It doesn’t fling the payload into orbit. It flings it about the height a first stage would. The projectiles have a rocket motor that kicks in at altitude to finish the orbital insertion.
This is exciting for the moon. You could build it as an open frame since you don’t need to retain a vacuum, and it would be much smaler or easier on payloads.
My sense of it was the payload gets flung into LEO and then a small rocket engine finishes the orbital insertion (read: relatively small boosts and corrections). The video shows a sample payload with its rocket engine inside a carbon-fiber “bullet” casing. The rocket is really small. I can’t imagine it is enough to be equivalent to a second stage booster to orbit.
(The demonstrator they built gets nowhere near orbit.)
No, I had it right:
The spin throw eliminates the need for a big booster, but it still needs a second stage. They are working on eventually making that reusable.
This looks like a small sat launcher at best. The military is likely very interested in this idea, as you could throw a dozen missiles a day into orbit on very short notice.
Thanks! I had it wrong.
The whole thing still seems nuts but people way smarter than me think it can work.
Totally inderstandable, given terrible media coverage and the uniqueness of this method. When I first heard about it, it sounded like a joke.
“How do you get your payloads into,orbit?”
“We spin round and round, then we fling them!”
I think that we did that a few times on the merry-go-round in elementary school.
When I was in kindergarten we were working on a show for our parents. The show included a square-dance bit where we locked elbows with our partner (dosey-doe?) and spun them around. I let go of my partner as we were spinning and she flew across the stage. No one was hurt but very young me learned about spinning and flinging things (honestly, I knew she was going to fly across the stage…I just thought it would be funny).
You’d need more than one spin launcher to orbit that many daily. In the video linked above, it’s said that the spin-up takes a long time, and a company graphic (screenshot below) states it could launch “up to five times a day”.
Tardigrades could survive. As well as probably any single-cell organism.
A second and third stage, in fact:
The total vehicle mass is 11.2 tons, and puts 200 kg into orbit. In comparison, the Rocket Lab Electron weighs 12.5 tons and puts 300 kg into orbit. And that 200 kg counts for less due to the required structural reinforcement.
Although the SpinLaunch vehicle is probably simpler than an Electron, it also has a larger dry mass–probably mostly in that huge carbon fiber shell. That doesn’t look cheap to manufacture.
So although the idea is much less crazy than it sounds, and I hope they get it working, I don’t see how the business case closes, even against existing smallsat launchers (which already have a dubious business model).
Totally agree. Smallsat in general is under severe threat from rideshare. That’s why they are all working so feverishly on cutting costs and coming up with unique ways to get stuff into orbit.
And if orbital Starship flies successfully, It could launch hundreds of small satellites at a time, for a launch cost not much greater than some smallsat launchers today.
I applaud the attempt, though. This is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that leads to breakthroughs, much as SpaceX’s original plan for landing rockets was way out there at first. You never know what’s going to be the next big thing until you try it.
This still looks awesome for military applications, because launches could be done on very short notice, and you could build launchers in many places. And on the moon in vacuum and 1/6 g, this could turn out to be a better, cheaper way to get mass into LEO than a miles-long mass driver. Nuclear or solar powered, it could launch resources off the moon for next to nothing.
Agreed that lunar applications seem promising due to not needing a vacuum chamber and having much lower orbital velocities. Can also be used to fling rocks at Earth in a bid for declaring Lunar independence.
Starship is going to change everything, but I can’t yet predict how. Some smallsat launchers may survive–there’s going to be value in having your very own ride to orbit, and they should be able to compete on per-flight price (i.e. <$10M). Medium+ launchers are dead except as a prestige item or a national security thing (and they’ll be less interesting even for those applications, because they’ll become relatively more expensive when commercial interest dries up completely).
Da, Is bolshoyeh technique for flinging rocks, no huhu.
Yeah, I don’t think we CAN predict how Starship is going to change everything. This is a massive shock to an industry that has been fairly static for decades. If Starship works, everything in the space industry changes - or should change.
