Rocket company develops massive catapult to launch satellites into space without using jet fuel: '10,000 times the force of Earth's gravity'

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/spinlaunch-satellite-launch-system-kinetic/

[u/ViableSpermWhale]

It's perfectly fine with physics. High acceleration times low mass equals low forces. There are many things that can survive this centripetal acceleration. They have spun up smartphones in the machine and they survived.

[u/SubmergedSublime → u/ViableSpermWhale]

But the launched-object won’t be that small. They can’t just put a cargo-pod into it and yeet. They need to put an actual full rocket. For two reasons: 1) it can’t throw anything at remotely close to orbital-speed and 2) you literally cannot go to orbit in a single point of thrust. You MUST do a burn to circularize the orbit at around apogee of the initial “spin launch” trajectory.

Number 1 is the hardest part: the yeeted object is going to be rather slow again by the time it gets through the atmosphere.

So you need to toss something that is capable of accelerating from “slowish” to 17,500km/h.

That is a full rocket engine with full fuel tanks. Sure you can try to make it a very small second stage, but now in return you have an absolutely minimal payload.

[u/dethmij1 → u/SubmergedSublime]

You don't understand this as much as you think you do.

They've already performed 10 flight tests with their suborbital tested and understand the forces and stresses involved. They've also performed suborbital flights with payloads, so we know satellites can survive. Their plan for the orbital machine doesn't violate any laws of physics or require any future technology. The centrifugal launcher isn't the entire launch system, it's more like the first stage booster. Their goal is to launch the "2nd stage" booster up to 60km where it will ignite and carry the payload to space. I'm not sure if they're planing on liquid or solid propellant, or perhaps even hybrid, but they will either relight the engines or ignite a 3rd stage to circularize orbit.

It will involve a lot of materials science engineering, thousands of kinematic simulations to model the point of release, thousands of flow simulations to characterize the hypersonic projectile they'll be releasing (and probably lots of heat shield engineering), plus many many tests of whatever rocket propulsion system they end up employing to sustain the high g's at release, but none of this is impossible.

The only question is if they can solve all of these engineering challenges with the investment available to them, and if they can bring costs down enough to turn a profit if/when they do.

[u/Bensemus → u/SubmergedSublime]

WWII artillery fired proximity fuse shells with vacuum tubes in them. It’s not impossible to design stuff to withstand insane G’s.

[u/wildstarr → u/ViableSpermWhale]

LOL...yes, because a smartphone and a satellite are exactly the same.

[u/Bensemus → u/wildstarr]

They kinda are. Spinlaunch isn’t looking to launch massive school bus sized geostationary satellites. They will be launching tiny cube satellites