A company that wants to shoot payloads into orbit with a cannon
Link here. The company is called Longshot. It isn’t the only company attempting to do this. I reported on another company, Green Launch, in 2022, but have heard little from it since then.
I leave it to the engineers in my readership to tell me if this company has any chance of success. It seems to me that any payloads it launches would likely have to be dead weight, like water or oxygen or fuel, as the speeds involve would damage delicate instrumentation.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Link here. The company is called Longshot. It isn’t the only company attempting to do this. I reported on another company, Green Launch, in 2022, but have heard little from it since then.
I leave it to the engineers in my readership to tell me if this company has any chance of success. It seems to me that any payloads it launches would likely have to be dead weight, like water or oxygen or fuel, as the speeds involve would damage delicate instrumentation.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
May I suggest attention seeking Holywood celebrities?
Yes, I believe we already have an experienced all-female crew ready to go!
Seriously, I read that the German engineers in WWII refused to believe that an artillery shell could be designed to contain a radar fuse that would detect the proximity of a target, because the G-forces of firing it would destroy the circuitry, especially the vacuum tubes that were used before solid-state transistors existed.
This not only did a better job of shooting down planes, but resulted in a field artillery shell that exploded ABOVE the ground by a few meters! Instead of hitting the ground and expending most of its blast force and shrapnel up and outwards, it exploded over the enemy’s heads, raining death down onto them even if they were hunkered down in trenches. Basically won the Battle of the Bulge.
SpinLaunch is still raising money, and has appointed “Aerospace Pioneer Dómhnal Slattery and Defense & Satcom Veteran Peter Hadinger to Advisory Board” to read some recent news.
I suspect SpinLaunch’s model would work better. It at least doesn’t pound the bottom of the capsule with sudden escape-velocity worth of force.
Gerald Bull would be proud. Cheers –
It’s not the velocity that the payload will experience, it’s the acceleration (as noted by Ray Van Dune above).
Looking at a .30-06 being fired from a 22 inch barrel with a muzzle velocity of between 2,800 to 3,000 ft/sec, if you assume a uniform acceleration all the way down the barrel (probably not true, but run the math) you’ve got something like 36,000 to 38,000 gees acting on the bullet.
I have no idea what the muzzle velocity of a howitzer is but that’s probably on the same level of acceleration. Not many payloads will be able to withstand that.
I like it better than Spinlaunch.
Didn’t Jules Verne write something along those lines?
Getting fuel, water, and other materials considered “sudden velocity tolerant” into space with a low-cost solution could again transform efforts to reach space. Why spend a thousand for each pound (SpaceX pricing?) to get things up there when it can be done cheaper by two or more factors. A similar technology, the tethered, semi-flying wing electric railgun proposal caught my attention thirty years ago or more in Guccione’s Omni magazine. It seemed to be a feasible way to get fuels, foods, water and other materials into apace at low costs. Today, I can’t even find a mention of it. Still, if the barrel is long enough, the G forces can be held to manageable levels by incrementally adding propulsive forces as the payload passes by them. Jules Verne was certainly a fan of the explosive approach and wrote about it in “From the Earth to the Moon”
Andi,
Verne sure did write something along those lines. From the Earth to the Moon, in which are chronicled the adventures of Impey Barbicane and the Baltimore Gun Club building a gi-normous cannon on the Florida coast and then shooting himself and some others to the Moon with it. Movie version came out in 1958 starring Joseph Cotten as Barbicane – with first name changed to Victor – and with the so-very-fetching Debra Paget added to provide a bit of Victorian-era spice. I believe the film was shot in 3-D, but I’m not sure it was ever released in that format.
Verne was obviously prescient anent the launch site, but the rest of the tech required copious hand-waving of physical reality. As others here have pointed out, an actual gun would impart G-forces at launch amply sufficient to instantly transform a human body into a slightly smaller volume of nasty pink goo.
H.G. Wells also had a go at Moon travel fiction, First Men in the Moon. The motive force in this case was far kinder to human physiognomy even if not possible via any physics known in either his own time or now – anti-gravity paint. As with Verne’s work, Wells’s was movie-fied in 1964 with the also-very-fetching Martha Hyer as the requisite eye-candy. It also featured insect people animated by the peerless Ray Harryhousen.
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