Author Topic: SpinLaunch: General Company and Development Updates and Discussions  (Read 142930 times)

Offline ringsider

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You would have to assume to attract those investors that the concept is simple and easily proven, and doesn't need the entire satellite customer base to change they way they work to handle extreme loads.

I don't think that assumption is at all warranted.

Sure they are.

$40m is a massive A raise. An average A series is ~1/10th of that amount. Investors like Airbus, KPCB and Alphabet will go way deeper than basic physics, especially when the raise is so large and the valuation must by implication be sky high.

http://www.nea.com/blog/what-size-series-a-round-can-you-expect-to-raise

Offline QuantumG

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In a way, the rest of the launch market is going the other way: less need for special testing and hardened payloads.
Human spaceflight is basically just LARPing now.

Offline meekGee

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You would have to assume to attract those investors that the concept is simple and easily proven, and doesn't need the entire satellite customer base to change they way they work to handle extreme loads.

I don't think that assumption is at all warranted.
they are.

$40m is a massive A raise. An average A series is ~1/10th of that amount. Investors like Airbus, KPCB and Alphabet will go way deeper than basic physics, especially when the raise is so large and the valuation must by implication be sky high.

http://www.nea.com/blog/what-size-series-a-round-can-you-expect-to-raise

You'd think that, but in reality history shows huge investment rounds that were made into concepts that were not even physically viable, not to mention market-smart.  (Some LTA balloon turbines come to mind, some solar ideas, etc)

~$50M for round A is not unheard of by any means.  It's a matter of how much trust the investors have in the exec team, and also of how much money is burning holes in their pockets at the time the deal goes down.
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Offline rklaehn

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Build something like this on a body with lower gravity and no atmosphere like the moon or a large asteroid and it suddenly makes sense.

Could it be that they are targeting extraterrestrial launch but don't advertise it? On earth I really don't see any advantage...

Offline The Roadie

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Look at the nominal numbers. 100 meter chamber. 2000 kg launch vehicle. 3000m/s target launch velocity.

TANGENTIAL ACCELERATION at 535 RPM: 16,000 G's!

3.14X10^8 Newtons. (Around 70,000,000 pounds or 35,000 tons)

A battleship weighs around 60,000 tons.

To have any safety margin, their tether has to be able to lift a battleship.

Not to mention what to do with the insane energy to deal with in their released counterweight!

And they're looking for gullible investors who can't do the simplest back of the envelope math?
"A human being should be able to...plan an invasion..conn a ship..solve equations, analyze a new problem..program a computer, cook a tasty meal.."-RAH

Offline john smith 19

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Their patent.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2018/0194496.html
That patent could literally have been written any time within the last 20 years.

I guess the big "innovations" are

1) It's a chamber, not a tube or tunnel.
2) The roof is concave and the edge puts it under compression
3) The tether does not have to be rigid
4) The tether is simplified by not having any connections inside it. Once spin up starts all connections are by wireless.
5) The payload is put inside an aerodynamic faring, which may have a rocket on the back to increase final thrust.
6) The tether is tapered to reduce stresses.

The attraction of a chamber is you can put a set of ports on it to allow different inclinations. Easy for rockets to do, very hard for this sort of concept.

The obvious question would be "Is there anything in this that would not be fairly obvious to someone who'd spent maybe 5 minutes thinking about the problem?"

About the only thing I can think of was the concave roof concept.

The issues with this concept remain exactly what they were several decades ago.

1) The payload has to be hardened just like a gun launched payload, no matter how slow it's spun up.
2) Unlike conventional centrifuges (like the type for g testing pilots) this is designed to deliberately become unbalanced at maximum revs when the payload separates. That means you need to synchronize separation of any counter weight, which then hit the opposite wall. That suggests some kind of bag holding either a dense liquid, solid like water or Tungsten pellets. The nearest equivalent would the dissipating the massive KE of one of those energy storage flywheel systems by making the wheel out of a single tightly coiled flat tape that  unwinds
3) Balance is critical. The hub has to be perfectly vertical to prevent lop sided loads on it. That means after chamber exit you have to deflect the vehicle onto a climbing angle.
4) To keep the payload fraction high you want most of the acceleration done in the chamber. So at exit from the pipe(s) connected to the chamber it will hitting a substantial fraction of orbital velocity at ground level.
that means a lot of TPS.

TL:DR. It's a hell of a lot of work for not much result.  :(
MCT ITS BFR SS. The worlds first Methane fueled FFSC engined CFRP SS structure A380 sized aerospaceplane tail sitter capable of Earth & Mars atmospheric flight.First flight to Mars by end of 2022 TBC. T&C apply. Trust nothing. Run your own #s "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" R. Simberg."Competitve" means cheaper ¬cheap SCramjet proposed 1956. First +ve thrust 2004. US R&D spend to date > $10Bn. #deployed designs. Zero.

