*YEET*ing to orbit @ TL=5-8 (pre-gravitics)
- Thread starter Spinward Flow
- Start date
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
Spin launch requires extremely hardened payloads.
Now, if you could build a beanstalk, that'd be something. And an entirely different set of problems and failure modes.
Now, if you could build a beanstalk, that'd be something. And an entirely different set of problems and failure modes.
This is actually misleading.
Not that it's not true, the payloads suffer very high Gs, but it turns out lots of payloads can naturally survive high Gs, so in practice it's less of an issue than they thought.
Just the fact that they've demonstrated solar panels that can take those forces (which, intuitively. one might think are particularly vulnerable to it), shows a lot of the "hard questions" regarding this have been solved. Circuitboards take the Gs pretty well, apparently, too. If they can manage to not flatten the liquid fuel tanks during spin up, it just might work.
Downside is that they have apparently been rather dark about progress since the 1/3rd scale work a few years ago.
Similar threads
