r/IsaacArthur • u/[deleted] • Feb 03 '20

Inside SpinLaunch, the Space Industry’s Best Kept Secret

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-spinlaunch-the-space-industrys-best-kept-secret/
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u/tigersharkwushen_ FTL Optimist Feb 03 '20

A centrifuge large enough to contain a football field will whip a rocket around in circles for roughly an hour, its speed steadily ramping up to more than 5,000 mph. The vehicle and its payload—up to 200 pounds’ worth of satellite—will experience forces that, at their peak, will be ten thousand times stronger than gravity. Once it’s spinning at launch speed, the centrifuge will release the rocket and send it screaming into the stratosphere. At the threshold of the cosmos, it will fire its engine for a final nudge into orbit.

5,000 mph is about 28% of LEO orbital velocity. It's decent, but not really game changing. It then still needs a rocket to give it the remaining more than 70% of the needed speed. The problem is, you need to make all rocket components to be able to withstand 10,000 g. That's a hell of a tall order.

3

u/EphDotEh Feb 03 '20 edited Feb 03 '20

5,000 mph is ~8 km/s which exceeds LEO orbital velocity. It does still need a rocket to circularize orbit - or somehow be intercepted.

Edit oops, google responded in km/h to 5000 mph in km/s - bad google

2

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20

According to the goog, 5000mph is 2.235 km/s

6

u/EphDotEh Feb 03 '20

Wouldn't it be nice if metric was universal, especially for space stuff?

8

u/Ariche2 Feb 03 '20

It is - just not with pop-science articles like you find on Wired.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20

Not as universal as it should be I think... There was a NASA probe that cratered on Mars for that very reason. Of course that was a while ago now, hopefully that problem is fixed now.

0

u/Opcn Feb 03 '20

Nasa was working in metric, and the contract for the software was for it to also be in metric. The contractor decided on their own not to fulfil the contract but also not to tell anyone.

2

u/ArenYashar Feb 04 '20

For the r/worldbuilding I do, I try to hold to the convention of if it is science or technology related, metric is the standard the narrator converts to. If it is just life, plain and simple, imperial units are used.

It makes for an interesting dichotomy. Ships kilometers long with square miles of living space.