World's Biggest Gun Has SpaceX in its Crosshairs
Rockets spew fire and produce tons of noise, which makes them cool and sexy, if you’re into fire and noise, which is to say, if you’re human.
Also cool, however, is a 10-kilometer-long space gun that simply blasts objects into orbit with less obvious drama.
Making such a gun is the dream project for Mike Grace and Nathan Saichek, the co-founders of Longshot Space based in Oakland, California. And their efforts to date are the subject of our latest video filmed during a recent visit to their engineering compound.
Longshot falls into the category of kinetic launch systems. These are machines that try and get objects into space without all the fuel, engines and other engineering baggage associated with rockets. Lots of people think kinetic launch systems – other examples include SpinLaunch and Auriga Space – are crazy, and they sort of are.
But they also make a lot of sense when you consider that gravity is a huge pain and that rockets are very inefficient. Roughly 95 percent of a rocket’s mass goes toward getting it off Earth, leaving a few percent behind for the actual payload.
Kinetic launch systems focus on putting the gravity-defeating infrastructure on the ground instead of in the air. The hope then is that you can blast objects into space cheaper and faster.
One of the major downsides with this approach, though, is that you’re hurling sensitive electronics through the atmosphere and creating all sorts of conditions that electronics tend not to enjoy.
Mike and Nathan care not for the naysayers and have been building a smaller version of their gun inside of a shipping container. It works, and it’s awesome. You’ll see.
For more on the history of space guns and the physics behind them, we have some additional deep dives with the Longshot team down below.
• Why Rockets Suck: The History of Supe...
• How to Build a 6.2-Mile Long Gun
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Chapters
00:01 - What is Longshot's Space Gun?
01:21 - Guns vs. Rockets: The Kinetic Launch Advantage
03:33 - How the Multi-Stage Gun Works
06:33 - Firing the Prototype!
08:28 - Business Plan: Hypersonics & Space Launch
09:24 - The Vision: Why Humanity Needs Space
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