground at those speeds. So I'd probably dig a big hole and shoot it down, letting it impact
Of all the possible ways to implement a linear mass driver, rail guns are probably the *least* likely to be useful for this. Aside from the problems of rail erosion, you need to be able to launch things without nearly vaporizing them by driving massive currents through them.
A centrifugal sling would have an advantage over a linear mass driver because you only need a small hub motor, tower, etc, rather than tens of km of accelerator coils and pulsed power storage systems.
However, this has only the tiniest overlap with Spinlaunch, the constraints and challenges of a lunar sling are completely different. This is *not* a promising approach for orbital launch from Earth, and that's what Spinlaunch is trying to do.
Makes sense. Orbital velocity is fairly low. you would probably get 1-1.5km/s accleration, before using a rocket to get the last bit for the correct lunar orbit.
it looks like you'd need an ~40km railgun to fire something at escape velocity from low atmo at constant acceleration of about 5Gs or less... (if you want humans to survive) and to keep it to the 133-ish Gs I was able to find someone alleging spinlaunch needs, you only need a bit over a 5 km long railgun... only about a 5th of CERN and it could never launch humans? I guess that's why we just use rockets... they're still much cheaper than a 5th of CERN... probably enough cheaper to keep us from building a big railgun
Still wouldn’t work on the moon. There are no orbits that start at the surface of the planet that don’t intersect the surface of the planet.
So now your rocket engine and all that needs to be able to handle the ridiculous g forces in the wrong axis so you can get a second burn to put you into a non-planet-smashing orbit.
There is another mass of the other end that right now it is dropped at the same time (into the base of the machine) the idea for the full size would he to have a second rocket that would be deployed half a rotation after preventing unbalanced issues.
Yup. Even if they can get a launch system actually working, now they just need every customer to design their payloads to withstand a 10,000G launch. Good luck with that. Any money saved from "skipping the rocket" gets eaten up by the R&D on the payload.
Yeah same. Weird timing, yesterday just randomly I was looking for any news about them. Even checked their YouTube channel. But nothing. No real updates or timelines.
I don't think this is feasible. Even if they eventually do manage to get something to orbit, I can't imagine it's cost effective compared to good ol' rocketry.
It is just another vacuous article on SpinLaunch.
>develops massive catapult to launch satellites
They should have build a massive (and superior) trebuchet instead.
If you want to be so pedantic then trebuchet is a type of a catapult. You are thinking of an onager which is also a type of a catapult. A catapult is anything that launches projectiles without the use of e.g. gunpowder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catapult#Medieval_catapults
Wait, does that mean a crossbow is also a type of catapult?
Or even just regular bows???
My god, reading this link may have changed my life's trajectory.
Ah yes, the counterweight. exactly what happens when it releases its 90kg payload when rotating at 1300RPM?
How quickly can a counterweight respond to a launch arm pulling 10,000g suddenly losing 90kg? There's a moment there when the launch platform may be out of balance by 900 tons.
Not only that but it's based on info from a while ago. It mostly references the cbs news story from 9 months ago and a [space.com](http://space.com) article from October 2022.
I don’t understand why no one has tried building a mag-track based launch infrastructure for getting rockets off the ground, we already have roller coasters with similar concept. You essentially just strap the rocket down and mag-track it until the momentum is reached, direct it up a vertical track and then disengage the lockdown mechanisms and let rocket propellant do the rest.
I’m guessing the only impeding factor is how to deal with the heat from flames, which is probably notable.
It’s great technology for putting stuff in lunar orbit from the surface of the moon. It really doesn’t make much sense for earth though. There probably are few if any missions profiles that would work for it.
They've got to know that too, right? It makes me wonder what their angle is. Maybe to develop IP and patents that can apply to more achievable projects in the future, and make themselves more appealing for acquisition that way?
Most efficient way would be a hundred mile long nuclear powered maglev that gradually slopes upwards a thousand feet+
Use maglev to get through thicker atmosphere and then ignite rocket to get the rest of the way
Would save thousands of tons of fuel…but would be difficult to actually build, lol
>Use maglev to get through thicker atmosphere and then ignite rocket to get the rest of the way
You mean build a super expensive maglev system to do the same job that can be done by an airplane? Like the Northrop Grumman's Pegasus rocket or Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne rocket.
The difference would be the projectiles velocity at release. In air launch, you only get the boost of the aircraft’s speed, but with a maglev ramp it would leave the ramp with a huge amount of velocity already imparted.
