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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.
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.
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
" 'tis a silly thing."
*** Don't be dull.***
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.
you might be interested to know 120mm tank round electronics do indeed take about 60,000 g of accleration, a 40mm over 100,000g
solved problem
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
did you even look? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(acceleration) its basicly the sort of acceleration a bullet undergoes, and artillery shells exist with electronics in them that are designed to survive launch.
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.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuze
Mostly random stuff.
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.
For that matter, you could fill the last fourth of the tube with hardened concrete, and it *still* wouldn't make a calculable difference to the stresses on the cargo. We're talking about a lot of stress on that cargo.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
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
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.