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"Slingatron" To Hurl Payloads Into Orbit
cylonlover writes "People have been shooting things into space since the 1940s, but in every case this has involved using rockets. This works, but it's incredibly expensive with the cheapest launch costs hovering around $2,000 per pound. This is in part because almost every bit of the rocket is either destroyed or rendered unusable once it has put the payload into orbit. Reusable launch vehicles like the SpaceX Grasshopper offer one way to bring costs down, but another approach is to dump the rockets altogether and hurl payloads into orbit. That's what HyperV Technologies Corp. of Chantilly, Virginia is hoping to achieve with a 'mechanical hypervelocity mass accelerator' called the slingatron."
Are they virtualizing this?
Be careful if you build one on the moon, though. Those people will get uppity and use it as high ground to gain independence from the democratically-elected governments of Earth.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That sounds cool for launching tungsten balls into space, but probably wont work if you put any astronauts in it.
It's a Kickstarter campaign.
#DeleteChrome
Wonder if this'll turn into the poor-man's ICBM -- where you target a house of an enemy with google maps; and drop rocks on it with this 15,600 mph slingshot.
Any chance of getting a gigantic railgun anytime soon? As cool as this coiled object-chucker is, a railgun seems easier to aim.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
So we're going with the Wile E Coyote school of engineering then?
Awesome!!
Might be sure your payload doesn't get any sudden G-forces it's not built for, but it sounds interesting.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Everything astronauts need is currently either on board or was put into orbit using expensive heavy lift rockets.
Imagine a low cost way of getting things into space, it would be an instant game changer.
It is a lot more complicated than a railgun or coilgun, suffers from erosion issues nonetheless, so what is the advantage? That it sounds like something out of a Dilbert story?
Out of curiosity, why aren't mass drivers feasible for this sort of thing? You could build one up a mountainside near the equator - something like Mt. Chimborazo (6200+ meters) and drastically reduce the amount of fuel needed to get anything into space. By making the thing several kilometers long, you'd also massively lower the material strains on any craft (you probably still couldn't send humans up, but you'd have far less limits on how sensitive your cargo could be.)
The slingshot sounds like an extremely limited tool - you'd still need a high degree of complexity for things like guidance systems and engines, because of drag you probably couldn't launch anything right into space without at least a partial boost. A mass driver would only get your cargo up to equivalent speeds once it got to the "muzzle", which would ideally be located at very high altitudes with thin air...
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
They want to throw payloads through the entire atmosphere at 6-7km/sec.? Is the payload mass going to be mostly heatshield?
What is escape velocity again? 25,000 mph?
How is this an improvement over the Babylon Gun? More moving parts, more breakage, more complicated. Give me a hydrogen-powered intercontinental artillery piece any day.
Inside the slingatron is a spiral tube, or a series of connected spiral tubes, depending on the design, that gyrates on a series of flywheels spread along its length.
That sounds a lot like a spiral version of the Interwebs! It's only a matter of time before Mr. Ted Stevens sues for infringement!
0x or or snor perron?!
When the projectile is moving at about 7,000 miles per second.. is it not going to heat up and vaporise when it encounters friction from the atmosphere and the slingatron? How hot will it get, and if the contour changes are irregular, will the projectile not deviate off its expected path? I think it makes more sense to build a super gun on Mount Everest, or use a stratospheric aircraft to provide a lifting platform to get a rocket out of dense atmosphere.
I guess the existing name "Lofstrom Loop" wasn't hip enough.
So ... basically a complicated railgun with lots of moving parts
Here is a list of all the things that can take a short (but not instant) 60,000 Gs:
...
...
...
...
...
...
I've got nothing.
I'm now trying to think of how to build something that can take 60,000Gs:
I've still got nothing.
" 'tis a silly thing."
*** Don't be dull.***
Check out google autocaption at 1:20. Classic.
They're going to launch it from the surface at orbital velocity? It would burn up from the air friction inside the Slingitron itself before hitting orbital velocity. If it didn't (i.e. it was a vacuum inside the Slingitron) - it would as soon as it hit the outside air. Meteorites and returning spacecraft do this (in the opposite direction) when the reenter the Earth's atmosphere. Watch how much the atmosphere slows them down (and burns them up). Why wouldn't this happen from a Slingitron launch? This issue was never even addressed in the video.
