We've had many discussions on HN about SpinLaunch, but Brian real goes through and answers several of the questions that were left unanswered, love it.
Of course the system is extraordinary, but it's an engineering project. An engineering project with a lot of "knowns", vs "known unknowns". It's mostly a materials science project.
It's a complicated integration problem with all of the engineering associated with that, but, to be fair, they're not making up a lot of stuff out of whole cloth, they're utilizing known things in new ways.
Simply, much of the concept can be simply tested after the napkin math is performed. Tested to the point of either "yea this will work" vs "no way".
As far as I know, there's no real government money in this, they don't seem to be running in to a lot of administrative red tape (like, high speed rail is not an engineering problem, it's social and governance problem). So, doesn't seem to be some swamp land boondoggle.
Can it fail? Of course it can fail. Is it inevitable? No, I don't think so. I don't think it's a bill of goods sold to investors to fund a few engineers in the middle of the desert.
All of it looks patently possible, given enough money and engineer-time. It's the kind of project that may change the relation Humanity has with space, but has huge odds of bankrupting the entity doing it even if it succeeds in reshaping Humanity.
So yeah, it's either government built or it won't get built at all.
This is a false dichotomy. Falcon Heavy is not government built. It nevertheless benefits from American largesse. SpinLaunch is in effect building the world's largest rail gun. If the proof of concept works they won't have trouble lining up grants.
Project HARP attempted to do this in the 1960s.
Because even if it works, it's still bonkers. Any proposal that involves extreme engineering never done before is going to illicit a lot of skepticism.
And this proposal also catches all the general (often unfounded) skepticism people have regarding space. And it catches the skepticism people have for startups proposing radical new technology. And being a space startup, it catches the skepticism inherent to being Musk-adjacent. Spinlaunch is a perfect storm for raising eyebrows.
The areas I'm skeptical about are whether customers will be able or willing to design for 10,000G loads, and what market remains once Starlink can bring 120,000 kg to LEO at once. that fits a lot of small satellite ride shares.
Nobody build a satellite and expect such high g forces, they don't build satellite to accommodate to launch system, it's the other way around.
Is thinking you can throw something into space really a priori any more bonkers than thinking you can get to space by strapping a seat onto a bunch of explosives? Because that's what rockets are.
"Bonkers" is a classification only for concepts that haven't yet been normalized.
FYI this is "elicit" and not "illicit". The latter has negative connotations.
Sure, it's super expensive and massive, but that doesn't mean it won't work.