To temper your enthusiasm some:

They cannot fling things to orbit, they can fling things very fast but a (smaller) rocket is still needed to finish getting to orbit.

and G Forces are extreme so this is only suitable for payloads that don't mind extreme G forces.

G force isn't even the issue. It's friction from the air as soon as the vehicle leaves the launch contraption.

Mach 6 or 7 at launch? No big deal to mitigate that.

On reentry from orbit vehicles are going mach ~25.

Those kind of speeds are common at altitude, in the upper atmosphere.

The drag and resulting heat production at sea level would not be as easy to deal with if you were zipping along at Mach 25 right after launch. Even supersonic aircraft don't run full speed (for a whole host of reasons) at sea level.

The Sprint missile could hit mach 10 from sea level in 5 seconds. But I think by the time it got that fast it would already have considerable altitude.

Yeah, Spinlaunch is going to dump a lot of energy into the lower atmosphere, shed its glowing white hot shell, and then need get enough deltaV to put up a payload.

Anyway, the earliest patent I could find was a steam centripetal launcher in 1918. It never went anywhere and it has been followed by a number of improbable reinventions that all faded away.

NASA and the US Army tried again in 1982 and thought they could put a 60g projectile down range at 3 km/s. Mach 8. Guns and rockets could perform as well or better with simpler systems and the idea was shelved.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US1332992 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1982ITM....18..209F/abstra...

I hadn't read much about that missile before now, but apparently it got so hot it required an ablative coating just to survive it's very short intercept mission.

10,000 g is certainly going to be an issue for anything squishy!

Sorry to put a dampener on things, but Thunderf00t has already done two debunking videos on SpinLaunch. He's rarely wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ziGI0i9VbE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibSJ_yy96iE

Scott Manley also put out a video on Spinlaunch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAczd3mt3X0

He...encourages caution. It's one thing to call a technology "debunked", another to say it's very difficult or that it has a low probability of success.

It's not impossible, but there's no reason to believe that the company is able to build it.

The founder has little demonstrable understanding of physics, and their demonstration video was misleading.

If SpinLaunch's idea was practical, it would've been in use for decades already. The company seems unaware of this... for now.

I look forward to watching SpinLaunch's progress.

> He's rarely wrong

About what? Most of his recent content is clickbait debunking videos about stupid ideas that no serious person has ever taken seriously.

"Solar Roadways Debunked" Yeah no fucking shit.

And the whole Elon stuff? Compared to that even solar roadways are more realistic.

And here we are talking about spinlaunch.....

That's true, but he has interesting insight into more seemingly realistic concepts like SpinLaunch.

Thunderf00t is not a credible source, even if he's right sometimes, it's in the "a broken clock is right twice a day" sense. So these aren't good videos.

He is a scientist with published papers, and he seems to have a decent understanding of physics.

Obviously scientists are not perfect, but you seem to imply that most of his videos are incorrect. I can't see any evidence to support that, but I'm happy to be contradicted.

> He is a scientist with published papers, and he seems to have a decent understanding of physics.

There are many mentally deranged people who have published papers and are "scientists".

> There are many mentally deranged people who have published papers and are "scientists".

That's true, but it could be interpreted as a distraction from the fact that you haven't provided any evidence to support your claim.

In my experience, few mentally deranged people have a good understanding of physics. Even fewer have published in 'Nature'.

Looks like one comfy armchair.

I do have a degree in physics, if that helps.