Sam Altman is supporting a SpaceX competitor who wants to shoot things into space with a giant gun
The Rockets are cool, but they are also shot into space by the cringe Elon Musk. Do you know what's cool? A huge cannon that can shoot things into space. It may be cheaper, easier, and more efficient. That's the pitch of Longshot Space, an Auckland-based company that is building a giant gun to shoot things into space. Openai's Sam Altman is an investor.
On the surface, the pitch of Longshot Space sounds simple. “If you have the opportunity to do something grand and beautiful, you should do it. That's part of getting me up in the morning. The other part is that the work I'm going to do every day is thriving, big, and fun,” Mike Grace, CEO of Longshot Space, said in a video on the company's YouTube page.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eebgrmrzbbu
Over the past few years, the world has sent a large number of satellites into space. The low earth track is full of things. It takes a rocket to get these things into space, and rockets are expensive. Musk and Jeff Bezos spent billions into space. Musk bought the entire area of Texas, destroyed the city of Bocachica and spent tens of millions of dollars per rocket launch. Musk's innovation in space is designed to re-use rockets.
Grace thinks you can jump over expensive rockets altogether, and he is building a team of like-minded people who will help him realize his dream of launching things into space with a big gun. “We are building a huge space cannon to help colonize solar systems,” Longshot Space CEO Nathan Saichek told The YouTube Channel Story Co. “We are building a huge space cannon to help colonize solar systems.” YouTube Channel Story Co., Ltd. “Building a big ass cannon is a million times easier than a fancy rocket mount. That's the company's argument: we can launch cheaper by making a very large infrastructure investment. Everything else after that is really easy.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwath1im6z0
So how will they do it and how far have they gone? Longshot's plan is to use pressurized gas to gradually push the object towards the spear to achieve the Mach 25 goal. As the subject goes down the gun, insert it into the hole in its barrel and speeds up. Bringing satellites into space will take a long gun.
Early testing of a smaller version of the concept has been successful. According to a report by SFGATE, Longshot has rolled out Apple-sized objects at a rate of up to Mach 4.6. This is far less than the end goal, but it is a good proof of concept and its sound thrives.
To build larger guns, Longshot needs more space.
It is currently in the desert of Nevada and lays the foundation for the next phase of the project. The new gun has a diameter of 30 inches and travels 1,800 feet. Hopefully, such a long gun can make objects weighing 220 pounds reach Mach 5. The final version of the long photo may require more than six miles of running to get into space.
Longshot Space is just one of the companies that want to bypass the high-cost rocket problem. Another popular idea is to build a space elevator. To do this, the company will build a loading platform on the track and then transport some kind of connection elevator to the earth. It will have a high startup cost, but once built, a space elevator will theoretically save a lot of time, money and energy for anyone trying to put things in space.
But for Grace and Longshot, the giant Sonic-Boom-induced gun is the only way to do it.