Offline john smith 19

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That's why my original version of the post had a "lol" at the end. Hard to believe its worth at least 4x the 35 mil they put into it for the last round, right?
Hell, yes. Staggered in fact.
Quote from: Mardlamock
There seems to be nothing that any of us couldn't have come up with within a week of looking at the concept. All those hard engineering challenges to be solved, for maybe a 10x reduction in g/p?? And that's before including the potential mass fraction and isp penalties of dealing w such huge acceleration.

Maybe they've merged their brains w the gods of FEA, CFD, MDO, and have properly manufactured and tested so many subscale components that building such a thing doesn't seem as unreasonable to them as a first pass analysis would seem to indicate, but if so, we should get these guys to build some other cool stuff first...
Hmmm. Well, in an infinite universe anything is possible.  :)

But even then you still have the issue of hardening the payloads.
Now if they have some kind of "gravity nullification" technology that makes designing a payload for this as "easy" (relatively)  as designing for a secondary payload on a big LV, or one of the 30+ small sat LV proposals....

I'm guessing if they did they would have been considerably louder about announcing it.
Quote from: Mardlamock
It seems as though the ever increasing and alarming tendency to sell a paper airplane as a jumbo jet, wave economics off to "first principles", wave off engineering to computer sims, and to have a complete disregard for the history and true underlying problems of the industry just works like magic on big time VCs, but we'll see if magic works on reality...
Those guys must be doing some due diligence I guess?
Unless they are so cash rich that they can literally say "OK, I don't really understand what you're talking about but here's $10m and if it works hand us a 500% profit and we'll call it quits"
Quote from: Mardlamock
I for one welcome our new catapult overlords, and would love to launch 10000 tonnes of tungsten satellites per year.

Anyone care to join on the kickstarter?
Indeed.

As you've noted it's not the infrastructure, or the vehicle, that's the issue. It's the payloads

And as Feyman pointed out (and people tend to forget at their peril) "Against the laws of physics there are no appeals."

A well funded bad plan is still a bad plan.

BTW when I looked at that Smallsat review paper on the other thread it said they are looking to do ground launch to 4800Km/h, that's about M3.9 (assuming M1 at 340m/s)

That leaves about M22 left for the on board rocket to deliver, plus the circularizing burn at that top.

Shades of Dr Gerald Bull, the "Last of the Long Range Gunmen"  :(
MCT ITS BFR SS. The worlds first Methane fueled FFSC engined CFRP SS structure A380 sized aerospaceplane tail sitter capable of Earth & Mars atmospheric flight.First flight to Mars by end of 2022 TBC. T&C apply. Trust nothing. Run your own #s "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" R. Simberg."Competitve" means cheaper ¬cheap SCramjet proposed 1956. First +ve thrust 2004. US R&D spend to date > $10Bn. #deployed designs. Zero.

Offline TripleSeven

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Shades of Dr Gerald Bull, the "Last of the Long Range Gunmen"

now there is a blast from the past :)

Offline HMXHMX

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Their patent.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2018/0194496.html

Not to be overly pedantic, but it is only their application.  Given the obviousness and prior art, I'd personally say they are unlikely to get all – or perhaps any – of their claims granted.  See for example DOI: 10.1109/TMAG.1982.1061770 in IEEE Transactions from January 1982.

Offline JH

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, but it is only their application.  Given the obviousness and prior art, I'd personally say they are unlikely to get all – or perhaps any – of their claims granted.  See for example DOI: 10.1109/TMAG.1982.1061770 in IEEE Transactions from January 1982.

I wouldn't.

U.S. patent examiners are greatly restricted in their ability to deny patent applications in certain circumstances, the most relevant to the present situation being when claims in the application give previously unstated specifics that the examiner cannot be certain do not materially impact the effectiveness of the proposed invention. By specifying a three-segment, tapered tether, by specifying a synchronized release, by specifying a puncturable membrane/high-speed shutter, by giving a maximum chamber pressure, by specifying a an inverted, dome-shaped roof, where panels are kept under tension, by specifying a range of accelerations, by specifying a liquid-based counterweight, they make it more difficult for the examiner to reject their claims.

This is to say nothing of the ever increasing pressure for examiners to process applications more quickly.

Offline HMXHMX

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, but it is only their application.  Given the obviousness and prior art, I'd personally say they are unlikely to get all – or perhaps any – of their claims granted.  See for example DOI: 10.1109/TMAG.1982.1061770 in IEEE Transactions from January 1982.

I wouldn't.

U.S. patent examiners are greatly restricted in their ability to deny patent applications in certain circumstances, the most relevant to the present situation being when claims in the application give previously unstated specifics that the examiner cannot be certain do not materially impact the effectiveness of the proposed invention. By specifying a three-segment, tapered tether, by specifying a synchronized release, by specifying a puncturable membrane/high-speed shutter, by giving a maximum chamber pressure, by specifying a an inverted, dome-shaped roof, where panels are kept under tension, by specifying a range of accelerations, by specifying a liquid-based counterweight, they make it more difficult for the examiner to reject their claims.

