Catapult to Orbit - SpinLaunch

[Shpaget]

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221003005340/en/SpinLaunch-Completes-Milestone-Flight-Test-10---Launching-Payloads-from-NASA-Airbus-U.S.-Cornell-University-Outpost

The article doesn't really say anything of substace, just a bunch of marketing buzzwords.

[wumpus]

Have to wonder if  they are eating Stratolaunch's (intended, not provably real) lunch.  They appear to have the worlds best "hypersonic testing facility" on the Earth.  With the claimed recovery of all launch tests, this might make some customers wonder if adjusting a scramjet test to handle 10kG of lateral load might be worth it.  Best guess is that they have to move as fast as possible to try to get the big yeeter up and running, and don't have time to talk about anything else.

This might be the most progress on the craziest idea I've ever seen in spaceflight. 

[AckSed]

SpinLaunch is still around, and making hardened cubesats:

tl;dw A dash of glue, a few reorientations of components and a 1U cubesat can survive 10,000 gravities.

[tater]

Some loons will do anything to avoid the math that shows TSTO is best

 

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, tater said:

Some loons will do anything to avoid the math that shows TSTO is best

 

I think Spinlaunch will end up with a niche DoD contract if anything.  I’m imagining their rate of launch could be mind boggling once tuned up.  Need to deploy a replacement bare bones constellation fast after a wave of ASAT attacks?  Spew a few thousand more up at several per minute? Idk, but the design reminds me of an old machine gun design from the civil war that used the same principle but powered by steam.  Or even swarm ASAT launches

[AckSed]

14 hours ago, darthgently said:

I think Spinlaunch will end up with a niche DoD contract if anything.  I’m imagining their rate of launch could be mind-boggling once tuned up.  Need to deploy a replacement bare bones constellation fast after a wave of ASAT attacks?  Spew a few thousand more up at several per minute? Idk, but the design reminds me of an old machine gun design from the civil war that used the same principle but powered by steam.  Or even swarm ASAT launches

Indeed. For the tradeoff of having to wait an hour for each launch, working three shifts and assuming you have 1 cubesat equivalent per yeeted launch vehicle, a high-inclination LEO constellation of 22-24 satellites, say like Planet Labs' SuperDove earth-imaging cubesats (5kg each) could be launched within 24 hours. A working 6-day week of 2 shifts at 15 shots per day? 90 satellites.

We might end up with a new metric: kg to orbit per hour.