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.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.filmsite.org%2Fposters%2Fvoya.gif&f=1&ipt=326457defeec38219bdb2b569ef4481175debe41dcff0a22c332a75d6d1f5dbf
Do we really have to go over the business and technical problems with this concept again?
It is not just “a” that hurts the projectile, but the derivative of “a” with respect to “t” also known as the jerk. But I have to wonder if a lot of this orbital cannon stuff recently has more to do with the military infrastructure applications. Politicians love fixed assets such as trains and train stations and orbital cannon are hardly mobile. Musk had a recent X post mentioning that rocket fuel is not very expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon
I think this is a fine idea looking forward. Not for terrestrial use but for launching High G tolerant material payloads into Lunar orbit to facilitate large scale structure manufacturing.. That’s the most likely path to actually building a 2001 Space Odyssey class orbital space station, tand from where we are today probably within 3 to 4 decades as we are fast approaching critical mass for space oriented development.
My humble opinion anyway.
Seems as likely as a space elevator.
To agimarc,
That was the only “sanction” the Mossad ever did that made me angry…proof that looking at people as problems instead of resources never results in anything good long term.
To Ray,
Right you are. In fact, we have more modern electronics that are survivable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur
It would not exist had people had to ask funds from investors—who (as proven by their stupidity in supporting Spinlaunch) don’t have five brain cells put together.
Obama was no friend to space. He said he wanted a cheaper alternative to spacelaunch…but didn’t want to fund those either.
Distressingly, the trend is that American engineers come up with ideas only China chooses to build—due to lack of either public or private interest.
Many in leadership positions there are engineers. Our congress is made up of suits and protesters who only supply hot air. China’s 640-2 project is just going to be aimed at Taiwan, so….
There is a concept that is something along the lines of a Verne Gun….HYPACC
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16822672-800-its-a-blast/
There are huge blue-holes in the ocean (better for Sea Dragon?)
PETRA has a robot named “Swifty” that is to use a no-contact, thermal spallation process using a jet of 1,800 degree gas. If not HYPACC, then a ballistic compass rose.
Space force needs to fund this, in that it can have a dual use.
Imagine an asterisk of tubes surrounding a central location. When not launching, this can double as an ultrasound/infrasound array—which should be named in honor of Douglas Orson ReVelle (1945-2010).
Just once, I’d like to see a concept designed by Americans actually BUILT by Americans for a change, without running into the stinginess of so called “space advocates” who would prefer to dump on it…in the form of Randian screeds that do nothing to improve American spaceflight—only stifle it.
All this research has already been done with project HARP, where hundreds of test shots were made using 16-inch naval gun barrels (welded together) in Barbados (Gerald Bull, Joint US & Canadian Defense Department tests) and at the Yuma Proving grounds where the payloads could be recovered over land
A variety on innovations were employed to protect payloads from the 25,000 G acceleration and to increase altitude, one method used was pumping out the air in the barrel before firing,
We spent like’ 10+ million dollars on all this–in 1960’s money.
The remains of the barrel assembly still exist in Barbados.
“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.”
By “chance of success” as analyzed by engineers, I suspect Robert is asking about technical feasibility rather than financial or political results.
Ray Van Dune is correct that electronics can survive the cannon. Containing liquids may require heavier walls in the payload container than may be desirable, but still feasible. I’m not sure about economical. If Starship is able to launch payloads for (rough order of magnitude) $100 per pound, then a cannon would need to be pretty big to put enough mass in orbit to compete with the larger bulk carriers. Cubesats and some smallsats may be able to be built to survive the cannon. It could be interesting to see how things like solar arrays and deployable items respond to the forces.
As with SpinLaunch, a small rocket would be needed to circularize the orbit. Most likely a solid propellant motor would be desirable, and the motor may need to take up a significant portion of the mass that is shot into space.
The nosecone may be interesting, as the maximum Q could be fairly high.
So, what kind of cannon would this take? Battleship cannons in WWII got to be around 20 inches in diameter, and they could only throw a heavy projectile around 20 miles. To get better speed, a longer cannon with more pressure behind it may be needed, so a heafty barrel may have to be used.
As with the proximity fuse mentioned by Ray, the way to do the impossible is to find the impossible part (vacuum tubes not strong enough to survive the cannon) and work around it (solid state electronics, potting the electronics within epoxy, etc.).
