SpinLaunch launches cargo into space
The SpinLaunch is basically a giant pendulum, which hurls packages from the Earth’s surface into space. Is this Columbus’ egg for space cargo?
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Escaping the Earth’s gravitational pull
The Earth’s gravitational field is strong. You can only escape the gravity of the earth when you reach a speed of 11.3 km/s. To give you an impression of how fast that is: in half a minute you have traveled through the Netherlands from Limburg to Friesland. So very fast!
With a rocket you can build up this speed slowly, but that has another disadvantage. Namely, you also have to drag the fuel with which you accelerate the rocket further up. Therefore, the payload of the rocket is only 2-3% of the total weight. That makes space travel expensive.
Is the SpinLaunch the egg of Columbus?
In principle, you can solve this problem with a space cannon, which gives projectiles a speed of more than 11 km/s. Then you give all the speed from the ground, so you don’t need rocket fuel.
The 19th-century French writer Jules Verne already came up with one, though the deadly acceleration made his story with human passengers impossible. They would have turned into a layer of bloody mincemeat on the floor. But for cargo that can take a beating, it could very well be. Although the SpinLaunch is smarter.
Launch cargo into space with the SpinLaunch
The disadvantage of the space cannon is that it has to be very large and very long. And therefore very expensive. A pendulum solves this problem. You can also achieve that high speed by just swinging faster and faster and then letting go at a given moment. Of course, that leads to other technical problems. The main problem is to prevent the pendulum from bursting at these extreme forces and speeds.
The Spinlaunch is 50 m high, which is quite reasonable for space travel. The construction costs were also relatively low at several tens of millions of euros. The SpinLaunch uses electric motors and operates in a 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 Accelerator, which can reach speeds of 1300-8000 km/h.
That is a maximum of just over 2 km/s, less than the escape speed. But in itself a good step to reach the ultimate step, to put things in orbit around our earth. This requires a speed of 7-8 km/s. So four times as fast. This next phase will be reached with Spinlaunch’s Orbital Accelerator. It should start in 2025. Here the acceleration disk alone is 100 m in diameter. The costs are of course much higher here.
Towards the rest of the solar system
Because once we have a cheap way with the SpinLaunch to bring bulk materials and rocket fuel into, for example, LEO, which is an orbit about 300-800 km above the Earth’s surface, we can weld space stations and spaceships together there and send them further into the solar system. In principle, this could reduce the costs of space travel by three quarters.
That is very good news, because then it is 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 richly supplied with metal asteroids that consist of pure metal. Energy, in the form of sunlight and helium-3, is also abundant. Let’s go where no one has gone before.
