SpinLaunch launches cargo into space

Author: Mobyjob October 5, 2022 at 07:56 – Answer

The SpinLaunch is essentially a giant pendulum, which launches packages from the Earth’s surface into space. Is this the egg of Columbus for space cargo?

Escape Earth’s gravitational pull

Earth’s gravitational field is strong. You can only escape Earth’s gravity when you reach a speed of 11.3 km/s. To give you an idea of ​​the speed: in half a minute you crossed the Netherlands from Limburg to Friesland. So very fast!

With a rocket, you can increase this speed slowly, but this has another downside. Namely, you also need to drag the fuel with which you accelerate the rocket higher. Therefore, the payload of the rocket is only 2-3% of the total weight. This makes space travel expensive.

Is the SpinLaunch the egg of Columbus?

In principle, you can solve this problem with a space cannon, which gives the projectiles a speed of more than 11 km/s. Then you give full speed from the ground, so you don’t need rocket fuel.

The 19th-century French writer Jules Verne had once imagined one, though deadly acceleration made its story with human passengers impossible. They would have turned into a layer of bloody minced meat on the floor. But for goods that can be beaten, it very well could be. Although the SpinLaunch is smarter.

Launch cargo into space with the SpinLaunch

The disadvantage of the space cannon is that it must be very large and very long. And therefore very expensive. A pendulum solves this problem. You can also achieve this high speed by simply swinging faster and faster and then releasing at some point. Of course, this leads to other technical problems. The main problem is to prevent the pendulum from bursting at these extreme forces and speeds.

The Spinlaunch is 50m tall, which is quite reasonable for space travel. Construction costs were also relatively low at several tens of millions of euros. The SpinLaunch uses electric motors and operates under vacuum. This allows the device to save energy and run on clean, sustainable solar power instead of often toxic rocket fuel.

At the moment there is only the Suborbital Acceleratorwith which speeds of 1300-8000 km/h can be reached.

This is a maximum of just over 2 km/s, less than the escape speed. But in itself a good step towards reaching the ultimate stage, putting things in orbit around our earth. This requires a speed of 7-8 km/s. So four times faster. This next phase will be achieved with the Spinlaunch orbital accelerator. It should start in 2025. Here, the acceleration disc alone is 100 m in diameter. The costs are of course much higher here.

To the rest of the solar system

Because once we have a cheap way with the SpinLaunch to get bulk materials and rocket fuel into, for example, LEO, i.e. an orbit at around 300-800 km au above the surface of the Earth, we can weld space stations and spacecraft together there and send them further into the solar system. In principle, this could reduce the costs of space travel by three quarters.

This is very good news, because it is then no longer necessary to exploit African children in a coltan mine, for example.

Or, for Europe, to kneel before dictators to buy oil or gas. The asteroid belt is rich in metallic asteroids made up of pure metal. Energy, in the form of sunlight and helium-3, is also abundant. Let’s go where no one has gone before.