Rockets are cool, but they’re also being fired into space by Elon Musk, who is cringe. You know what is cool, though? A giant cannon that shoots stuff into space. It might be cheaper, easier, and more efficient, too. That’s the pitch of Longshot Space, an Oakland-based company that’s constructing an enormous gun with the goal of shooting things into space. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is an investor.
On the surface, Longshot Space’s pitch is as simple as it sounds. “If you have an opportunity to do something that is grand and beautiful, you should. That’s part of what gets me out of bed in the morning. The other part is that what I get to work on on a day-to-day basis goes boom and is loud and is fun,” Longshot Space CEO Mike Grace said in a video on the company’s YouTube page.
The world has sent an incredible number of satellites into space over the last few years. Low Earth orbit is riddled with stuff. Getting that stuff into space requires rockets, and rockets are expensive. Musk and Jeff Bezos have spent billions of dollars getting into space. Musk bought whole areas of Texas, destroyed the city of Boca Chica, and spent tens of millions of dollars on every rocket launch. Musk’s big space innovation was designing rockets to be reused.
Grace thinks you can skip the costly rockets altogether, and he’s building a team of like-minded people who will help him achieve the dream of firing stuff into space with a big gun. “We’re building a giant space cannon to help colonize the solar system,” Nathan Saichek, CEO of Longshot Space told the YouTube channel Story Co. “Just a million times easier to build a big ass cannon than a fancy rocket. That’s sort of the thesis of the company: we can launch cheap by making one really big infrastructure investment. Everything else after that is really easy.”
So how will they do it, and how far have they come? Longshot’s plan is to use pressurized gas to push objects in stages down a long gun with the goal of those objects achieving Mach 25. As the object goes down the gun, holes in its barrel inject more gas and increase the speed. Getting satellites into space will require a gun that’s miles long.
Earlier tests on small versions of the concept have been successful. According to a report from SFGate, Longshot has launched apple-sized objects at speeds up to Mach 4.6. That’s well short of the final goal, but it’s a decent proof of concept, and it makes a loud sonic boom.
To build bigger guns, Longshot needs a bigger space.
It’s currently in the deserts of Nevada, laying the groundwork for the next stage of its project. The new gun will have a 30-inch diameter and run 1,800 feet. The hope is that a gun this long can get an object weighing 220 pounds up to Mach 5. The final version of the Longshot will probably need to run more than six miles in length to get stuff into space.
Longshot Space is just one of the companies that’s hoping to bypass the issue of high-cost rockets. The other popular idea is to build a space elevator. For this to work, a company would build a loading platform in orbit and then run some kind of connecting elevator down to the planet. It would have a high startup cost, but once constructed, a space elevator would theoretically save a lot of time, money, and energy for anyone trying to put stuff into space.
But for Grace and Longshot, giant sonic-boom-inducing guns are the only way to go.
