"Slingatron" To Hurl Payloads Into Orbit 438
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."
HyperV? (Score:5, Funny)
Are they virtualizing this?
Re:HyperV? (Score:5, Funny)
Nobody uses HyperV for virtualization.
Virtual Physics (Score:3)
My oh my (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:My oh my (Score:5, Insightful)
TANSTAAFL
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No, TINSTAAFL. Speak properly, and sit up straight!
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TANSTAAFL
True, but the moon lacks resources crucial for life... like, for example, air. We haven't yet figured out how to create a sustainable self-enclosed biome. The only place that exists so far is on this rock we call Earth... so they can try and declare independence, and it'll last about as long as it takes for them to run out of supplies.
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Re:My oh my (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My oh my (Score:5, Insightful)
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And that government in turn gives the people who elected it more dollars. It's led to an instability, I hope it doesn't lead to catastrophe.
--PM
Re:My oh my (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My oh my (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, but given a "plurality rules" voting system, that won't work. If a majority of votes were required, that would be a defensible tactic. This is why I favor either Condorcet voting or IRV (Instant Runoff Voting.).
I will agree that there is no perfect way of counting votes, but plurality rules is worse than most of the options. In fact I would consider it significanlty worse than slection by lottery.
Limited cargo use (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's my read. It's probably possible to make a rocket that can survive this treatment, but it isn't going to be easy!
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Replying to my own post... I thought about it a bit more, and you could probably hurl raw materials or durable parts up to space with this and then use on-orbit lasers to correct its final orbit. At that point, you can scoop it up and put it where you need it.
Re:Limited cargo use (Score:5, Informative)
From the article:
It’s questionable whether any rocket system could survive such stresses and there’s certainly no chance of a slingatron being used on a manned mission because it would turn an astronaut into astronaut pudding. Only the most solid state and hardened of satellites built along the lines of an electronic artillery shell fuse would have a chance of survival. The developers say that a larger slingatron would reduce the forces, but even with a reduction by a factor of 10,000, it would still be restricted to very robust cargoes. This makes it mainly attractive for raw materials, such as radiation shielding, fuel, water, and other raw materials.
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Why not just use it for propulsion? It's quite easy to vary the speed objects are launched at, and the machine gets cheaper for smaller payloads, so just put your spaceship into orbit conventionally and then bombard it with a stream of tiny metal pellets to get it moving. Keep the collision speed constant by firing the pellets faster as the ship accelerates, and you can build up speed without carrying reaction mass.
Even better, use something like those magnetic balls you can buy as desk toys, and your ship
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Robert Forward used such tanks in Dragon's Egg, and Heinlein used them in Starship Troopers. Neither story subjected the people in the tanks 60,000g's though.
Cargo is expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Cargo is expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
A surprisingly large amount of stuff sent into low earth orbit and even geosynchronous orbit consists of fuel and oxidiser. The Shuttle launched with over 14 tonnes of manoeuvering fuel and oxidiser on board for the OMS and RCS motors. That's 14 tonnes that couldn't be dedicated to payload, food, water etc. Similarly a geosynchrononous satellite weighing 6 tonnes will be carrying two or three tones of fuel and oxidiser so it can maneuver into its final orbit and allow it to maintain station for a decade or more. Some GEO birds have been decommissioned when they nearly ran out of fuel, not because they broke down or became obsolete.
Using a slingshot or other brute-force technique to put tanks of fuel and oxidiser into orbit cheaply could well be worthwhile; robot tugs could collect them into a tank farm of some kind in a higher orbit and then deliver fuel and oxidiser to various vehicles as needed rather than them having to lift their entire fuel and oxidiser loads along with delicate electronics, structural components for Mars landers, fleshy meatbags etc.
Re:Cargo is expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah.
Taking stuff into space requires a huge amount of energy. Right now, the stuff we sent into space has to carry its own energy, stored in fuel. Because so much energy is needed, lots of fuel is needed. But fuel is heavy, so even more energy is needed.
