Space Launch Start-Up Just Used A Giant Centrifuge ToFling A Projectile Into The Upper Atmosphere
SpinLaunch plans to use its kinetic launch system to put small satellites into orbit rapidly and cheaply, andthe Pentagon is interested.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43079/space-launch-start-up-just-used-a-giant-centrifuge-to-hurl-a-projectile-into-the-upper-atmosphere
The article goes on to note the military's interest in alternative means of launching small satellites into orbit, and obviously, this method is completely impractical for launching a manned capsule; the G's alone of spinning up a projectile to literally throw it into space would kill a human long before it reached a sufficient velocity to be thrown into space.
And that's my problem here, because the word "projectile" isn't mine, it's the article's.
In short, we're looking at …well…artillery,though of a very unconventional sort. Unconventional artillery has been around for a long long time. The first electro-magnetic "rail guns" were actually conceived (and experimented with) prior to World War One. But this system intrigues: it's not a"rod of God"system except in its use of sheer kinetic energy. It's more like a"baseball of God"technology. It's that artillery aspect that disturbs here, because with a little adjustment of the release chamber - shown pointing straight up in the pictures in the article - one could launch the "projectile" on a standard ballistic trajectory or alternatively, with the right electronic packages inside of it, guide it to a remote target and destroy it through sheer kinetic energy. Indeed, I can't help but think that perhaps we're looking at one of the technologies that was behind the announcement of the US Army a couple of years ago that it is designinga super-long range "cannon".This would certainly fit the bill if the technology can be made to work reliably. Perhaps the technology could even be miniaturized and put into orbit as an anti-satellite kinetic weapon or - here it comes - an anti-asteroid weapon, either ground-based or space based.
https://gizadeathstar.com/2021/11/forget-rods-of-god-heres-the-wind-up-and-the-pitch/