Ill wait and see how well it works in kerbal space program before buying into it.
The xkcd for today seems rather relevant heh http://xkcd.com/
There have been experiments to shoot things into space using cannon (for research) since at least Project Harp of the 1960's. They tended to have funding problems, leading Gerald Bull (their chief proponent) to accept money from Saddam Hussein to build a supergun using the same technology, which lead to his assassination.
Wernher von Braun never had these problems...
Just because you can't put astronauts or unhardened electronic/mechanical bits up with it doesn't really reduce it's value.
If it can reduce launch costs for the stuff it can launch to around $100/pound vs $2k, it changes the dynamics even if it's just launching oxygen, water, and such to the station.
"One true solution" arguments (it doesn't replace every use so it's useless!) don't help solve problems.
I don't read AC A human right
Is it April 1 already?
Aaaaaaaaand, of course it is a Kickstarter.
Have they actually studied physics? This project is so bogus on multiple levels:
1) It's much easier to use a linear accelerator. It won't have to deal with tremendous loads from centrifugal forces, for one thing.
2) Acceleration will be murderous for anything that's not a solid material.
3) And finally, it still won't work even if a payload is accelerated to orbital speed. That's because the payload would re-enter the atmosphere and return to the point where it left the accelerator at the end of its first orbit - that's simple freaking orbital mechanics. And you need quite a bit of delta-v to lift the perigee high enough to avoid it, which requires a rocket with an engine, see 2) why it's not feasible.
Wonder how far it can throw a pumpkin?
http://www.punkinchunkin.com/
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
the slingatron replaces rockets with a more sophisticated version of the sling famed in the story of David and Goliath
Really? David and Goliath is your go-to analogy? Oh wait... written by: David Szondy .
Doug Stanhope: "... the Jews have a tendency to throw their Judaism into whatever conversation you're having..."
They keep trying to find ways to get stuff up there but not as much work is being put into how to get all the crap up there back down again....
How many people laughed at all the rednecks creating weird contraptions to hurl pumpkins down a harvested field in Discovery channel? Now who is laughing, eh? When space travel is commercialized and you are crammed into the economy class seat of the commuter plane to mars, you may have to thank Bill "1 gallon" Schwarzenhammer, winner of Pumkin Chunkin 2021, who was the first one to hurl a pumpkin all the way to Moon, more known for his ability to gulp down 1 gallon of beer without pausing for breath.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This is quite unlike atmospheric braking and descent, where the heat can easily be dissipated by convection once the payload has slowed down enough.
Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a wagon.
And since the vacuum insulated the heat, it matter a whole lot less. Who cares if something is hot, if the only possible way it could be bad is if an astronaut took off his suit in space and then touched it.
How is this heat issue any different than with normal rocket ships.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
This thing basically boils down to a mass driver with a curved track. Why would this be better than a traditional and straight mass driver? Every half circle basically reverses the payloads velocity, which is an immense waste of energy and also much more g-forces than otherwise needed.
This thing seems to have all of the downside of a mass driver and then some, while offering no benefits other than saving some real-estate.
Flinging projectiles at extremely high speeds sounds more useful for a rail-gun like weapon than for throwing stuff into space. I assume it would have to have extreme accuracy in either case.
They could cool it will ablation of material as is used in some rocket engine designs.
HyperV Technologies Corp. of Chantilly, Virginia has announced they have been acquired by Microsoft and received 10 truckloads of chairs.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Heat builds up outside the insulation.
Heat cannot dissipate to environment quickly enough and overcomes insulation.
Astronaut turns on air conditioning which also has nowhere to dissipate heat.
Astronaut toasts.
Boils down to good enough insulation to protect the interior while exterior radiates or you jettison the heated exterior (most likely by it burning off).
Or you could spin up your payload magnetically on a smaller circular track that does not require you to oscillate the spacecraft AND entire mass of the track http://www.launchpnt.com/portfolio/aerospace/satellite-launch-ring/ Either way, things are going to get hot when the spacecraft touches the atmosphere.
