Space division
Climate-friendly rocket launches thanks to giant slingshot: Spinlaunch wants to revolutionize space travel
Spinlaunch’s “Suborbital Accelerator” in the New Mexico desert. The company recently completed a successful test flight with the roughly 50-meter-high giant sling. The findings from the tests serve to achieve the actual goal: the development of the “Orbital Accelerator”, which works according to the same principle and is supposed to catapult objects into orbit.
© Screenshot Spinlaunch.com
An American startup wants to carry out rocket launches virtually emission-free. Instead of thrust from immense engines, the company relies on a gigantic sling.
The topic of space travel has recently moved into the public eye, especially due to the three-way battle between billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, who want to open up space as a new business area for themselves. The approaches of the trio are quite disruptive and innovative, as the reusable rockets from Musk’s company SpaceX show. But in the end, the billionaires also catapult their spacecraft into space the traditional way: with rocket engines.
The American startup Spinlaunch takes a completely different approach. The California-based company is developing an alternative method of launching satellites and aircraft into space: kinetic energy generated in a giant sling. The rockets are accelerated to several times the speed of sound in a vacuum-sealed centrifuge and finally shot through a launch tunnel into space. As the broadcaster CNBC reports, a successful test flight with a prototype was completed in the desert of the US state of New Mexico in October.
Spinlaunch wants to carry out space flights in an environmentally friendly way
Spinlaunch CEO Jonathan Yaney hopes that the “radically different” method will be an entry into the commercial space market, as Spinlaunch can put satellites and other things into orbit at high frequency and at the lowest cost in the competitive field. The vision: In a future in which more and more people will be drawn into space, the company writes on its website, supplies and other things would also have to be transported there to build an infrastructure. Spinlaunch wants to offer this emission-free, with as little impact on the environment as possible. The immense fuel consumption of classic rocket launches is eliminated, as is the large amounts of rocket scrap.
Spinlaunch was founded in 2014 and has so far acted rather apart from the public. “I think the bolder and crazier a project is, the better it is to just work on it – instead of talking about it publicly,” he told CNBC. Behind the scenes, however, the spin launch creators have obviously already been able to convince some of their idea: So far, the company has raised around 110 million dollars from investors, including Airbus Ventures.
Sources: Spin launch, CNBC