As we have seen, lately, with the advent of commercial space there are plenty of mad scientists and crazed engineers willing to try the darnedest things. Forget about “if we can send a man to the Moon, then we should be able to …” phrases. Going to the Moon turned out to be possible with the meager technology of the 1960s. What is really impressive is catching a fly with chopsticks, and in real life rather than in the movies.
Fortunately, commercial space done in this way — with different people trying different seemingly unlikely or impossible concepts — has resulted in several concepts designed by Americans and actually BUILT by Americans, without stingy so called “space advocates” dumping on them but rather cheering them on — even to the point of the occasional flyovers with videos to report on progress being made at various sites around the country.
This starts with American Jeff Bezos and his New Shepard and New Glenn concepts — both are operational. Elon Musk, a naturalized American (making him an American), had the concepts of reusability, commercial manned and cargo spacecraft, huge low Earth orbit (low latency) communication constellations, all of which are operational, and he is now working on a Super Heavy reusable launch vehicle and its reusable orbital/deep-space upper stage. ULA’s American-conceived and American-built Vulcan is also flying operationally with an American Centaur upper stage.
And talk about improving American spaceflight rather than stifling it, the reusability of just the Falcon booster alone has made not only America the leader in all of spaceflight, it has made a single American company the world leader. What, pray tell, will New Glenn be doing in five years or ten years? What about all the other American companies verging on their own reusable launch vehicles? What will their contributions to American spaceflight be?
“This Gun Could Reach Space”
Real Engineering (February 2023)
https://youtu.be/W4EMf_MTXVc
19:33
“To this day, holds the record for highest altitude projectile ever launched.”
Success can be as stifling as failure….(Allen Funt’s recording of a venture capitalist eating the steak an aerospace entrepreneur just bought him):
BE (Before Elon)
“Cough…you want me to invest in your space start-up…go up against EELVs? Look kid—I’m in this to make money, not lose it.”
AE
“Cough…you want me to invest in your little outfit now that Elon has cornered spacelift? You can count me out…gee, this steak seems tougher than last time…”
Somebody draw it up and see how fast the Chinese copy and try it.
Dear engineers
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
For this concept to be attractive, it would have to be significantly cheaper than guided launches. The problem with any ballistic mechanism to reach space is inevitably minute-of-angle (MOA). Even a highly accurate rifle would have problems inserting something into a desired orbit given the MOA spread after 100+ miles of ballistic flight.
Anything one could do to avoid the cost of deploying it to an unintended trajectory — adding guidance mechanisms to the payload, deploying space tugs to retrieve it once in orbit — would quickly revert to the cost of doing guided launches in the first place. I can’t see this idea going anywhere.
Jeff Wright,
Once again I suppose it is incumbent upon me to inquire as to the color of the sky on the planet you occupy – which pretty clearly is not Earth.
Gerald Bull got what he had coming. If one throws in with Mordor, one should not be surprised if one’s head is subsequently separated from one’s body by a Gondorian or Rohanian sword.
Excalibur was very much an evolution of technology application and hardly the revolution the WW2 proximity fuses were. And if it had been developed by a hungry start-up instead of a cost-plus blob, it probably wouldn’t cost six figures per round either.
American space engineers have been designing and building up a storm these past two decades – just not the ones employed at MSFC. The PRC is not copying NASA – there’s nothing there to copy. They’re copying SpaceX, mainly. You know – one of those Ayn Randian outfits built with the money of a serial entrepreneur and some brain-dead investors. Imagine what they could be doing if they had ten brain cells to put together.
pzatchok wrote: “Dear engineers Just because you can, does not mean you should.”
That wasn’t Robert’s question to the engineers. Please let me add “ethical” to my list of questions that Robert was not asking: I suspect Robert is asking about technical feasibility rather than financial, ethical, or political results.
___________
Craig,
You wrote: “For this concept to be attractive, it would have to be significantly cheaper than guided launches.”
So, what was the cost of firing a shell from a WWII battleship? Doing it this way could be cheap, and you already suggested a couple of not-so-expensive solutions to the problem you presented.