The maximum exhaust velocity of a Space Shuttle engine is approximately 10,000 mph, they are shooting for a velocity much higher than this. Why not use the Slingatron as a direct propulsion device once in space? You could use solar or nuclear to generate the electricity then your fuel could be anything. You can use all your waste as propellant, just fling it away, or cannibalize unneeded (spent) portions of your ship as you go. You could use BB sized objects as the propellant so I imagine this thing could be scaled to a something easily within current launch capabilities.
Letter To Iran
A compact rail gun sounds not that useful as a space launch tool, mounting one on a ship on the other hand makes a lot more sense. Add that to the kickstarter campaign that will put them at the bottom of the weaponized range and the planed conference to figure out other uses of the technology, that seems to be exactly what they have in mind.
Watch North Korea, Iran, and sundry other coveters of a cheap, effective fractional orbit delivery system for their nasty payload of choice.
Bull didn't get to finish his Superkaboomer for Saddam, but that's not to say the concept isn't still interesting to would-be bombardiers. I'm sure Russia or China would be happy to build them one. For peaceful, scientific research, of course.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
The slingatron 5000 sounds better.
I would be interested to see how the resistance of air impacts this. What velocity must it impart (and at what alunch angle) to achieve an orbital velocity? It sounds like there might be some "gotchas" to me. But if it sounds like it would work, I recommend we give it government funding, and make Obama the first human to try it as a passenger.
Seems a rail gun better. A human uses a sling because we have to use our own body energy to throw an object and its not just well designed for high velocity projectile throwing.
But if you're building something... you can make it take any shape you want. Including 1 mile of rail gun track.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
How about a ball shaped spiral spiral? You would get better acceleration density that way. You could even make it completely mechanical by using springs and 'plucking it' in just the right way to propagate the correct harmonic
love is just extroverted narcissism
Sounds like the popular iOS game; hopefully no one get sued. I suppose they'll be safe, unless they paint the payload to look like a bird.
This might work to toss pucks and marbles across the parking lot at 200mph, but thats a long way from putting something into orbit.
This spinning mechanical thing would literately explode from the forces involved at the velocity they would really need.
If my chevy engine could spin fast enough, it could get into orbit too.... if it was possible someone would have done it. OH !, they did try it, his car is permanently embedded in a mountain side somewhere in Az.
Basically, use a maglev approach (seraphim motor) but rigged in the same spiral fashion. Far less chance of failure and very likely a great deal cheaper to do.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
you might be a vaporware if....
Load ball bearings into the center and flick the switch. Equatorial plane of death!
Too lazy to RTFA. Do they have a solution to the problem of building an engine that can survive launch and perform the burn to insert payloads into orbit?
So in the end this is just another Kickstarter Slashvertisement from two guys who want you to pay them to keep screwing around with random, unworkable ideas rather than actually work for a living. At least they aren't standing at the end of the exit ramp begging for handouts.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Drop you kids off in one of these. And they wouldn't be back for at least an hour. Leaving plenty of time for reading a book a having a small break.
You might also bring a net in order to catch little toddle deorbiting at 6 km/sec
Is this being sponsored by Six Flags?
Hurlinator
Chuckertron 5000 XL extreme
Spaztron
Instotapioca
Hypervelocity Orbital Transit Yielding Acceleration Sling System (a.k.a. Hold On To You ASS!)
you know I'm right about this.
YOU KNOW IT!!!
This sounds like a character from Transformers. Optimus Prime sends the Autobots newest planet hurling member Slingatron Maximus against the Decepticon hoard.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
The question that really needs answered is "can it break the 1 mile barrier for pumpkin chunkin?"
..just so we can hear how it sounds like!
other "cool" stuff is the loftstrom loop, space fountain, launch loop etc.
as for excessive g-forces: these can be minimized by submerging a human in water inside the rocket. (human is 80% water?)
the limits prolly being the same as going diving: helium-oxygen breathing gas during high-g launches could
mitigate the nitrogen bubble forming though.
submerged jelly-fish can prolly go up to 100 (hundred) Gs without damage?
Two, actually.
First, most of the posters here didn't RTFA (not that I'm surprised). To save you all the shame: They know this creates tons of g. They don't plan to launch astronauts with it, it's for bulk materials like water, construction materials or hardened satellites.
