Footnotes / references California Secretary of State,[1] Built in LA[2]
SpinLaunch is a spaceflight technology
development company working on
mass accelerator technology to move payloads to
space.[3] As of September 2022, the company has raised US$150 million in funding, with investors including
Kleiner Perkins,
Google Ventures, Airbus Ventures, ATW Partners, Catapult Ventures, Lauder Partners,
John Doerr, and the Byers Family.[4][5]
History
SpinLaunch was founded in 2014 by Jonathan Yaney in
Sunnyvale, California. The company's headquarters are in
Long Beach.[6] In 2020 it opened a launch site. SpinLaunch continued development of its 140,000 square-foot (13,000 m2) corporate headquarters in Long Beach, and of its flight test facility at
Spaceport America in
New Mexico.[7]
In late 2021, SpinLaunch was named one of the "World's Best Employers in the Space Industry" by Everything Space, a recruitment platform specializing in the
space industry.[8]
In March 2022, SpinLaunch was listed as one of the Top 100 Most Influential Companies of 2022 by
Time Magazine. In April, SpinLaunch received a launch contract from
NASA to test a payload.[9][10]
Technology
SpinLaunch is developing a
kinetic energyspace launch system that reduces dependency on traditional
chemical rockets, with the goal of significantly lowering the cost of access to space while increasing launch frequency. The technology uses a vacuum-sealed
centrifuge to spin a rocket and then hurl it to
space at up to 4,700 mph (7,500 km/h; 2.1 km/s). The rocket then ignites its engines at an altitude of roughly 200,000 ft (60 km) to reach
orbital speed of 17,150 mph (27,600 km/h; 7.666 km/s) with a payload of up to 200kg. Peak acceleration would be approximately 10,000 g.[11] If successful, the acceleration concept is projected to lower the cost of launches and to use much less power, with the price of a single space launch reduced by a factor of 20 to under US$500,000.[12][13]
The SpinLaunch system's historical predecessors include
centrifugal guns.
Flight testing
At
Spaceport America in New Mexico on 22 October 2021, SpinLaunch conducted the first vertical test of their accelerator at 20% of its full power capacity, hurling a 10-foot-long (3.0 m) passive projectile to an altitude of "tens of thousands of feet." This test accelerator is 108 ft (33 m) in diameter, which makes it a one-third scale of the operational system that is being designed.[14][15][16] The company's first 10 test flights reached as much as 30,000 feet (9,100 m) in altitude.
A September 2022 test flight carried payloads for NASA, Airbus US, Cornell Engineering’s Space Systems Design Studio (SSDS) and Outpost.
[17]
Criticism
A number of reasons why this technology may not work have been put forward, including problems with massive spinning objects, potential for catastrophic damage to the payload, incompatibility with traditional liquid rocket fuels, increased atmospheric drag relative to existing technologies, and other potential problems with the idea.[18]