Company Wants To Slingshot Satellites Into Space

Can you use a giant slingshot to hurl projectiles into space? One California company is trying to turn that simple idea into a new way to send satellites skyward, replacing fire and fuel with electric power and motion.

SpinLaunch, founded in 2014, has built a launch system that skips the dramatic blastoff people usually associate with rockets. Instead of burning propellant on the ground, the company uses a rotating arm inside a vacuum chamber to hurl payloads at extreme speed. The goal is to reach low Earth orbit with small satellites while cutting both launch costs and pollution.

"This is not a rocket," said Jonathan Yaney, SpinLaunch's founder and CEO. "And clearly our ability to perform in just 11 months this many tests and have them all function as planned really is a testament to the nature of our technology."

He made that remark after the company's 10th successful test flight, part of a steady push to prove that the concept can work outside theory and animation.

The underlying physics are not new. Long before modern spaceflight, siege weapons used stored energy to launch heavy objects over walls. Trebuchets and other machines turned force into motion with brutal efficiency. SpinLaunch is working from that same basic principle, though with materials, electronics, and engineering that belong to the 21st century.

That link to the past is part of what makes the company's approach so striking. The method has even drawn comparisons to pumpkin-launching contests, where hobbyists use giant machines to send gourds flying for sport. The difference here is that the payload is not a pumpkin, and the target is not a field. It is orbit.

To make that leap possible, the company depends on high-strength carbon fiber and increasingly compact satellite hardware. Smaller electronics give payloads a better chance of surviving the violent trip. SpinLaunch says, "Modern electronics, materials, and simulation tools allow for satellites to be adapted to the kinetic launch environment with relative ease."

That does not make the challenge gentle. Any satellite riding this system must survive crushing acceleration and then keep working in space.

At its New Mexico test site, the company has carried out a series of launch demonstrations that look more like controlled shock experiments than traditional liftoffs. In one video, a sleek capsule disappears from the chamber almost instantly, moving so fast that it is hard to follow with the naked eye.

The forces involved are enormous. SpinLaunch says its system has already handled loads of 10,000 Gs, or 10,000 times Earth's gravity. That is enough to expose weak points in almost any design. So far, the company says, the hardware has held together.

That performance has helped attract backing and cooperation from major names, including NASA, Airbus, and Cornell University. Their equipment has played a role in testing, giving the effort outside validation as SpinLaunch tries to move from experimental launches to a working orbital system.

The company's stated target is ambitious: launching satellites into orbits below 600 miles by 2026. A coastal orbital launch site is already in development, a sign that SpinLaunch sees this as more than a string of eye-catching tests.

"It has proven that it's a system that is repeatedly reliable," Yaney said.