Not Everyone Buys Spin Launch’s Claims
SpinLaunch’s plan to launch payloads into orbit using a giant centrifuge has generated a lot of skepticism, as seen in the above video.
58 responses to “Not Everyone Buys Spin Launch’s Claims”
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curiouis
Jonathan Yaney has no background in engineering or a related subject. There is little background info on him. He has a pilot license and a psychology degree from University of Kansas. In the past he worked closely with his brother Maximus. I am very leery about Spinlaunch and Yaney.
There are plenty of startups and well-established businesses being run by CEOs who can’t design the products their enterprises make or even do much simpler things with them. It would be amusing, I’m sure, to get the CEOs of the American legacy automakers into a room with cars from each company’s product line and ask them to change the spark plugs. Jessica Alba runs a billion-dollar personal care products company. I don’t think she’s a chemist.
Engineers are easy enough to hire as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have demonstrated. The question is how good are his management skills and in hiring the right technical employees.
NASA forum discussion on SpinLaunch from 2018 – interesting.
https://forum.nasaspaceflig…
The key is recognizing that as we discussed the real application of this technology is not on the Earth but on the Moon and asteroids. The dense atmosphere and the very deep gravity field makes getting to orbit from Earth very difficult. That is why they are focusing near term on suborbital markets.
The real problem with this concept is we don’t make payloads that can take the 1000s of g forces for the long spin up periods.I wonder if they even tried to put a telemetry system on that dart they threw? If they did, did it function?
Ordinary smartphones – except for their screens – can survive transient levels of G-force equal to or greater than what even the yet-to-be-built full-size Spin-Launch centrifuge can dish out. And transient Gs are harder to withstand than Gs that build more slowly. WW2 proximity fuzes had little radar sets in them based on vacuum tube electronics. Those could survive and function after experiencing transient G-forces five or more times as high as the Spin-Launcher can achieve. In the 50s, atomic bombs were built that could be fired from 155mm howitzers. The technology of high-G-force-tolerant electronics is comparatively ancient.
Good point on the smart phones, and they do that multiple times before really breaking. One application for that merry-go-round in NM will be payload test facilities. Customers will pay for qualification time if people are going to pay to fly using this method.
the largest market for this is probably an ASAT
What’s the spin up time? What’s the reload time? As cereal filler to work along side missiles maybe? With the arms control wonk community decimated we don’t have the old fashioned public engineering based analysis on what happens when you start using strategic weapons. I wonder how LEO and MEO become useless as more ASATs are used?
I think it takes 1 and 1/2 hour to spin up…but for target systems it would probably work ok. small payload etc
Decades ago vacuum tube electronics were able to survive being fired in artillery shells at 8-10,000 G’s. Modern solid state electronics in guided shells can survive 12,000 G’s.
the prox fuse. 🙂
Paul Shillito (‘Curious Droid’) did a good story on those a few months ago…
It’s not just the electronics that has to survive; it’s all the propellant plumbing and tankage that can’t possibly be hardened to thousands of g’s. Other people have pointed out the aerodynamic shock of entering the very lowest part of the atmosphere at extreme speeds. Recall those videos of reducing rocket thrust even for uncrewed missions in order to avid fatal (to the spacecraft) peak aerodynamic thrust. Private entrepreneur Elon Musk knows this and so much more than to the SpinLaunch principals. I imagine he has a wry smile and has no need to think about any competition from SpinLaunch.
A muddled and silly presentation that spent most it its time haring off after irrelevant squirrels. It also seems that every Brit twit with a working-class accent thinks he can make his fortune by trying to be Jeremy Clarkson on YouTube. There are legitimate questions to be asked about Spin-Launch and its technology. This bozo didn’t ask or answer any of them.
thunderf00t is infamous for similarly poor quality arguments “busting” new tech, but he somehow gains a lot of followers.
yeap it was tiresome to watch and I gave up about oh 1/2 in. the thing that kind of “got me” a little going “hmm” was his claim that this was all a fraud because the vehicle coming out of the tube didnt exit all at one spot. I would expect some sideways mo on the thing due to the imprecision in the release moment of milli seconds
that doesnt point out anything really
someone is throwing in some money fly safe
Both Airbus and Google are listed as investors (GV) as investors in Crunchbase.
https://www.crunchbase.com/…
Given this it is very likely that IF the technology proves itself they will go to Centre Spatial Guyanais in French Guiana for the orbital system.
That big round thing in the New Mexico desert doesn’t look particularly vaporous to me. And its initial trial didn’t result in it destroying itself. As launch companies go, there are plenty with more obviously dubious prospects than Spin-Launch.