Externalizing the energy source for what gets sent into space can severely lower costs of getting stuff up there. I don't know if a slingshot is the best way to do it, but at least it's thinking in the right direction.
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It's kind of difficult to think back that far but in the 70s space launches were complicated things, not run-of-the-mill operations like today. One of the constraints that resulted in the Shuttle design was the necessity to launch the crew and payload in one shot. The idea of launching two or three individual payloads and crew capsules within a few days of each other and have them make rendezvous in orbit was beyond the capability of anyone at the time. The Shuttle was basically a variant of the one-shot Ap
Re:Cargo is expensive (Score:5, Funny)
Unlimited pudding rations for all ISS crew members!
Re:Cargo is expensive (Score:4, Funny)
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Yeah, but if you can put a cargo payload into space using this, you can make it much easier to put things into orbit.
For humans I think we'll be limited to rockets for a while. But if you can fire a small satellite into space like this, it might be easier.
Of course, you're also half way to a rail-gun type thing you can lob projectiles long distances.
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Quoting from the Fine Article:
It’s questionable whether any rocket system could survive such stresses and there’s certainly no chance of a slingatron being used on a manned mission because it would turn an astronaut into astronaut pudding.
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If it's cheaper it's still good (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:If it's cheaper it's still good (Score:5, Insightful)
True but pointing out how a solution doesn't solve every aspect of every problem is what gets a post modded up around here. This reinforcement of short-sightedness keeps rearing it's ugly head with nearly every article. Thus even people who know better are still prone to postings such as this just because they know it'll be modded up. The cycle continues and we help to breed a new generation of cynics who don't think that things getting a little better today is a worthwhile goal if it's not the future promised to them by the most optimistic sci-fi stories.
Welcome to Slashdot.
Re:If it's cheaper it's still good (Score:5, Insightful)
Payload on a ballistic arc is worthless (**) unless you can do a subsequent burn at apogee to raise the perigee above the atmosphere. They are unlikely to be able to build a rocket that is hardened enough to survive launch, but is large enough and has enough thrust to raise perigee before it and the payload reenter and burn up.
(** Outside of lobbing nukes at people.)
That said, this might be more useful on a low-gravity, atmosphere-free body like the moon, where you can build the spinner much larger, and launch at a much more horizontal trajectory (improving efficiency, and making interception easier, via an orbital tether). So as long as these guys aren't wasting my money, I'm happy for them to waste their own time and money to develop and prove version 0.01a of the technology.
Re:If it's cheaper it's still good (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you assume that? They built nuclear weapons in the 1950s that could survive being launched from a howitzer, there were (are?) missiles that were launched from naval 5 inch guns. The advances in engineering and materials science in the last half century would imply (to me anyway) that this shouldn't be an insurmountable obstacle.
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And how close did either of those come to reaching orbit?
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Thanks to Kerbals, I actually know what you're talking about!
Yay
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I think that KSP has done more at explaining orbital mechanics to the masses than any public education campaign ever would.
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It would work great if you need Astronaut Paste. The G Forces to fire a projectile into space would be incredible.
Most stuff we would shoot up would probably be crushed or unusable.
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How about use it as a burial device. Some people would likely pay huge amounts for a space burial.
Re:Limited cargo use (Score:4)
How about use it as a burial device.
I suppose if you pointed it at the ground... :p
Re:Limited cargo use (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Limited cargo use (Score:4, Insightful)
Space nutters... Man they are nuts.
And yet, between the ones who want to terraform Mars tomorrow (which I will note that GP is not), and the people like you who want to kick the can down the road forever, we will make progress. Just as GP said.
One important thing to note is that astronauts will need cargo for the foreseeable future. Just because it doesn't look like we'll ever be able to Sling people doesn't mean it's not useful to manned spaceflight.
Re:Limited cargo use (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll save you some reading (Score:5, Informative)
It's a Kickstarter campaign.