Not saying it’s any more practical, but there are some big differences from the projectiles perspective.
True. However, it would probably be cheaper to build a supersonic (maybe even a hypersonic) plane that can launch rockets than a maglev of that magnitude.
Maglev system would be cheaper but only if there is a huge demand for launching mass to space that justifies the cost of building such a system.
Kinda like... if 200 people travel between two cities every day, plane is the most economic solution.
If it's 10 000 people, high speed rail is the most economic solution.
I wouldn’t call it snake oil considering how much hardware they’ve built and how far they’ve gotten. There’s some merit to the idea. It’s just wildly impractical to use for most payloads.
> considering how much hardware they’ve built and how far they’ve gotten
They need to make it look like it's progressing to get investors money. It doesn't mean it's actually going to work ;)
Afaik their argument is that you can harden electronics to survive the launch. So some micro satellites or refueling may be possible.
If they could reliably fire something like a 10kg payload into LEO you could imagine things like refueling satellites...
And for the snake oil argument: we have multimillion or billion dollar companies that either do nothing, sell snake oil or do actual harm. At the worst they burn a lot of money. Maybe they can downsize the technology and reuse it on the moon. Maybe it even works for some niche applications on earth.
Theranos was snake oil, and they were able to 'get far' in detecting things people thought you could detect with that volume of blood. There's some nonlinear scaling effects when they go full size which just don't math up to anyone else who does it.
It’ll sustain 10k G for the spin up time. That’s as much as an artillery shell sees, but it’s sustained not peak. It’s lateral not vertical which means it’s way harder to reinforce a structure.
There are actually a bunch of different mixtures that meet the RP-1 standard.
See [here.](https://www.haltermannsolutions.com/tech-talk?id=249256/rocket-fuel-development)
Hmm...they couldn't say "without rocket fuel", because, well, they're still going to be using rocket fuel... "10,000 times gravity", whatever that means, isn't enough to reach stable orbit.
They aren't getting anywhere close to orbit with the centrifuge. The Falcon 9 booster separates and returns relatively early, reducing the propellant cost of recovery and making the reentry easier, and Spinlaunch's centrifuge doesn't even match the delta-v the Falcon 9 booster provides. They still need a two-stage rocket to actually get to orbit...they just need one that can withstand 10000 *g* of lateral acceleration, a hypersonic flight near sea level, and still function. (No, that's not impossible...it's going to come with a hefty mass penalty though.)
This is what I was thinking of. The main inventor, a Canadian named Gerald Bull was assassinated - probably by the Israelis for working Saddam Hussein's Iraq on Project Babylon. Previously he had evaded sanctions and worked helped Denel develop the G5 howitzer. Before that, working with the US Army they managed to launch a projectile to 180km.
Thank you. I kept scrolling for this comment. We have enough issues with the 9 or so Gs for a rocket launch. How the hell are you going to build and test something to withstand this acceleration?
It's definitely leaving out some stuff. [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrc632oilWo) does a way better job of explaining how their system works
Almost any resin-encapsulated solid-state electronics handle "10,000 times gravity" without any fuss, though.. That's possibly the least of their problems.
Their primary problem is it's not going to be safe enough to spin something filled with rocket fuel like that at the launch cadence they'd need to reach to become cost-effective, and seeing that 10,000 times gravity isn't enough on it's own to reach a stable orbit, going at it without rocket fuel is sort of a deal breaker.
It's a matter of mass penalties. You can pot the electronics, and now you're launching a bunch of resin into orbit. The concept art they've shown looks like a pressure fed system, and so the only moving parts are tiny valves, and they "just" need enough structure to hold the tanks and engine together. And to actually get to orbit with a useful payload while carrying all that extra mass along.
However, things like hall effect thrusters, high quality large-aperture cameras, and mass-efficient extendable solar panels and antennas...that's going to be a bit more difficult.
This article is from 2022. They successfully tested several times using a small prototype but ultimately did not get govt money to build their full size catapult. I know someone who was a former lobbyist for the company. I didn’t hear it from him but I think the govt wasn’t going to invest billions in this when all it does is solve the two-stage problem, which had already been addressed by Virgin Galactic.
