Longshot to cannon satellites into space
December 5, 2024
By Chris Forrester
Longshot Space Technology is challenging the established ‘rockets-into-space’ status quo with a planned 500-metre-long pneumatic cannon designed to launch payloads into orbit and with no rockets required.
CEO Mike Grace is betting on a physics-proven, cost-efficient approach to disrupt the $580 million+ space tech market. He commented: “It’s a million times easier to make a big-ass cannon than a fancy rocket”.
Based in Oakland, California the company says the end result will be able to use a multi-stage pneumatic cannon to boost a projectile from standstill to orbit. The device will be 500 metres long. The design uses plenty of ablative material to absorb the massive forces of acceleration and the projectile accelerates gradually enough not to be blown apart.
Currently Longshot has working prototypes capable of handling a 6” diameter payload to Mach 4.2. The company says that by moving the system to the Nevada desert, Longshot can use hydrogen as the accelerant gas. By extending the length of the barrel to 500+ metres and adding more boosters, Longshot will be able to accelerate payloads of up to 100 kilos to Mach 5+ at acceleration loads that a cellphone can survive, and at prices significantly lower than current rocket-based accelerator systems.
Grace praised the work being done by rivals including Spinlaunch. “The Spinlaunch guys, for example, those guys are awesome, the technology is cool, and I hope it works,” he explained. “But, why design the most novel possible way of doing it? Instead, we just steal Nazi stuff where the physics questions have already been answered.”
Longshot raised $3.5 million in its latest funding round out of a total now raised of $8 million. The first task is to build a device capable of launching a 100 kgs cargo at speeds of up to Mach 15 and initially a sub-orbital flight. The company emerged from ‘stealth mode’ in September.
The aim is to place not just satellites into orbit, but essential back-up items needed in orbit (raw materials, batteries, water, supplies for the International Space Station, etc).
The project echoes both World War II developments from the German army, but also the Gerald Bull developed ‘supergun’ Astra concept, Project Babylon. By 1962 Bull’s initial prototype supergun was successfully firing a 100 kg projectile at 6810 mph to heights of 66,000 mtrs. Project Babylon was stopped when supergun parts were seized by Customs in the UK in November 1990, and most of Bull’s staff returned to Canada. The smaller test gun was later broken up after the Gulf War