I think creating cannons along the designs of Gerald Bull would be more promising. Just huck cube sats into orbit. Obviously you'd probably want a cube sat with no moving parts or something that could withstand what I'd assume to be like 10K G's.
Instead, you have to fire a rocket motor to alter the initial orbit into one that doesn't intersect the ground. Now you have a new problem: you have to design a rocket motor which can withstand the launch. A solid rocket almost certainly will spontaneously RUD when heavy acceleration is applied. A liquid rocket has pumps and pipes which are likely can't survive the acceleration.
This is the reason spin launch is nonsense: you've traded a solved problem (make big rocket motor) for an unsolvable problem: make a rocket motor which can withstand absurd acceleration.
The other red flag with spin launch is that genuinely new approaches to problems do not come from unqualified randos thinking about a problem. For example, if a company has a crazy new idea for blood testing, it's really bad if the crazy new idea came from someone with zero experience and zero domain knowledge.
Seems like there is already a mechanism, sans moving parts, of generating force post-launch. Not saying it is sufficient to correct a ground-launched, ballistic projectile though.
> A solid rocket almost certainly will spontaneously RUD when heavy acceleration is applied
I am skeptical that there is no chemical propellant capable of resisting the initial acceleration. That seems like a bold claim.
What about gas-based thrusters(i.e. ion drive with xenon or even just nitrogen gas)?
My comment about solid rockets is due to the fact that they include fully combustable fuel in a ready-to-use mix. Solid rockets don't require much input to get them to combust. I assume no one is considering solid rockets for this application; I only mention it as part of assuming they would need a liquid rocket so I could explain the problem with liquid rockets which rely on pumps and pipes.
RUD = Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly
Seems to be popularised by Elon Musk [1] but I managed to find a page which links to evidence [2] going back as far as the 70s.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/16/elon-musk... [2] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10022/who-coined-t...
Let's put this another way: every orbit is an ellipse. If you do not alter your orbit, you will only travel on the ellipse. The moment you stop interacting with the atmosphere, you are on a fixed ellipse. The problem is just behind you on the ellipse is the atmosphere, and if you continue forward on the ellipse you will inevitably come back to the part of the ellipse that is still in the atmosphere.
But it's not a point that you suddenly stop interacting with the atmosphere, it's a gradient, with asymmetric forces on the forwards and down directions from gravity/air resistance that are smeared over time, a bit like a non-instantaneous burn around the fast end of the ellipse; I'm not sure how well the "free motion in a vacuum" intuition holds in this case; but especially when your delta-v from the atmosphere is smeared nonlinearly over your ascent period.
Yes, you end up at the same height or lower the next time round, and will incur drag from that, but shrug, that's just regular orbital dynamics.
In 5:55 minute mark, video is describing force applied on the payload will reach from 1G to 10000G, but how long does this take? 10 minutes? 30 minutes? An hour? Can you have a payload which will be able to withstand 1000G+ for minutes?
Contrary to big cannons, like [0] there would be forces of 10000G only for few milliseconds as shells are accelerating only during the time of being in the barrel.
They conclude by placing a digital camera in their lab mockup and taking it to 10,000g.
This probably would not have worked for a phone, but they seem quite confident.
Most satellites are unique, so the same can't be done. Besides being weight critical, every failed satellite becomes space junk.
With regard to weight, they say this system works best with very dense payloads. But that's only for the spin/toss stage; it doesn't account for the rocket booster needed to actually bring the satellites into orbit.
As for testing, engineers don't need as much empirical testing anymore, since we have very good computer simulations now. Most of the satellites launched with this would probably be variations on a handful of designs. But I don't understand where the demand for such a launch system comes from anyway. There is only so much demand for school project cube sats; communication satellites launched this way seem dubious (not least because you can launch dozens/hundreds of them at once with a rocket like Falcon 9 or Starship)
Pressure and ballast balls.
This technology seems to be suited for launching moderate numbers of small satellites. It's not a huge win on launch cost over filling up a Falcon 9 with racks of small satellites.
This competes with the Pegasus air-launch system, where a rocket is carried to high altitude by an aircraft. That works fine, and launches have been going on since the 1990s. But it's not a huge financial win.
It's good to have a few competing technologies. Keeps the price down.
I don’t know whether it makes a difference in survivability, but it seems to me that it would, at least somewhat, for some materials.
But then, what do I know? Impact resistance typically is reported in gs, but that might be a simplification because, typically, the higher order time derivatives of position correlate well with acceleration.
A sane solution will be something that's closer to a large water mains pipe supported by a roller coaster frame.