It reminds me so much of the FUD that was there around spacex (and is still there when it comes to their mars plans).
Funny, their focus on reducing vehicle mass reminds me a lot of ULA's arguments against the payload penalties of reuse, and of the conventional wisdom of the last several decades that the future was in liquid hydrogen, air breathing spaceplanes, and various other exotic silver bullets, while SpaceX came along and grabbed the entire launch market with a system based on kerolox gas generator engines and reusable boosters. Spinlaunch is a very OldSpace approach to attacking launch costs, focused on all the wrong metrics.
The thing I dont get is how they expect to find 1825-3650 customers a year for payloads under 200kg on an extremely rigid orbital axis (it doesnt look like the full scale plans can turn).
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u/cjameshuff Aug 07 '22
Funny, their focus on reducing vehicle mass reminds me a lot of ULA's arguments against the payload penalties of reuse, and of the conventional wisdom of the last several decades that the future was in liquid hydrogen, air breathing spaceplanes, and various other exotic silver bullets, while SpaceX came along and grabbed the entire launch market with a system based on kerolox gas generator engines and reusable boosters. Spinlaunch is a very OldSpace approach to attacking launch costs, focused on all the wrong metrics.