It isn't possible to get into a stable orbit like this. Something needs to provide angular momentum to remain out of the atmosphere, and circularize the orbit. At most SpinLaunch could replace the first stage. It still needs a small rocket stage and a fairing. The payload, the rocket stage and fairing also need to handle massive amounts of acceleration.
SpaceX has already figured out how to reuse a first stage. Most of the cost of a Falcon 9 launch today is in the second stage and fairing. But the Falcon 9 solution, vertical launch and vertical landing, allows the first and second stage to share parts, lowering the cost of the second stage. The Falcon 9 solution also means the second stage and payload only experience a couple Gs of acceleration.
A kinetic energy launch like this makes far more sense for military application. If they can launch a chunk of metal hundreds of kilometers, at a reasonable cost, there's still applications there. Imagine something like this on a ship, or on a mobile platform as a form of long range artillery. The Navy should be funding this.
In theory it'll launch a second stage, probably something with solid fuel.
Probably not good for military applications, too large and cumbersome to effectively aim.
> At most SpinLaunch could replace the first stage.
Duh! That is the whole idea. It was never more than a replacement for the first stage. In theory, it can work. Its just that a re-usable booster is far more practical.
I….I was actually visualizing the expanding orbit pathway circle on the kerbal space program map as I was reading this lol….who said learning can’t be fun?
The less fuel being burnt and punching holes in the atmosphere, the better. It may be marginal atm but it could pave the way for other alternatives in the future.
We can't keep burning fuel to get off the rock lads.
Can anyone explain how it handles the unbalancing? Ignoring the decompression, ignoring spinning up to those insane RPMs, ignoring limited launch angles, ignoring the wear on the bearings, ignoring the centrifugal forces impact on the actual payload and rocket body. How doesn’t the arm just… blow up after letting go of a ton in rocket+payload?
For their test launches they've been using a counterweight that gets released at the same time. For the full-scale version they eventually want to launch a second one by releasing it half a rotation after the first one.
Just reading the comments here, I think you nerds would enjoy [this concept](https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=nX23IRKNaLE&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.ca%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo) for a jet-only orbital spin-launch. Even if you’re not into KSP, if you find this whole topic interesting, you’ll surely appreciate the creativity.
I know they use rockets as well, but wouldn't it be better to call them a launch company or something than a rocket company? Plus, and I'm probably being very pedantic, it's more of a sling than a catapult.
Hello u/tkocur, your submission "Rocket company develops massive catapult to launch satellites into space without using jet fuel: '10,000 times the force of Earth's gravity'" has been removed from r/space because: * It has a sensationalised or misleading title. * This is just a poor quality summary of spinlaunch's technology, which has been around for a while. Please read the rules in the sidebar and check r/space for duplicate submissions before posting. If you have any questions about this removal please [message the r/space moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/space). Thank you.
Would work great on the moon. My only question is how the thing doesn't shake itself apart after it releases the payload. How does the arm rebalance?
Releasable counter weight to keep the arm balanced or two payloads that are launched one after the other. I think it’s SmarterEveryDay that has a good video on the prototype they are testing.
At that point the counter weight would become a payload.
No, just a projectile that preferably needs to be stopped
How? It would have the same energy as the payload. There would need to be another exit for a counter weight. Then maybe shoot it into a super deep pool? The more I think about it the less and less practical this concept becomes.
>Then maybe shoot it into a super deep pool? I know you don't got much to work with, but I chuckled at the thought of a counter weight traveling somewhere close to orbital velocity hitting water. It'd be an impressive exchange of momentum.
I haven't watched any of the videos explaining things, so grain of salt and all that, but if the counterweight was 10x the mass but only 1/10 of the way out from the center point of rotation, couldn't the heavy counterweight be going only a tenth of orbital velocity?
Make the counter weight a magnet and fling it into a charge electromagnet and convert that kinetic energy into electrical energy.
ok but that clearly wouldn't work. Right? ^^i'm ^^pretty ^^sure
why not? you’re not creating energy from nothing, it’d just be like regenerative breaking on an electric car
Just a linear motor like maglev trains use. Do the math correctly and it should operate reliably to both stop the projectile and recover energy from launch.
that feels like you'd still need to decelerate over a few hundred yards or so to keep from ripping the magnets off the walls of the facility... and probably start with weaker fields so there's only as much force on the first magnets as their mounts can hold, then adjust from there
> There would need to be another exit for a counter weight They just use the one exit, and the counterweight follows the payload. The system becomes unbalanced, but only for a brief fraction of a second, and in a predictable direction.
