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Comment by mojomark | Hacker News Reader

Why do you have to launch by rocket? Why not something like spinlaunch(1), perhaps powered in situ by stored renewable energy?

1. https://www.spinlaunch.com/

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Spinlaunch is a joke. No payload is built to withstand those kinds of forces during a launch and the added weight to reinforce them to do so makes it uneconomical.

They are even offering to pay companies the extra cost to reinforce their payloads to try and get customers and they still can't get anyone to do it.

> They are even offering to pay companies the extra cost to reinforce their payloads to try and get customers and they still can't get anyone to do it.

It certainly can't help that Spinlaunch can't put anything into space.

I was gonna say. Wut? They have a demo that probably fooled all the investors lol.

Well, spinlaunch doesn't exist yet. It also imparts _much_ higher accelerations on its payloads than a rocket does, and a rocket is already appreciable.

Spinlaunch would destroy these satellites, and still requires some amount of rocket to get to orbit.

sadly spinlaunch is bogus and the whole concept doesn't really work out. [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/9ziGI0i9VbE (Spinlaunch: BUSTED! by Thunderf00t)

Thunderf00t isn't science, it's a youtube channel who wants to get views.

He also busted Starlink because apparently technology costs never reduce, and single geostationary satellites have infinite bandwidth

YouTube channels are bogus, but he's not wrong. It's wildly unlikely. Any actual project would require not just a payload that can handle insane stresses, but also rockets for orbital insertion. Rockets that can handle those kinds of ludicrous launch stresses are hard to conceive.

I can't prove that it's impossible, but the gap between the requirements and even the most extreme conception of what's feasible is so immense as to basically dismiss out of hand. They're welcome to keep trying, but it absolutely will not happen soon and is not worth the level of attention it receives.

That video actually explicitly says that the concept _can_ work, he's just skeptical that the current company is likely to achieve it. I wasn't particularly impressed. Yeah, maybe spinlauch the entity _won't_ achieve it. Most people who try to do very hard things fail. But the only way we advance is because sometimes they don't.

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