Bumping along a dirt track in New Mexico, something alien rises above the expanse of brush. It looks like a flying saucer on its side, a huge circle 4 metres taller than the Statue of Liberty. This is SpinLaunch鈥檚 suborbital accelerator, a colossal centrifuge built to practice throwing satellites into space. It seems like a wild idea, but it just might work, as I saw when I watched the company鈥檚 ninth test flight.
started in California in 2014 with the goal of making it cheaper and easier to launch satellites while reducing dependency on traditional rockets. In 2017, the company completed its first prototype centrifuge and began using it to test satellite parts, spinning them to extraordinary speeds to see if they could withstand the g-forces.
It went well, and the firm was starting to build the suborbital accelerator at when the covid-19 pandemic hit. Most of the construction and engineering crew moved into storage containers at the site, retrofitting them into living spaces and creating a small, isolated community in the desert where they holed up for two years.
Advertisement
On sunny days, people worked on the centrifuge, which was mostly made from off-the-shelf industrial equipment, some bought second-hand, rather than costly aerospace parts. On rainy days, they found other ways to keep busy 鈥� renovating the homemade village, exercising to聽stay fit for the gruelling work in聽extreme heat or tending their five chickens and two dogs. Every聽night there was music and聽a聽campfire. After more聽than two years, the hulking launch facility was ready.
The first test flight was conducted on 22 October 2021 and demonstrated a step towards a new idea: chucking things into space. This type of space flight would use mostly electricity rather than rocket fuel and could cost less than $500,000 per launch instead of upwards of $50 million. 鈥淭he most complex, expensive and polluting part of space launch is the rocket,鈥� says Mark Sipperley at SpinLaunch.
Inside the SpinLaunch centrifuge, the payload is enclosed within a carbon-fibre capsule, which is in turn attached to the end of a carbon-fibre tether. Almost all the air inside is pumped out to avoid aerodynamic friction and unnecessary heating.
At the other end of the tether is a counterweight that keeps the whole system balanced while the tether whirls around, bringing the capsule up to speeds of thousands of kilometres per hour. Then, all of a sudden, the tether releases the projectile and the counterweight. The projectile pierces the plastic sheet that is maintaining the centrifuge鈥檚 near-vacuum and flies out of a chute pointed upwards. The counterweight is released into a聽canister of dirt, where it is vaporised nearly instantly.
When I visited SpinLaunch, I asked 鈥� only half joking 鈥� if I could get into the capsule and be flung to聽space. They said no. This system is for satellites only, because the g-forces from being spun around that fast would be fatal. Instead, I聽watched from a distance as the centrifuge flung its 3-metre-long projectile into the air at more than聽1600 kilometres per hour. The process was eerily quiet 鈥� none of the usual rumbling of a traditional rocket launch 鈥� and after a few seconds, the projectile vanished into the sky. It flew more聽than 8000 metres up before crashing back down to the ground.
This system is only one-third of the size of SpinLaunch鈥檚 planned orbital accelerator, which the firm aims to begin building later this year and finish in 2025. If all goes well, the orbital system will use 10-metre projectiles to send payloads of up to 200 kilograms into low Earth orbit 鈥� that is about eight cubesats or one satellite about the size of a washing machine.
And that is only the beginning. 鈥淚deally, rather than building one orbital system, we would build them in farms鈥� so we could pass power between the systems,鈥� says Sipperley. 鈥淭hrough regenerative braking we can capture back more聽than 80 per cent of the power of a launch [and feed it to聽a聽neighbouring system].鈥�
SpinLaunch has contracts with and the Pentagon, and the hope is to eventually perform five聽to 10 launches a day using the聽orbital system, all powered by聽renewable energy.
鈥淭he market expands when launch becomes cheaper 鈥� people that never thought they could send something to space will now聽be able to do it,鈥� says Christine Lawson at SpinLaunch. After seeing the suborbital accelerator in action, I believe it. It may not be聽able to throw me into space, but聽this little start-up might just revolutionise satellite launches.
Sign up to our free Launchpad newsletter for a voyage across the galaxy and beyond, every Friday