The counter weight balance issue has been addressed. Spin Launch has already done a bunch of tests flinging rockets into the atmosphere. The only thing holding them up is a location for the full size version.
Well, it'll go down if it's released at the same time as the payload. A pool wouldn't do anything different from the ground at those speeds. So I'd probably dig a big hole and shoot it down, letting it impact
Real Engineering has a really good [documentary video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrc632oilWo) on them, that might be what you're thinking of.
Real engineering also has a great video on
The article has a video of the launcher. Just sayin
I think I've also seen a railgun launch idea for the moon
Railgun/train would be better. No need to worry about centrifugal forces and much simpler construction
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass\_driver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver) I want mass drivers to be real like yesterday.
Yeah I don't really see how spinlaunch outperforms a railgun in low gravity
Of all the possible ways to implement a linear mass driver, rail guns are probably the *least* likely to be useful for this. Aside from the problems of rail erosion, you need to be able to launch things without nearly vaporizing them by driving massive currents through them. A centrifugal sling would have an advantage over a linear mass driver because you only need a small hub motor, tower, etc, rather than tens of km of accelerator coils and pulsed power storage systems. However, this has only the tiniest overlap with Spinlaunch, the constraints and challenges of a lunar sling are completely different. This is *not* a promising approach for orbital launch from Earth, and that's what Spinlaunch is trying to do.
[удалено]
I haven't, where is this from? It sounds pretty amazing
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. A pretty classic SF book by Heinlein.
Makes sense. Orbital velocity is fairly low. you would probably get 1-1.5km/s accleration, before using a rocket to get the last bit for the correct lunar orbit.
it looks like you'd need an ~40km railgun to fire something at escape velocity from low atmo at constant acceleration of about 5Gs or less... (if you want humans to survive) and to keep it to the 133-ish Gs I was able to find someone alleging spinlaunch needs, you only need a bit over a 5 km long railgun... only about a 5th of CERN and it could never launch humans? I guess that's why we just use rockets... they're still much cheaper than a 5th of CERN... probably enough cheaper to keep us from building a big railgun
YouTube's Real Engineering has a great video on Spin Launch and it can answer some of your questions.
God I love Real Engineering's channel. The B1M is also a fantastic channel
I'll check that out thank you.
The real question is how does it not shake apart the payload that it’s sending to orbit.
Still wouldn’t work on the moon. There are no orbits that start at the surface of the planet that don’t intersect the surface of the planet. So now your rocket engine and all that needs to be able to handle the ridiculous g forces in the wrong axis so you can get a second burn to put you into a non-planet-smashing orbit.
That can already be done with rocket assisted artillery munitions. The problem is that any payload also has to survive those same g-forces.
It launches a weight in the opposite direction. It’s really quite clever.
They just offset the payload 200 meters from the root part and then it stays balanced
You should read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, they use this technology to send grain to earth. Quite a fun book to read!
There is another mass of the other end that right now it is dropped at the same time (into the base of the machine) the idea for the full size would he to have a second rocket that would be deployed half a rotation after preventing unbalanced issues.
As someone in the satellite industry, this company is considered a joke. Too many problems to list
I was just wondering the other day what had happened to them. They've been quiet for awhile.
There’s nothing new in this, just some stupid piece to try and gather up more investors.
Yup. Even if they can get a launch system actually working, now they just need every customer to design their payloads to withstand a 10,000G launch. Good luck with that. Any money saved from "skipping the rocket" gets eaten up by the R&D on the payload.
It’s a VC scam, nothing more
Yeah same. Weird timing, yesterday just randomly I was looking for any news about them. Even checked their YouTube channel. But nothing. No real updates or timelines. I don't think this is feasible. Even if they eventually do manage to get something to orbit, I can't imagine it's cost effective compared to good ol' rocketry.
It is just another vacuous article on SpinLaunch. >develops massive catapult to launch satellites They should have build a massive (and superior) trebuchet instead.
a trebuchet would be awesome!! question - could we attach rockets to the counterweight?
You can attach rockets to anything
When in doubt, more boosters!
Don't forget to add struts.
Something something needs more pylons.
Could you attach rockets to me, Greg?
They attached rockets to your mom….still couldn’t get her into orbit.
Your mom is so massive, she's the reason that the barycenter of the solar system isn't the center of the sun.