On the other hand, Musk is making a huge ‘if you build it, they will come’ gamble. I could see a scenario where Starship works, but the rapid growth of Starship inventory will not be met with growth in space utilization, and SpaceX’s own rockets could compete with and kill their manufacturing, much like the growing inventory of perfectly good used airplanes killed many general aviation manufacturers.
In my ideal world, Starship will revolutionize satellite manufacturing by A) lowering the cost of failure, allowing for more innovation and cheaper manufacturing of satellites and science missions, and B) raising the number of satellites being launched high enough to kick off secondary industries making everything from parts to standard buses to completely manufactured satellites on assembly lines that have the ability to be customized with add-on hardware.
Imagine you are a small university or a company with an idea for utilizing space. Pick up the catalog from Satellite Shack, and choose your frame, propulsion, sensors, instruments, etc. Add your own custom bits and software, and you can put a complicated satellite in space for under a million bucks. Maybe WAY under if it’s small enough and you can launch it on a rideshare with 50 other satellites.
We have no idea what we might discover or be able to exploit in a world of cheap satellites and cheap launch. I can imagine, for example, a company coming ip with a lander for the moon which deploys a bunch of small rovers, each of which has a 360 degree camera and solar power. Rent the rovers out by the hour to planetariums, universities, or even individuals who get to steer a rover on the moon in real time in VR. There are already telescope networks on Earth you can buy time from.
Not that this will necessarily happen, but it’s an example of the type of new application that could come along if space access gets cheap enough.
If Starship works is there any plan to limit how much stuff gets put into orbit?
Also, do they now mandate that anything put up must also be made to come down again once it is at the end of its working life?
The FCC already has a 25-year rule (really more of a guideline) that encourages satellites in LEO to reenter safely within 25 years. They should do much better, though. I’d like to see 5 years, and maybe some additional rules regarding passive vs. active deorbiting.
Ideally, lowering the cost to space access will make deorbiting hardware cheaper, and therefore more practical to mandate. Starlink does a good job here; their orbits are such that they’ll passively deorbit in under 5 years, but also have active propulsion that will deorbit them more quickly. Furthermore, they are launched into a very low orbit initially, and move by themselves to their final orbit. If any satellites fail early for “infant mortality” reasons, they’ll come down in under a year.
Unfortunately, this is also one of those tragedy of the commons type problems, so convincing China and others to have the same protections is going to be difficult.
Maybe Starship will enable craft that collect and dispose of dead satellites.
You have to wonder what they were thinking of, but I’d guess it was at the direction of Putin who’s becoming increasingly out of control.
Anti-satellite weapons are not great at the best of times, and the US, India, China, and Russia have all conducted tests. The US and India have been relatively responsible, keeping their tests at 250 km (Operation Burnt Frost) and 300 km respectively. Debris from these tests generally comes down in weeks, though small portions might last longer. The recent Russian test was at 650 km, where debris will last many years. By far the worst offender has been China, however, which conducted a test at 865 km. That debris will last for decades, maybe centuries.
As a rough guideline:
Yeah, when worrying about too many satellites, consider that just that one Chinese ASAT test created thousands or maybe tens of thousands of particles, and scattered them across a range of orbital altitudes. And now Russia has done the same. They probably generated more orbital debris than years of satellite launches, and the smallest debris from those tests will be hard/impossible to track but still dangerous, unlike satellites which are in known orbits.
One thing that worries me about heavy use of satellite internet: If we lost the capacity to launch replacements, the entire constellation will come down in a few years and we’ll be back to square one. So long as we don’t tie it to critical infrastructure we’d be okay, but since when do we think about long-term safety? We’re still doing almost nothing about Carrington-event level Coronal Mass Ejections, and there’s about a 12% per century chance of one. And if we got hit with one now, the economic and human damage would be immense - worse than global warming by far.
That video is 18+ minutes along. Care to summarize?
It really isn’t gonna, and currently in no way, works.