This is to say nothing of the ever increasing pressure for examiners to process applications more quickly.

We can argue about the claims ad nauseam, and it is true that sometimes you can seemingly patent the wheel, or fire, but each of the items you mention (excepting perhaps the liquid counterweight) certainly have an extensive prior art history.  (For example, light gas guns use a puncturable membrane.  Every sling launcher tapers the arm, etc.) 

I am amused by the notion of examiners moving quickly though.  I've current company patents (biotech, not aerospace) that are four years into the process with no end in sight.  :)

Offline JH

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Not to draw out the discussion, but I'll point you towards US08144473.

Also, being under pressure to do something more quickly than you'd prefer is not the same as finishing it in a short period of time.

Offline matthewkantar

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This concept seems loony to me, but still, since hearing about it I have been trying to imagine the noise this thing would make when its vehicle transitions from vacuum to ambient.  Splat boom bang.

Matthew

Offline HMXHMX

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This concept seems loony to me, but still, since hearing about it I have been trying to imagine the noise this thing would make when its vehicle transitions from vacuum to ambient.  Splat boom bang.

Matthew

To provide some quantitation, see below.  "Big bada boom!"
« Last Edit: 08/13/2018 04:21 pm by HMXHMX »

Offline jongoff

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I'm glad the patent is now public so I have to stop biting my tongue on the details...

Build something like this on a body with lower gravity and no atmosphere like the moon or a large asteroid and it suddenly makes sense.

Could it be that they are targeting extraterrestrial launch but don't advertise it? On earth I really don't see any advantage...

I think they're really going after earth launch, but agree that this is way cooler for use on say the Moon (where 2.8km/s happens to be the dV you need to lob something to one of the Lagrange points).

~Jon

Offline jongoff

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This concept seems loony to me, but still, since hearing about it I have been trying to imagine the noise this thing would make when its vehicle transitions from vacuum to ambient.  Splat boom bang.

Matthew

To provide some quantitation, see below.  "Big bada boom!"

But how does this compare with a rocket of similar payload capacity? IIRC, most rockets are up in the 150+ dB range at the pad--though I don't know how fast that drops off with distance. Also, this shows dB along the ground track, but since that would be out over the ocean, I wonder what it would look like in 2D off ground track.

Not saying it isn't a problem, just trying to provide some context. Rockets of all sorts tend to be loud too.

~Jon

Offline ringsider

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« Last Edit: 08/13/2018 09:39 pm by ringsider »

Offline Mardlamock

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This concept seems loony to me, but still, since hearing about it I have been trying to imagine the noise this thing would make when its vehicle transitions from vacuum to ambient.  Splat boom bang.

Matthew

To provide some quantitation, see below.  "Big bada boom!"

But how does this compare with a rocket of similar payload capacity? IIRC, most rockets are up in the 150+ dB range at the pad--though I don't know how fast that drops off with distance. Also, this shows dB along the ground track, but since that would be out over the ocean, I wonder what it would look like in 2D off ground track.

Not saying it isn't a problem, just trying to provide some context. Rockets of all sorts tend to be loud too.

~Jon

IIRC, the shuttle generated around 90 decibels at 9000 meters from the launchpad. Meaning you'd have to be nearly 6 times further away for the same noise during a Spinlaunch release.

Dont worry tho, they only want to launch 3 times a day in the beginning...

We have to agree tho, that the sound of such a massively powerful thing would probably be an absolutely awesome thing to experience and behold. If its under 200 mil total cost, they should do it just for sh*ts and giggles.
« Last Edit: 08/13/2018 10:03 pm by Mardlamock »
"And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder"

Offline HMXHMX

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This concept seems loony to me, but still, since hearing about it I have been trying to imagine the noise this thing would make when its vehicle transitions from vacuum to ambient.  Splat boom bang.

Matthew

To provide some quantitation, see below.  "Big bada boom!"

But how does this compare with a rocket of similar payload capacity? IIRC, most rockets are up in the 150+ dB range at the pad--though I don't know how fast that drops off with distance. Also, this shows dB along the ground track, but since that would be out over the ocean, I wonder what it would look like in 2D off ground track.

Not saying it isn't a problem, just trying to provide some context. Rockets of all sorts tend to be loud too.

~Jon

IIRC, the shuttle generated around 90 decibels at 9000 meters from the launchpad. Meaning you'd have to be nearly 6 times further away for the same noise during a Spinlaunch release.

Dont worry tho, they only want to launch 3 times a day in the beginning...

We have to agree tho, that the sound of such a massively powerful thing would probably be an absolutely awesome thing to experience and behold. If its under 200 mil total cost, they should do it just for sh*ts and giggles.

I can't find a short clip of the 16" naval rifle discharge from the movie "Under Siege", but it is worth checking out... :)

Offline matthewkantar

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I can't find a short clip of the 16" naval rifle discharge from the movie "Under Siege", but it is worth checking out... :)

While looking at the that discharge, keep in mind the projectile will weigh twice as much and be fired three times as fast.

Matthew

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