NASA will test SpinLaunch's ability to fling satellites into orbit

Re:NASA will test SpinLaunch's ability to fling satellites i... by kragen on Friday April 15, 2022 @12:01AM (#31036515)

You can reach somewhat higher accelerations by making the center of the rotor thicker than the periphery, but you start getting into ridiculous ratios pretty quickly.

I don't think Quicklaunch would have to suffer significant barrel damage, maybe some fouling that can be cleaned off. The pressures and temperatures required are pretty low, and the required chemistries are pretty tame; it's just the velocities that are high.

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Re:NASA will test SpinLaunch's ability to fling satellites i... by Retric on Friday April 15, 2022 @01:13AM (#31036788)

The g forces are from rotation not how fast you spin up. To take it to the extreme an arm that’s slightly longer than the radius of the earth for sometime moving at Mach 22ish hits ~1g, because that’s orbit. Hitting Mach 22 or even Mach 10 on an arm that’s 500m means vastly higher g-forces.

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Re:NASA will test SpinLaunch's ability to fling satellites i... by kragen on Thursday April 28, 2022 @07:01PM (#31199309)

Yes obviously.

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Re:NASA will test SpinLaunch's ability to fling satellites i... by jhgb on Friday April 15, 2022 @03:11PM (#31044435)

And how long is the arm supposed to be in the intended orbital system? Because if you want a 500m arm, you literally have a millions-of-cubic-meters-sized vacuum chamber -- and not only that, you have a vacuum chamber with a highly disadvantageous shape (a flat disc). That sounds like a mildly insane design to me.

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Re:NASA will test SpinLaunch's ability to fling satellites i... by Retric on Friday April 15, 2022 @03:55PM (#31045007)

50m sorry 500 was a typo.

“This test accelerator is 108 ft (33 m) in diameter, which makes it a one-third scale of the operational system that is being designed.”

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