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Comment by MichaelCollins | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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'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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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