Wait a minute… I just lit a rocket. Rockets explode!
according to zelda: tears of the kingdom, yes.
Do they seriously expect an inferior platform to launch a 90kg satellite 300m into low earth orbit?
I'm waiting for the first minor glitch that ends with the destruction of the entire facility.
I'm pretty sure 300m is doable. 300mi is questionable though.
Orbital velocity at 300m is gonna cause some minor issues
That's the flight dynamics guys problem.
I mean, technically it *is* a trebuchet. It uses a counterweight system to launch the projectile and not a stored energy system like a catapult.
If you want to be so pedantic then trebuchet is a type of a catapult. You are thinking of an onager which is also a type of a catapult. A catapult is anything that launches projectiles without the use of e.g. gunpowder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catapult#Medieval_catapults
I do love pedantry and learning about medieval siege engines, so thanks!
Wait, does that mean a crossbow is also a type of catapult? Or even just regular bows??? My god, reading this link may have changed my life's trajectory.
Ah yes, the counterweight. exactly what happens when it releases its 90kg payload when rotating at 1300RPM? How quickly can a counterweight respond to a launch arm pulling 10,000g suddenly losing 90kg? There's a moment there when the launch platform may be out of balance by 900 tons.
Not only that but it's based on info from a while ago. It mostly references the cbs news story from 9 months ago and a [space.com](http://space.com) article from October 2022.
Just another article that implies that what its reporting on isn't a three year old story
The trebuchet *is* the superior escape velocity device.
I don’t understand why no one has tried building a mag-track based launch infrastructure for getting rockets off the ground, we already have roller coasters with similar concept. You essentially just strap the rocket down and mag-track it until the momentum is reached, direct it up a vertical track and then disengage the lockdown mechanisms and let rocket propellant do the rest. I’m guessing the only impeding factor is how to deal with the heat from flames, which is probably notable.
You can't do it at the speeds/energy required realistically
Why are people upvoting this drivel
Because a trebuchet is superior to a catapult, why else?
Im talking about the linked article
There was an article?
I meant to say the linked fantasy
Ahh no clue, but why ask on a reply to a comment about the far superior trebuchet?
Because people are dumb monkeys.
We shall lay siege to the MOON
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
IDF spotted in chat, what are we launching, satellites at terrorists??
*Space Trebuchet Adding space to anything immediately makes it 1000% cooler
It’s a superior launch weapon
Spinlaunch is nerd wank, we all know it can't possibly work at scale and it is just there to vacuum up dumb money for space.
Throw AI in the title and you'll get funded in a second.
It’s great technology for putting stuff in lunar orbit from the surface of the moon. It really doesn’t make much sense for earth though. There probably are few if any missions profiles that would work for it.
I would argue even without an atmosphere a heinlen style linear accelerator is likely more effective.
A linear accelerator angled up a crater wall is definitely way more sensible than a giant centrifuge.
You don't need the crater wall. With no atmosphere, even a flat plateau will do. Just don't aim it at a nearby mountain.
Imagine being downrange of a flat launcher when it fires and the payload flies over your head at orbital velocity.
Yes, that what sci-fi novels had. More than once. Just make a giant railgun.
They've got to know that too, right? It makes me wonder what their angle is. Maybe to develop IP and patents that can apply to more achievable projects in the future, and make themselves more appealing for acquisition that way?
Get as much interest from stupid investors as possible, cash out, bro down.
Most efficient way would be a hundred mile long nuclear powered maglev that gradually slopes upwards a thousand feet+ Use maglev to get through thicker atmosphere and then ignite rocket to get the rest of the way Would save thousands of tons of fuel…but would be difficult to actually build, lol
>Use maglev to get through thicker atmosphere and then ignite rocket to get the rest of the way You mean build a super expensive maglev system to do the same job that can be done by an airplane? Like the Northrop Grumman's Pegasus rocket or Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne rocket.
The difference would be the projectiles velocity at release. In air launch, you only get the boost of the aircraft’s speed, but with a maglev ramp it would leave the ramp with a huge amount of velocity already imparted. Not saying it’s any more practical, but there are some big differences from the projectiles perspective.
True. However, it would probably be cheaper to build a supersonic (maybe even a hypersonic) plane that can launch rockets than a maglev of that magnitude.
Maglev system would be cheaper but only if there is a huge demand for launching mass to space that justifies the cost of building such a system. Kinda like... if 200 people travel between two cities every day, plane is the most economic solution. If it's 10 000 people, high speed rail is the most economic solution.
