Spinlaunch: Busted(youtube.com) |
Spinlaunch: Busted(youtube.com) |
I gather the issues are:
* Keeping the centrifuge from tearing itself apart once it loses the payload.
* Ablation of the skin of the payload from hitting 1atm at hypersonic.
* Aerodynamic instability from emerging from vacuum at tremendous speed (?)
These all seem like hard, but solvable, engineering problems. Undercuts the argument that this is "fundamentally impossible" like the video claims.
Also I didn't note "surviving acceleration" as a deal-breaker. Maybe for satellites or squishy humans it is, but launching raw materials into orbit would be amazingly useful, and e.g. blocks of steel don't care about g-forces