Second, the video also misses the point. Even after watching it, I still have no clue how this thing actually works. Something about centripedal force and some kind of locking. This is a geek project, stupid! Do explain the physics in some more detail!
Anyone know more about the techniques involved? "Slingatron" doesn't exactly turn up many search results aside from this project.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Am I missing something? Rockets went into space in the 40's?
Some of us will get the joke.
If there was significant heat build-up, it would be a problem for a variety of payloads that would otherwise be a good match for the system. For example, water or rocket fuel could boil and generate significant pressure leading to either an explosion, or at least a significant delay before you can open the can and use the contents. But of course, in this case the heat is not much of a problem because the thing would punch through the atmosphere in seconds and only the outermost millimeters of the casing / heatshield would get scorched (see meteorites).
you should be targeting the military for battleship gun replacement. this could be a machine gun for battleship shells.
This reminds me of the "Space Gun" depicted in the 1937 British sci-fi classic (almost an oxymoron since history has shown that the best science fiction Britain has been able to produce is "Doctor Who", not a ringing endorsement) "Things to Come". We get to see it shoot the capsule into space and using a big telescope the final protagonists are able to see we don't get to see the red goo the two occupants were turned into by the G forces.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Also, they will need to fire it at far greater than re-entry speeds. Im pretty sure that would create a greater than hypersonic boom. I tried to see what that was called, but the table on wikipedia didnt go up that high. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_speed
trebuchet
You gotta be kidding me -- a b&w vector diagram lifted from some tech website, cheesy drum riffs for 20 seconds over a third-grader title screen, then two greybeards sitting in an ill-miked boxy echo chamber start out "Tell me Doug, what is a slingatron" ?????
Best parody of old-skool production values, or quarter-serious proposal for a $10 kickstarter?
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
The faster you go through dense air, the more energy you waste.
Have a shell insulated from the cargo that's jettisoned once you're out of the atmosphere.
Specifically, out of either Calvin and Hobbes, or Ozy and Millie.
I'm all for it, of course!
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Lots of things (materials like fuel, some/most electronics, and other stuff) can be made to survive very high G loads - when you drop your smartphone on the pavement it probably survived 100Gs or more - but the real problem for any kind of gun-type launch (this thing, or rail gun, or howitzer) is not the acceleration but the heat of the atmosphere when the vehicle starts going very fast. I only recently learned that when an orbital launch vehicle reaches some high speed (Mach 5 IIRC, but I could be off), the rocket engines are throttled back to maintain that speed until the vehicle gets above the majority of the atmosphere, to avoid burning up. This is a huge waste of fuel*, but necessary unless you make the nose cone into an ablative shield. Then, when the atmosphere is out of the way, the engines are turned back up.
*since fuel has mass, the sooner and faster you use it up, the more actual velocity you get. Burning just to maintain a certain speed means you're not accelerating to the required orbital velocity, just marking time while consuming a few thousand pounds of fuel per second.
Of course, a big enough ground-based launch system such as this proposal (assuming it works) could theoretically be scaled bigger to accommodate the mass of the heat shield. But the result may have such a reduced payload for the given launch vehicle that it is no longer cost-effective anyway.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
It's not friction. It's forward compression of the air.
You know, like the one from last week's XKCD?
http://www.xkcd.com/1243/
I prefer the Nuclear launch option
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
you realize projectile would be in space in under 0.004 of a second? aerodynamic shape with blackbody coating on high heat capacity material should be sufficient
Well they have virtualized the physics. Despite the claims on their website cyclotrons oscillate at a fixed frequency because the path length for each semi-circle increases in direct proportion to the velocity i.e. the time to turn through 180 degrees remains fixed. In fact this was why cyclotrons could only be used for heavy particles like protons and atomic nuclei - put an electron in there and it would become ultra-relativistic and so the half-period would increase because the velocity was essentially fixed at ~c and the path length would grow with energy. This is what lead to machines which the synchronized the magnetic field to the beam energy, so-called synchrotrons, like the LHC.
Worse though is that they repeatedly refer to the frequency increasing in their mechanical device despite the clear video evidence that, like a cyclotron, it operates at a fixed frequency. So while they have a neat idea, they clearly do not understand the basic, newtonian physics behind their machine which means they are unlikely to be able to make it work properly when they try to go from fun toy to something useful.