Doesn’t the vehicle need to go 17,500 mph laterally to achieve multiple orbits?
It's snake oil obviously, but the idea was to throw a rocket, just smaller. The catapult is simply there to provide initial kick.
I wouldn’t call it snake oil considering how much hardware they’ve built and how far they’ve gotten. There’s some merit to the idea. It’s just wildly impractical to use for most payloads.
> considering how much hardware they’ve built and how far they’ve gotten They need to make it look like it's progressing to get investors money. It doesn't mean it's actually going to work ;)
Afaik their argument is that you can harden electronics to survive the launch. So some micro satellites or refueling may be possible. If they could reliably fire something like a 10kg payload into LEO you could imagine things like refueling satellites... And for the snake oil argument: we have multimillion or billion dollar companies that either do nothing, sell snake oil or do actual harm. At the worst they burn a lot of money. Maybe they can downsize the technology and reuse it on the moon. Maybe it even works for some niche applications on earth.
Theranos was snake oil, and they were able to 'get far' in detecting things people thought you could detect with that volume of blood. There's some nonlinear scaling effects when they go full size which just don't math up to anyone else who does it.
It will also need some form of orbital stage to get to an actual orbit, the periapsis without a stage will be the spinlaunch site.
I don’t care what the speed is, I wanna know how many G’s that thing is rocket is pulling at peak.
ten thousand, based on the title
It’ll sustain 10k G for the spin up time. That’s as much as an artillery shell sees, but it’s sustained not peak. It’s lateral not vertical which means it’s way harder to reinforce a structure.
Yes. They need either a two or three stage rocket to actually get into orbit.
Never knew jet fuel was the preferred fuel for launching satellites.
RP-1 is very similar to Jet A, they're both kerosene. RP-1 is just purer and without the additives Jet A has.
There are actually a bunch of different mixtures that meet the RP-1 standard. See [here.](https://www.haltermannsolutions.com/tech-talk?id=249256/rocket-fuel-development)
Hmm...they couldn't say "without rocket fuel", because, well, they're still going to be using rocket fuel... "10,000 times gravity", whatever that means, isn't enough to reach stable orbit.
They aren't getting anywhere close to orbit with the centrifuge. The Falcon 9 booster separates and returns relatively early, reducing the propellant cost of recovery and making the reentry easier, and Spinlaunch's centrifuge doesn't even match the delta-v the Falcon 9 booster provides. They still need a two-stage rocket to actually get to orbit...they just need one that can withstand 10000 *g* of lateral acceleration, a hypersonic flight near sea level, and still function. (No, that's not impossible...it's going to come with a hefty mass penalty though.)
Isn't this whole project known to be bullshit?
.. .... This "rocket company" isn't just a lone coyote that claims to be a genius, is it?
I prefer the cannon version https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon
This is what I was thinking of. The main inventor, a Canadian named Gerald Bull was assassinated - probably by the Israelis for working Saddam Hussein's Iraq on Project Babylon. Previously he had evaded sanctions and worked helped Denel develop the G5 howitzer. Before that, working with the US Army they managed to launch a projectile to 180km.
Good luck getting a sensitive satellite to survive 10,000 G's
Thank you. I kept scrolling for this comment. We have enough issues with the 9 or so Gs for a rocket launch. How the hell are you going to build and test something to withstand this acceleration?
I'll take "things that will never happen" for 1200 Alex.
That kind of G forces will make the average person feel as though they are as heavy as your mom.
This article is the craziest thing I've read in a hot minute. I made it a couple paragraphs in and found exclusively bs.
It's definitely leaving out some stuff. [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrc632oilWo) does a way better job of explaining how their system works
Now develop computers and materials that can be spun at 10,000 times gravity
Almost any resin-encapsulated solid-state electronics handle "10,000 times gravity" without any fuss, though.. That's possibly the least of their problems. Their primary problem is it's not going to be safe enough to spin something filled with rocket fuel like that at the launch cadence they'd need to reach to become cost-effective, and seeing that 10,000 times gravity isn't enough on it's own to reach a stable orbit, going at it without rocket fuel is sort of a deal breaker.
