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Tossing Satellites into Orbit with SpinLaunch: Is that Possible? | Interesting Engineering (www.youtube.com)

submitted 11 months ago by TehBamski to c/videos

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] NotBillMurray 17 points 11 months ago

I mean, you would in fact get the astronaut into orbit, provided your container was water tight.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Jesus fuck. I know humans can withstand extremely high g-forces for short periods of time, but 10,000 Gs is a lotta Gs.

[–] AngryCommieKender 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

So.... Wouldn't a railgun system be able to do the same thing with less energy consumption?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] AngryCommieKender 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I don't think it would need to be all that long. The Navy considered putting railguns on ships, they decided against it because they figured out pretty quickly that the munitions would have to be shot lower than the horizon so that they weren't firing shots into space, if they missed the target.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I was wondering why they would care about firing shots into space, but then I realized that it's probably not enough velocity to escape our orbit and would just add to the orbital debris issue.

If the velocity was such that the projectile could exit our orbit, it would probably be less risky.

There's an interesting excerpt from one of the Expanse books about how all the rounds they fire from their space ships are probably going to travel through space for millions of years before they actually hit something.