That big round thing in the desert is a stage prop. There are likely some companies more dubious, they will have to work at it though. And yes I have run numbers on several aspects of a system like this. You can start with tether limitations in vacuum.
Yes, pivoting like 3M…
I debunked SpinLaunch as a ridiculously transparent scam two and a half years ago, but I couldn’t convince tech-ignorant investors to bail out: https://science-technology-…. Two days ago SpinLaunch launched a “brick;” no rocket that could continue with engines could have its delicate innards survive the huge centrifugal forces acting laterally. There are many other problems that are obvious to anyone who knows a little physics. NB: I have PhD in chemistry from Caltech, mostly doing chemical physics.
This is so right. SpinLaunch is a scam.
Clarke’s first law – “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
Time will tell if this technology will work, but the great thing about a market based economy is that they get to try to make it work.
Yes, I’m elderlly and distinguished (rated in the top 2% of scientists worldwide), but my claim based a few billion demonstrations of centrifugal force are not going to be falsified by one person untrained in physics who thinks market forces will make his launched vehicle fly. As one T-shirt with an image of a rocket puts it about science, “You can’t pray this s**t up there.” Neither can you market-force it up there. It’s a scam. Just follow the money. In brief, I beg to disagree.
Time will tell, but at least in America entrepreneurs are allowed to try out their crazy ideas to see if the experts are right, or wrong.
I wish Spinlaunch well.
BTW have you ever read the article from 1903 that Simon Newcomb published demonstrating with math why heavier than air flight was impossible?
Sorry, that’s cherry-picking. One scientist’s view, while the basic physics errors in SpinLaunch go against the intensively tested work of hundreds of thousands of physicists and engineers. Don’t ask SpinLaunch – or, say, your favorite fast food chef – to design a car, a plane, or a spacecraft to which you entrust your life
Now, could this double as a reaction wheel/gyro on nickel iron slug asteroids?
Creating SpinLaunch by Maximus Yaney.This article was written by Maximus Yaney, brother of SpinLaunch CEO Jonathan Yaney. By the way Maximus Yaney was convicted of mortgage fraud in 2015. The Federal court sentenced Yaney to 18 months in federal prison, to be followed by two years of supervised release.
https://medium.com/@maximus…
Most will. This is a boutique system, and my not come out cheaper in the end. That upper stage won’t be easy.
Yes, it won’t. But the technology they are developing concurrent with it to enable electronics and other systems to take high G stress both in the rocket and in the satellites they propose to build may have applications well beyond it. I suspect the military is a very interested observer of their work.
Yes it’s pertinent as the failure to successfully pivot is a major cause of the failure of space startups. XCOR is a very good example. They had numerous opportunities to pivot their business model into near turn markets but ignored them because they were too focused on the Lynx. The result is that they were mismanaged into bankruptcy and lost all of their investors funding.
As I said in the past:
They tested approx. at 1000 km/h, but they need approx. 7000 km/h or more. This is 50 times more energetic. They are far from their goals.”
I would like to know the condition of the rotating part after atmosphere hit it on release. Even Mach 1 can get interesting at sea level if the aerodynamics are off at all. And hypersonic in the purported final unit…
Regulatory capture is definitely a problem.
Yes, it almost destroyed the railroad industry until the ICC was done away with. It’s legacy is still seen in both the “great divide” between eastern and western railroads and in Amtrak. It did destroy completely the American merchant marine and commercial ship building.
Yes, the American economy has indeed changed a lot in the last century and even more in the last 400 years, something I teach in my graduate course on the American Entrepreneurial Tradition. But the essential core of an entrepreneur being free to try out a new idea, crazy or not, hasn’t changed which is why it is the most flexible and adaptable in the world. The way it is very rapidly adapting to following Covid-19 Shock is a great example, generating a boom in new business models, some of which will endure and some which won’t. But that is how a market economy works.
Again, time will tell if you are right or investors like Airbus are right about Spinlaunch. But there are numerous examples, which is what led to Arthur C. Clarke to create Clarke’s First Law in “Profiles of the Future”. He spends an entire chapter on analyzing all of the examples that provide the foundation to it.
But again, the great thing about a market economy is that the real world, and not a handful experts view of the real world, decides the outcome.
Of which I wasn’t one, pointing out the market they focused on could be served by just adding their rocket engine to an existing supersonic aircraft. It was poorly run as a business enterprise.
But then I also argued the Ansari X-Prize would be a failure in stimulating the industry, which is was. As Paul Allen noted in his autobiography SpaceshipOne would have flown sooner without it while the rest of the entrants were just jokes.
So you are reading what is in his mind? And you honestly think that Airbus and Google were taken in by him? That their engineers are not as knowledgeable as you are?