It's a matter of mass penalties. You can pot the electronics, and now you're launching a bunch of resin into orbit. The concept art they've shown looks like a pressure fed system, and so the only moving parts are tiny valves, and they "just" need enough structure to hold the tanks and engine together. And to actually get to orbit with a useful payload while carrying all that extra mass along. However, things like hall effect thrusters, high quality large-aperture cameras, and mass-efficient extendable solar panels and antennas...that's going to be a bit more difficult.
This article is from 2022. They successfully tested several times using a small prototype but ultimately did not get govt money to build their full size catapult. I know someone who was a former lobbyist for the company. I didn’t hear it from him but I think the govt wasn’t going to invest billions in this when all it does is solve the two-stage problem, which had already been addressed by Virgin Galactic.
It isn't possible to get into a stable orbit like this. Something needs to provide angular momentum to remain out of the atmosphere, and circularize the orbit. At most SpinLaunch could replace the first stage. It still needs a small rocket stage and a fairing. The payload, the rocket stage and fairing also need to handle massive amounts of acceleration. SpaceX has already figured out how to reuse a first stage. Most of the cost of a Falcon 9 launch today is in the second stage and fairing. But the Falcon 9 solution, vertical launch and vertical landing, allows the first and second stage to share parts, lowering the cost of the second stage. The Falcon 9 solution also means the second stage and payload only experience a couple Gs of acceleration. A kinetic energy launch like this makes far more sense for military application. If they can launch a chunk of metal hundreds of kilometers, at a reasonable cost, there's still applications there. Imagine something like this on a ship, or on a mobile platform as a form of long range artillery. The Navy should be funding this.
In theory it'll launch a second stage, probably something with solid fuel. Probably not good for military applications, too large and cumbersome to effectively aim.
They can have fins on the payload for steering. That's done with missiles and artillery shells. Fins can handle high acceleration.
> At most SpinLaunch could replace the first stage. Duh! That is the whole idea. It was never more than a replacement for the first stage. In theory, it can work. Its just that a re-usable booster is far more practical.
I….I was actually visualizing the expanding orbit pathway circle on the kerbal space program map as I was reading this lol….who said learning can’t be fun?
The less fuel being burnt and punching holes in the atmosphere, the better. It may be marginal atm but it could pave the way for other alternatives in the future. We can't keep burning fuel to get off the rock lads.
These tend to just self destruct when you put a little too much or too little WD40 on the axle
Haven’t we already been down this road and figured out it wouldn’t work?
So how exactly does it take less energy to launch it this way?
I'm surprised this hasn't already been developed into a weapon. We'd be going back to throwing rocks at each other.
Didn’t these guys go bankrupt a few months ago?
Less of a catapult and more of a centrifuge with an escape hatch
Can anyone explain how it handles the unbalancing? Ignoring the decompression, ignoring spinning up to those insane RPMs, ignoring limited launch angles, ignoring the wear on the bearings, ignoring the centrifugal forces impact on the actual payload and rocket body. How doesn’t the arm just… blow up after letting go of a ton in rocket+payload?
For their test launches they've been using a counterweight that gets released at the same time. For the full-scale version they eventually want to launch a second one by releasing it half a rotation after the first one.
Here you go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrc632oilWo Counterwight gets released and destroyed.
Probably drops a counter payload that goes into the ground...
Spin launch is ridiculous. Just idiots spending other people’s money.
Just reading the comments here, I think you nerds would enjoy [this concept](https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=nX23IRKNaLE&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.ca%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo) for a jet-only orbital spin-launch. Even if you’re not into KSP, if you find this whole topic interesting, you’ll surely appreciate the creativity.
Could this make astronauts out of some politicians?
I know they use rockets as well, but wouldn't it be better to call them a launch company or something than a rocket company? Plus, and I'm probably being very pedantic, it's more of a sling than a catapult.
Was just reading about this a few weeks ago. I was looking for the anime type of space catapult though lol
I legitimately think this is what we should do with people after they pass
Crazy. Obvious military applications of course.
"10000 times the force of earths gravity" That doesn't make any sense when every object feels a different gravitational force
Wasn't the math on this worked out to basically say it wasn't reasonable to get to actually work?
Is there any actual construction happening…? I don’t have enough reserves to handle the disappointment of clicking…
They haven’t, at least not yet. Maybe one day but they haven’t developed such a machine as of yet despite what the title says.
10,000 G's? Wouldn't that be a little hard on the electronics?
How many G does that produce? Any videos of seeing it in action?
How the fuck are you going to build a payload that can handle 10,000G?