Keep in mind that the way to do the impossible is to find a way around the impossible part. The same goes for reducing the costs or difficulties to a task. We use a Rocket Equation to explain why it is difficult to launch things from the Earth into orbit, but there are alternatives to simple rockets. It is good that so many people are exploring some of those alternatives in order to find better efficiencies. Profit is the reward for finding better efficiencies.
There may be one ring to rule them all (Dick Eagleson‘s comment is fresh on my mind), but there is rarely one solution to solve all problems.
Edward: My question was aimed at the technical issues, but that cannot be separated from the economic ones. Anything is technically possible, assuming cost is no object. I wonder if this launch method could be both economically and technically sound.
Here is a better link about HYPACC
https://www.spacedaily.com/news/future-00q.html
Projects like these need to be looked at every so often as new discoveries are made…like the methane (?) using PETRA boring machine, or geological finds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krubera_Cave
Most recently, Rice University’s Xiang Zhang and Pulickal Ajayan found ways to put diamond coatings in pipes to reduce scaling.
HYPACC needs a vertical tube of about a kilometer deep and 10 meters wide or so and access to sea water. The payload would be 10,000 tons to orbit–so much more than any other Verne Guns–though a rocket would still be needed. as the vehicle exits at 1,000 kilometers per hour.
If doable I could see this thing capable of multiple shots per day.
The key may be to find natural features like vertical caves in karst like blue holes, so as to avoid construction costs.
One of the more formidable oil platforms I have ever seen was Troll A, a condeep.
I could easily see one of these things serving as HYPACC infrastructure.
Economic feasibility is a much trickier question. It is what every investor wants to know.
As I was reminded a month or two ago, success depends heavily upon the initial concept or the requirements. If the business plan is wrong, success is unlikely.
So, let’s make some assumptions. We can launch a 3-unit cubesat, which is about 6″ on the diagonal, so we need a 6″ or 7″ barrel. If we have a barrel twice that diameter then we could launch four of that size of cubesat, probably making the cost per cubesat much less.
Either way, we need an upper stage in order to circularize the orbit. SpinLaunch needs the same thing, so this upper stage is possible and it is probably inexpensive, due to its small size, especially if it is a simple solid rocket.
What does it cost to put this size of cubesat into orbit on existing rockets, and what do the competitors charge for the same task?
Fabricating and installing the cannon may cost less than constructing a rocket launch complex. As with the Falcons and Starship, some technical efficiency may have to be sacrificed for price efficiency. Profit is the reward for finding efficiencies.
I think that a cannon fired launch is feasible and may be cheaper than rockets. So, is there enough potential business to keep such a company in business? Are there enough companies whose spacecraft could be inexpensively made to survive the forces? If they make the gun, will the customers come? They came for SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and they may come in greater numbers for a less expensive Starship, so maybe they would for an even cheaper cannon-fired launch.
If they do come, what is the launch rate that makes the company profitable? That was the question for the reusable Falcon 9, where some speculation was 18 launches per year. The Falcons have exceeded that assumed breakeven point. Can a cannon?
Edward: Thank you for an excellent analysis. My take-away from this is that once there is viable orbital industry, including space stations, manufacturing, and transportation to the Moon, asteroids and beyond, this method will become viable, especially for those facilities in Earth orbit. They will need supplies, and a cheap and quick way to get them. The cannon could provide that.
Before then however this launch method seems less appealing. Right now the need is to get sophisticated and complex payloads into orbit, not supplies.
Thus, it might be that the time has not yet come for this project.
“Thus, it might be that the time has not yet come for this project.”
Although, it may be a good time to begin some development of this idea so that it is ready when the customers are. His company seems to have a nice start. Timing is an unknown issue, however.
Poor timing is what did in Bigelow. If commercial manned flight had been available two or three years earlier, then maybe he would have had a space station for them to go to and started generating revenue and excitement for commercial space stations. Instead, we are a decade behind where we should have been.
Having projects that are dual use is key.
A cannon shell will always be cheaper than NGAD or B-21 individually. The up-front costs I could see eaten by the USSF or even the Army. Perhaps named after Medaris.
Sometimes, things can start as earworms. One of the greatest marketing slogan was “Think Pink.”
On space guns…fact and fiction
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LCoWX7mxjCg
Verne’s vision
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zFvt1nLSXMI