I do agree with you on the small sat launchers, secondary payloads on Falcon 9 and Starship launches will limit the market they are fighting for. But then as with other booms it will produce some interesting technology the next wave of entrepreneurs might make use of.
Time will tell if their test rig is useless or creates a new technology.
The company only cares about the investors.
Maybe it is because of how today scientists are so busy talking down to non-scientists, one of the consequences of government funded science research cutting scientists off from the general public.
The other reason is that folks are probably suffering from “doomsday fatigue” from scientists always talking about how society is doomed, starting with their infamous doomsday clock. Folks want to hear about solutions, not more doomsday rhetoric, which is why folks like Elon Musk are seen as heroes.
The virus Oppenheimers scare me more than nukes.
If they think something is not going to work they have a responsibility to go on record with it, like the engineers for Challenger, instead of staying silent and just whispering about it.
The reality is that one engineer’s show stopper is another engineer’s challenge. That is how breakthroughs are accomplished.
It should have.
There needs to be balance in between marketing, finance, engineering and production. Each of the fields are critical and cannot be ignored. When any one or two become totally dominant, the company will stagnate. Or the best engineers in the world will make little progress without the funds from finance and the ongoing revenue from marketing. As you point out, the reverse is also true that an honest company cannot proceed without a product.
Of course there are apparent exceptions that last for surprisingly long times by fooling the public. Certain churches come to mind.
I agree, engineers need to learn more about economics and finance/marketers need to learn some basic engineering.
Elon Musk’s strength is that he has dual degrees in Economics and Physics.
The problems starts with the High Schools who no longer require kids to take shop class, or show kids how to work on automobile engines. Kids also spent more time building models, flying model planes or building model railroads, all of which teach some basic appreciation of how technology works.
For example I had to demonstrate that I knew how to change a tire, check and change the oil in a engine, replace a battery and a fan belt before I was taught to drive. Today kids are just allowed to drive without understanding how an automobile works and it shows in their lack of tech skills beyond “apps”.
If anyone wants to understand why centrifuge like accelerators have limitations please visit our website at http://www.tstsystems.net and select Grendehl located at the top right hand corner. Once on this page look for “Documentation” and click just below it. We have placed this proof there because we are regularly asked about centrifuge accelerators because many people confuse these accelerators with our gyration accelerator. Note also that we cannot do any better than estimate how high a spin-launch accelerator can go until we have information on the materials used and sizes. We expect it will be well below the their maximum goal of 2.23km/s. Note also that high g accelerators are not meant to accelerate people or delicate equipment into space only dumb materials for construction of facilities there. Further note that the typical cannon will produce 50,000 g with a “smart” projectile and some special cannons have launched payloads up to 100,000g again with smart payloads. A cannon constitutes a linear accelerator while GRENDEHL is a lateral accelerator which means the pressure generated during the acceleration is spread over a larger area than the base area of a cannon shell. so we expect smart payloads might survive > 100,000g but there is no empirical evidence since there are no accelerators out there than can exceed 100,000g. The prototype Grendehl (slingatron) launched a 0.25kg projectile to 0.8km/s and survived the 130g acceleration with no damage visible,
of the limitations
Note all three of the owners of tstsystems have PhDs in physics and close to 120 years of experience in academia, industry, and government physics research.and a number of well scientists such as Freeman Dyson called the Slingatron a brilliant idea (we renamed the accelerator because to many people think it is a classical sling shot like the
centrifuge accelerator which it clearly isn’t!
By the time the spin launch gets up to speed the human’s inside would be more like soup than people. If it can reduce time to target it might make for a great missile defense system in a smaller form factor.
I don’t think that they were ever proposing putting humans in their craft…
Hi. In view of SL launching a projectile at 1/3 speed, I did a more detailed analysis of the physics, the logistics, and some of the economics, sharing it with friends here. I’ll post it shortly at science-technology-society….. Cheers.
Trying again: please see science-technology-society…. for an analysis of the physics, logistics, and a bit of economics, using the newly released info from SpinLaunch at their mock-up site at Spaceport USA in NM. Cheers.
It seems to be a money laundering entertainment scheme. There is no data available for their flights and its just an LDR backyard project. They say the “BIG” companies are behind them but thats after those “Big” companies were wiped out and then medical claimed the Pandemic killed them. Melbourne Australia is behind a lot of the collapse and take overs and murders and cover up. Indian communications, Medical. Maltese Catholic Government core exploiting and luring people. they used people that trusted them and they gut them and take their assets. “Blood of the lamb” Its right there for people to see, they admit it. People are so ignorant and gullible. THATS why they isolate and divide you so they deal with you individually you are no resistance to them. THEY WILL NOT ALLOW groups to form to review this. THIS IS A FACT.