Now, what the hell is Saturn going to do with 145 moons? Couldn’t it donate just a few of them to charity?
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Are you kidding? Do you have any idea how many pies you can get out of that much moon?
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Astronaut training of the future!
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Even better:
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I’m reminded of a lot of Wile E. Coyote never-quite-works contraptions right about now.
Plus, really, “into the air”.
(But if this is actually feasible, more power to them. Even serving only a subset of payloads, at 4x fuel reduction, 10x cost reduction, and multiple launches per day, it’s the kind of thing the other launch people might not want to succeed.)
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Reminds me of the Lou Ferigno Hercules where he throws a rock into space. MST3K should riff that one, my buddies and I had a great time with it.
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Cool. That “first optical payload” is not for the easily nauseated!
SpinLaunch is an okay name, but I’ve have called it Yeeting Into the Sun. Or the Yeeter.
Well into this air IS “toward” space…
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There are already GPS guided shells for howitzers where the electronics package has to survive ~10,000g momentary acceleration, so I think the biggest obstacles are the release timing and maintaining the vacuum in the centrifuge chamber until release.
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Let’s not forget the Hubble is still out there and still amazing too.
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This is pretty cool.
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“The signal, an encoded message developed by artist Daniela de Paulis and her colleagues, will then be made available to the public, who are invited to try to make sense of the message.”
I’m going to be VERY disappointed in Daniela de Paulis if this isn’t a Rickroll.
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You know what comes next?
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Or indeed the Ouster Treeships from the Hyperion novels (1989), kilometer-long living trees made spaceworthy with force shields.
And more fantastical, the Rocketship Forest of the epic Saga graphic novels (2012+), sentient trees capable of air flight and interstellar space flight, and even carrying air-breathing passengers.
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Or this episode of Dr. Snuggles.
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I’ll see those, and raise you Larry Niven’s stage trees.
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Watch the video at the bottom at 50 seconds in. You can actually see the stars revolve around the black hole. It’s awesome.
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