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Re:I'll save you some reading (Score:4, Informative)
A kickstarter for a version that'll launch 1lb loads up to a small portion of the speed of sound. You're not getting anything in to orbit on the back of this, just helping this guy make a marginally more convincing case to bigger funding agencies. Although if the physics and engineering made sense, I'm not sure why a marginally larger prototype than the ones they already have is needed.
Wonder if it can be weaponized. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wonder if it can be weaponized. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think there's any probably to it ... if you can get something into space, you can get it pretty much anywhere you like if you can figure out the flight mechanics of it. Which is why when people do any rocket testing, people are paying close attention since a rocket and an ICBM are pretty similar -- if you can do one you can do the other.
At those speeds, even a few kilos of mass is going to hit anything with some pretty serious force.
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The mechanics are a solved problem. Large artillery pieces already need to correct for the rotation of the earth, and all artillery needs to correct for atmospheric conditions that vary with altitude. This device would just need to correct for a lot more of it.
This is just a really big howitzer, and behaves exactly the same as one from a ballistics perspective.
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Yeah, that was about what I expected. I assumed the mechanics were long since solved, but I've never been involved in artillery so I wasn't sure. :-P
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any failure during launch and it becomes a weapon. hope they put in crater to keep neighbors out of harms way
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What is 'out of harms way' for something which can put an object into space with a purely ballistic trajectory?
My understanding is you could fling objects half-way around the world quite readily with something like this.
Putting it into a hole limits the flight angles so it has to go more up, but something coming out at those speeds is going to make a hell of a mess of anything it hits.
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there are a couple things to mitigate that problem, if it is going generally up and the onboard electronics come online (similar to way artillery fuzing is activated after launch), self destruct could be sent
for failure during acceleration, destroy the machine in such a way the projectile is guaranteed to ram into bedrock down or off to side
most of world uninhabited, for the edge case of failure in acceleration right before projectile leaves, and on board self-destruct can't be activated, then you're in the
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"Intercontinental Ballistic Catapults" even more so.
Re:Wonder if it can be weaponized. (Score:5, Funny)
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If so, it'd be the first time that anyone on Kickstarter found their life endangered based on being successful. Google "Gerald Bull," for an example of how far it can go.
Hmmm ... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Might be sure your payload doesn't get any sudden G-forces it's not built for
Can't be any worse than UPS. :p
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As has been noted, weaponizing seems the first likely destination.
Smells like bullshit (Score:2, Informative)
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?
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yeah because they never get exposed to a lot of EM radiation while in space do they?
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Mass Drivers as Alternatives? (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
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I Guarantee that it will technically not be a slingshot. They are probably talking about some mass driver type of thing. I am sure that whatever it is, it would have a long long mussel.
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Well, for 2 reasons – and the reasons apply to all space guns – including mass drivers and Slingatron.
I am not a physicist, but I have been told that the orbital path for any projectile fired from a space gun will pass though earth – which is a fail. So you still need rockets in space to get to a viable orbit, and rockets are fragile things.
The applied engineering is thin on the ground and the upfront costs are massive. There is a large gap between theatrically possible verse practical app
Re:Mass Drivers as Alternatives? (Score:4, Informative)
Real numbers would be much worse. For a muzzle V of 10km/s they are 77% worse.
The slingshot is in fact a far less realistic approach, we could build a mag train with these specs if we were so inclined to sink the billions it would cost to do so. But the slingshot has very large forces between the "track" and the projectile while still requiring a massive track that all moves!
Personally if we are going to dream then a launch loop is my preferred "rockets suck" alternative.
By the way Rockets don't suck. They do what they do well. Far better than anything else at this point. There is no reason they have to be as expensive as they currently are.
To paraphrase Monty Python about Camelot (Score:3)
Air Friction & Atmorphere (Score:3, Interesting)
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Perhaps they could coat the payload with an ablative heat shield? And presumably they would build the thing at high altitude to avoid the "thick" air below. Nevertheless, you're right that they'd have an "uphill battle" to reach orbit this way.
