The article is very light on details, but I believe what's being proposed is an evacuated tube with maglev propulsion, used to accelerate a rocket up to 5000mph (as stated in the article) while on the ground. The rocket is then released, and travels until some altitude is reached, at which point engine then starts and it continues to orbit. This results in a large fuel saving over a conventional rocket.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver

The g-forces involved would be very high, well beyond lethal to a human, so this would be for launching robust satellites, raw materials, or fuel cheaply into space. They would still be substantially lower than those of a space gun / intercontinental artillery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun#Practical_attempts

Would it be fair to say it is kinda like punkin chunkin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumpkin_chucking

Similar. I'd like to see a maglev (railgun) pumpkin chuck though.

No maglev and rocket fires at a different time :-)

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply this wasn't the case. I've edited this in now.

Given that the grandparent is presumably Ben Einstein of Bolt VC, an early investor in SpinLaunch, it sounds safe to say it's not using maglev at all. They say the catapult will be a centrifuge spinning inside a vacuum.

https://www.crunchbase.com/person/ben-einstein

https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/spinlaunch-converti...

Simple. You pitch the idea to the investor, promise big money in the future, you take small money now and use part of it to build some nonviable prototype, what's left is your profit.

It shouldn't. A second push is needed up change direction from "away from Earth" to "going around Earth", because the atmosphere creates too much drag to get there in one push.

> the atmosphere creates too much drag to get there in one push

This is not true. Feasibly designs have been worked out. The challenge is the trade off between cheap, short and high-G systems and expensive, long and low-G systems.

The second push has nothing to do with atmosphere. It's because orbits repeat. As soon as the push is done, you are in the initial orbit heading away from the surface. In other words, your initial orbit intersects the ground and it would be unwise to complete a full orbit.

The second push converts the narrow ellipse of the initial orbit into a wider orbit which avoids the ground-penetrating aspect of the first orbit.

The notion of sending volatile fuel sufficient to make the correction and yet somehow not kablooeying at launch seems like a hard problem to me.

The notion of using a catapult instead of a rocket for the first stage seems safer.