It can also do laundry
Get back to your workbench, dad. /s
The idea of throwing something into space isn’t anything new, tbh I’ve always kinda wondered why no one has spent more time developing it.
The projectile experiences wicked g-forces when it is being spun up: around 10,000 times the force of gravity. This is enough to tear the skin and muscle off a human being. This means SpinLaunch will not be going into the astronaut business. They also won’t be able to drive large satellites into orbit. The projected weight limit for the system would be payloads of about 440 pounds. That is a lot less than something like the Hubble Space Telescope weighs. – source
I mean, you would in fact get the astronaut into orbit, provided your container was water tight.
Jesus fuck. I know humans can withstand extremely high g-forces for short periods of time, but 10,000 Gs is a lotta Gs.
So… Wouldn’t a railgun system be able to do the same thing with less energy consumption?
I think it would have to be crazy long up the side of a mountain or something to work. I always thought that would be cool to see. I’m just an ignorant layperson though. I know little of the actual science, but I have read a lot of science fiction in my life.
…if a human could theoretically survive it long enough to get thrown into space.
The answer is ‘no’. This thing would spin all the blood out of your body, and then when it actually launches you, your body would get shattered by the shock, and then shattered again a millisecond later as your spacecraft plows into the atmosphere at a few mach number.
Usually when a SpinLaunch article or video is posted, all the armchair Physic PhDs show up pontificating on why it’s doomed to fail.
Well it’s been almost ten years and they still aren’t launching into space so I’d say they’ve been correct so far.
Everything is impossible, until it isn’t.
And some things never are. I don’t think spin launch is doomed to failure, but there are definitely projects that some people take seriously that are legitimately never going to happen
Eh… eventually anything we are trying to do now short of things that would break natural laws will be possible at one point or another.
For instance, even though something crazy like the Theranos Edison is impossible with current and even near future tech, it’s going to be possible one day, which is a certainty.
You’re dreaming of you think this is remotely feasible.
Strange that a bunch of aerospace and mechanical engineers believe it is, and have tested the math, yet some random person who probably doesn’t even work on STEM believes they have the better idea.
I can’t tell if you genuinely think you’re smarter than these people or if this is just the classic “space craft are stupid!” Rhetoric that’s become popular since Musk started SpaceX.
You don’t need to be Stephen Hawkings to understand that the bottleneck is not in the launch sling but in the satellite themselves. The idea is in the same league as the space elevator; sure you can do it, but is it better than rockets?