Very skeptical (Score:2)
Cannon (Score:3)
There have been experiments to shoot things into space using cannon (for research) since at least Project Harp [wikipedia.org] of the 1960's. They tended to have funding problems, leading Gerald Bull [wikipedia.org] (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...
Checking calendar... (Score:3)
Aaaaaaaaand, of course it is a Kickstarter.
Have they studied physics? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
TFA points out that it will have to have an orbital insertion motor on board.
Punkin Chunkin (Score:4, Funny)
Wonder how far it can throw a pumpkin?
http://www.punkinchunkin.com/ [punkinchunkin.com]
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You'd probably liquefy the pumpkin before it got airborne.
You're gonna need something fairly rugged to get launched out of this thing.
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. ;-)
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The acceleration would liquefy it into a long stream, and the deceleration would vaporize it within meters of the bore.
While it accelerates it would undergo incredible centripetal force along one axis, which would tend to force the material along the other axes (pumpkin pancake). In the air pumpkin juice would be decelerated along one of the long axes, causing it to pancake up again in a different direction briefly before it was completely reduced to plasma due to interaction with the air.
Up but not down (Score:2)
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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....
What, gravity isn't good enough for you?
See? Pumpkin chuckin' is useful. (Score:4, Funny)
I see an obvious problem with this concept: heat (Score:5, Insightful)
This is quite unlike atmospheric braking and descent, where the heat can easily be dissipated by convection once the payload has slowed down enough.
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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.
Military applications (Score:2)
In follow up news . . . (Score:2)
maglev is better (Score:3)
Kickstarter Slashvertisement (Score:3)
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Right. What they have now as a demo underperforms most handguns in muzzle velocity. What they propose to build with Kickstarter funding has the performance of a low-end artillery piece and is an order of magnitude below what's needed to get to orbit.
Unless they can show that their idea scales better than the various space gun [wikipedia.org] schemes, this is a lose. The HARP space gun reached about half of the necessary velocity in the 1960s. A space gun is quite possible, but can't put something in orbit directly witho
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Certainly a constraint, but one key difference. It gets less resistive as you go, the opposite of coming in. At 6 kilometers/sec, you're out of the really dense atmosphere pretty quickly.
That is true, but in general you'd need a much larger heat shield for this than you'd ever need for re-entry of an equivalent payload. With re-entry the highest speed is at the lowest air density. With a mass driver the highest speed is at the highest air density.
Sure, you'll get through it quickly, but that just means that the amount of power being dissipated as heat is astronomical.
I'd think the G forces from atmospheric drag would be incredible as well for the first few seconds.
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I also don't know if you could 'shape' the payload. If the centrifuge would make you have to shoot roundish obj
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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
Re:60,000Gs ? (Score:5, Informative)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuze [wikipedia.org]
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Warheads of various kinds.
What? You thought there was some non-military use for this?
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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.
[Emphasis Added]
.037c? That seems rather excessive when trying to get to LEO. Then again, it will get you to the moon in 34 seconds and to Mars in less than six hours -- assuming you don't want to stop and look around -- then you'll need to decelerate.
I assume you mean 7 miles per second (escape velocity on a body the size of the earth is ~25,000 miles/hour) or are in a *really* big hurry.
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At 7000 miles per second (11,000 km / sec, or 4% of the speed of light), you would expect a strong emission of 1 MeV gamma rays and an energy release in the megaton range for a 100 kg payload; basically you would have created the kinetic equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
At 7000 miles _per hour_, not so much. Project HARP [wikipedia.org] fired 8000 miles per hour payloads in the 1960's.
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I've thought about mounting a gigantic railgun on the eastern flank of Mount Kilimanjaro. You'd need to lengthen the barrel partly into the earth to give a longer run-up. Keep the barrel evacuated -- you can probably use a plasma window at the exit point to keep the atmosphere out. (although I'm not certain a plasma windows would work terribly well with a large aperture -- can anyone tell me?)
The tricky part is you'd need to accelerate your projectile at over 5000 gravities for the ~ 0.3 seconds it would ta
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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.
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