Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know why this system is such a magnet of internet skepticism.

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.

Any reasonable version of it (what must look very different from the prototype) is an incredibly expensive investment, that must be diluted into what is currently an outrageous number of launches to pay for itself. Besides, there are some very problematic known unknowns involved on submitting things that want to explode to high g.

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.

> 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.

Oh, man. If you think you can get it done in a single billionaire's budget, all power to you. But developing a Falcon Heavy looks like a much smaller marginal project than a launch rail.

I'm sure the US military will be interested in a launch platform that can quickly get a payload into space.

There’s always military uses.

> I don't know why this system is such a magnet of internet skepticism.

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 frustrating thing is that the skepticism always centers on basic physics/engineering problems that clearly have been solved before such a design would break ground. Nobody builds a giant centrifuge and says "Oh I didn't expect such high g forces!"

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.

I wonder if ICBMs will ultimately be a use case. I'm no fan of nuclear weapons, but the governments of the world are willing to throw money at them and weapons are generally easier to harden against g forces than an undergrad cubesat.

I'm amazed that radar circuits (for proximity fuses) can be fired out of a flak gun and survive and work, so maybe this is possible.

The US has had (for several decades) guided artillery shells, both optical and inertially guided. These get launched from battleship cannons and deploy fins to guide them to the target. The inertial guidance is almost more surprising, it means the IMU can not only survive being launched, but has enough sensitivity to double integrate accurately through both the launch and free fall.

> Nobody builds a giant centrifuge and says "Oh I didn't expect such high g forces!"

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.

Maybe I misunderstood what you wrote, but satellites are built to accommodate launch systems. They have to tolerate the temperature, vibration and acceleration of the launch system, even if it is a rocket.

Actually a lot of satellite engineering is based around reducing weight to lower launch costs.

> Because even if it works, it's still bonkers

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.

I’m inclined to say there’s a lot of priors for throwing things really, really fast.

Also a lot of priors for what happens to things near explosives that go off. I'm not sure naive extrapolations from such experience is sound.

> Any proposal that involves extreme engineering never done before is going to illicit a lot of skepticism.

FYI this is "elicit" and not "illicit". The latter has negative connotations.

The video stresses that this has been done before at similar energies, and modern materials can vastly improve reliability and reuse.

Project HARP attempted to do this in the 1960s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP

As Elon said about Starship - "We're not breaking any laws of physics here, so it should work".

Sure, it's super expensive and massive, but that doesn't mean it won't work.

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