We simply reproduce too much currently for this to continue to function once fossil fuels run out (i.e. fertilizer and medicine derived from oil goes away, the fuel isn't the issue).
Actually fuel is the only issue. We produce fertilizer from fixing nitrogen via the Bosch-Haber process to make ammonia. While this currently uses hydrocarbons for hydrogen this can also be obtained via electrolysis from water or potentially even from the hydrocarbons in plant life which is where medicines will come from if we ever run out of oil and gas entirely.
Of course such solutions require more energy (and there may be better, more energy efficient ones than those above) but, if that is available, it will work so the limited factor is simply energy. As a whole we are still well below the total energy budget we get daily from the sun and, if we can harness fusion power, we will have essentially limitless energy resources - although certainly not for 'free' - at current consumption rates.
You'd probably liquefy the pumpkin before it got airborne.
You're gonna need something fairly rugged to get launched out of this thing.
True, I'd drop a little money on a kickstarter for this just for the entertainment value.
That being said, I really really want to see video of things like pumpkins being fired out of this ... that would be awesome ... the pumpkin rail gun. ;-)
Anybody claiming that this system cannot put a rocket motor into orbit is wrong. The military has been usung rocket-assisted artillery shells for a long while now, as well as GPS guided shells. Right there, you have enough tech to put a solid rocket motor into orbit with enough control and telemetry to establish stable LEO.
imagine a chunk of tungsten hurled at a boat. no more boat.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
A railgun has been envisioned for space purposes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun
The article says that a heat shield is necessary. You can dump the heat-shield once you leave the atmosphere and before you perform your burn.
The concept is silly, but not for this reason.
They claim velocities of 1 Km / second (roughly the muzzle velocity of a tank main weapon) with a unit a few meters across, roughly the same size as a tank. Their little demo was run with small electric motors, which would suggest that the power requirements of their next larger unit are relatively manageable. Interesting to think about this thing hosing 0.1 kg projectiles at 1Km/sec repeating at a rate of once per half second or so....
Project HARP and Project SHARP.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Good luck dealing with the Centrifugal forces. Same issues that "supposedly" doomed the DREAD weapons system, unless somehow mass / inertia can be artificially reduced.
To achieve escape velocity (or even a significant fraction) for a 200kg payload would require a massively reinforced structure constructed of something significantly stronger than carbon fiber.
BTW - this is no new invention. this type of "catapult" has been proposed alternatively for "asteroid mining, mining on the moon, altering a large asteroids path by catapulting the asteroids own mass away. for that matter predecessors include a steam cannon developed by the Confederates during the American Civil War.
SpaceX has the right idea, use conventional aircraft to a given altitude then launch / recover spacecraft at altitude. This reduces need for complex launch/landing facilities, utilizes existing aircraft / air frame engineering techniques, as well as reduces overall weight of orbital craft. The lack of landing gear, low altitude aerodynamic flight systems, etc weight reduction translates into increased "to orbit" or "return to earth" payload, no brainer win win.
This "whirley gig" system would work in reduced gravity environments but basic mass problems themselves doom it on earth.
The late Gerald Bull's space cannon is much more realistic means of putting microsats in orbit than this system.
You don't seem to realize that squishy meaty bits are inside the really hot thing that is radiating away heat at a slow pace.
If not squishy meat bits, then at least electronics.
I hate to be negative here, but wouldn't this be an excellent weapon? Slinging steel rocks at your enemies around the world?
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but I took one look at their image and said to myself, how in the heck do they expect an object traveling at the speeds they are talking about to make the turn skyward at the end of the tube? It sure looks to me like the object is going to go straight, and the curved tube is going to come apart in a spectacular way. Perhaps if they tilted the entire spiral into the necessary plane...
If one made the force angular by putting the payload at a graduated angle, most of the force on the payload would be vertical not sideways, and a normal rocket launch could be stimulated.
That would work for the payload, but then you'll have a heat shield plummeting back towards earth with enough kinetic energy to do damage on impact, but not enough to burn up in the atmosphere.
Anyway. We could really use a way to get things into space that doesn't require the launch system to carry all the fuel with it, but it should be less silly than the slingatron.