A California startup wants to put satellites in a circular chamber and shake them at more than five thousand miles an hour before letting them explode, allowing a rocket to start its engine only after it escapes the suffocating tug of Earth’s gravity.
Humanity has been putting objects into orbit for six decades. But not this way.
Will this be possible? The answer is different depending on who you ask.
SpinLaunch, as the startup is called, wants – as the name implies – gsato.
The company plans to use a small, sharp ballpoint pen-shaped rocket that encapsulates a satellite, and tether it to a motor in the center of a 300-foot-wide vacuum-sealed chamber.
The rocket would then exit a hatch and rip through the upper reaches of the atmosphere before an onboard rocket engine fired to propel the vehicle to orbital speeds.
The concept “has a lot more in common with an amusement park ride than it does with a rocket,” Jonathan Yaney, CEO of SpinLaunch, told Rachel Crane of CNN .
So far, the seven-year-old company has completed nine high-altitude test flights using a scaled-down version of the centrifuge it predicts will be needed to put objects into orbit, a feat that requires speeds in excess of 27,358 kilometers per hour.
It is still in the early stages and it is not yet clear whether SpinLaunch will be technologically or financially successful.
But the hurdles didn’t prove big enough to scare SpinLaunch’s investors, including GV, formerly known as Google Ventures, and Airbus Ventures, which collectively poured tens of millions of dollars into the company.
Yaney said the idea for SpinLaunch was born out of his desire to reassess the past to rethink how we can explore the future.
He cites Jules Verne — a science fiction writer who died 50 years before the first satellite traveled into space — as a muse for the origin of SpinLaunch.
Verne imagined that massive cannons would shoot things into space. Yaney surmises that the reason we use rockets is a quirk of history, a by-product of the Cold War, when advancing weaponry was as important as putting a satellite into space.
“SpinLaunch was just an exercise to take a fresh look at how we can use renewable energy and terrestrial energy to really do this in a different way,” Yaney told Crane. “I ran about maybe 20 or 30 different scenarios, from railroad guns to electromagnetic accelerators, space cannons and gas light weapons.”
Ultimately, Yaney said, he estimated that a massive centrifuge would be the most efficient.
Traditional rockets require thousands of complex components that are stretched to the mechanical limit during flight and then either discarded or undergo expensive overhauls, Yaney said.
A centrifuge can keep all the components needed to produce large amounts of energy close to the ground — a more stable and fixed approach, according to Yaney.
That means they can use heavy industrial components and reuse the centrifuge multiple times, reducing the total cost of a mission, or at least that’s the hope.
Is all this possible?
Such a feat is theoretically possible, according to Olivier L. de Weck, a professor of astronautics and systems engineering at MIT. But there are engineering issues that SpinLaunch will need to solve, he told CNN business . For example, the SpinLaunch centrifuge can exert more than 10,000 G’s — or 10,000 times the force of Earth’s gravity — on the satellite being rotated inward.
“A CubeSat would be torn to pieces,” Weck said, referring to the small, standardized satellites that have grown in popularity in the public and private sectors. (To be clear: Humans will never go into space on a SpinLaunch rocket, according to the company. G-forces would easily crush the human body.)
SpinLaunch recognizes that intense G forces are an obstacle. On its website, the company says its engineers are evaluating the ability of various hardware and components to withstand the forces.
Yaney told Crane of CNN however, who is confident that it will not pose a significant threat: “Satellites designed for rockets can generally also survive in the SpinLaunch environment.”
To reach orbit, SpinLaunch will still need to develop a rocket that can survive 8,000 kilometers per hour so that, after leaving the centrifuge, it can start its engine and finish the journey to orbit.
At a factory in California, the company has already built a prototype, which SpinLaunch’s vice president of technology, David Wrenn, describes as an “aerodynamic dart.”
The rocket-powered projectile won’t be the hard part, according to Yaney. More difficult will be to build a centrifuge three times the size used for testing so far in New Mexico, which is already the world’s largest vacuum chamber by diameter, Yaney said.
That’s where Weck is suspicious. He’s not convinced that SpinLaunch’s technology will be easy to scale. A centrifuge three times the size of the system they’re currently using won’t just require three times as much energy – it will require 27 times as much energy. It’s not impossible, but it will require significant maintenance and cost.
“You can put me in the skeptic category,” he said. But “they went further than I would have said a year ago and… if I’m wrong, that’s great.”
In turn, SpinLaunch confirmed that the full-scale system will require 27 times the power of the scaled-down version.
“It’s about $2,000 worth of electricity consumed per launch, but it will also be powered entirely by renewable energy,” the company said in an emailed statement. “And most of the energy used during the rotation process will be recaptured during the rotation (in the same way an electric car charges regeneratively).”
But even if SpinLaunch can prove it can go into orbit, it will face stiff competition. There are dozens of startups around the world aiming to create launch vehicles capable of transporting small satellites into orbit, and a few — such as Virgin Orbit, Rocket Lab and Astra — are already operational. Big rocket manufacturers, including SpaceX, are also marketing services to small satellite builders and operators on shared transport missions.
Space has already become a business domain. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is widely credited with ushering in the era of commercialized access to orbit and dramatically reducing the cost of putting satellites into space. Before SpaceX, the price of putting a measly two-kilogram spacecraft into orbit was more than $8,000, according to data compiled by a researcher at the government-funded Center for Strategic and International Studies. Today, it can be as low as around $1,500.
It is unclear where SpinLaunch will fall on the price spectrum. But Yaney says SpinLaunch can also stand out because its hardware might be able to launch up to 20 or 30 times a day, regardless of the weather.
SpinLaunch, for the record, is far from the first rocket startup to claim such perks — but it is the first startup to offer a completely new way to get into space.
Yaney even admits that until the company began flight tests a few months ago, he wasn’t sure SpinLaunch’s technology would work. But now he is a true believer.
“SpinLaunch experiences a high level of skepticism from most people until they come and spend time with us,” Yaney told CNN , “and you really understand that rockets are really crazy. Rockets are the most complex systems ever built as a means of transport. They are really incredibly illogical.”
It’s a good idea?
One thing all launch companies — including SpinLaunch, if successful — will have to deal with the growing issue of congestion in outer space. In recent years, there has been an explosive increase in the number of satellites humanity is putting into space, and academics and experts are increasingly trying to warn about the risks of objects colliding in space.
This can lead to shrapnel and debris clouds that can make certain orbit fields impassable.
“It is imperative that we, as a collective industry, can exercise the utmost responsibility and caution when it comes to protecting this environment,” Yaney told CNN . And the industry is already doing a “fantastic job” of taking steps to mitigate the risk, including giving more satellites the ability to maneuver out of the way of space junk.
And despite all the risks and difficulties, Yaney said he wanted to pursue SpinLaunch for the same reason as many of the visionaries who exemplify the so-called “new space” industry: “We had hoped as a civilization that, after landing on the moon — following the of the initial thrust of the space age some 60 years ago — which [as viagens espaciais] would follow a natural expansion in the way that most industries do.”
“I think we all hoped that we would have cities on the Moon and we would have space stations and space hotels,” he said. “As a species, I think we always look up and say, ‘This is the next frontier; is where we should be.”
Source: CNN Brasil
