Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Can We Throw Satellites to Space? - SpinLaunch" video.

  1. I hate to bust anyone's nuts on this, but as an aerospace engineer this looks like a senior year project that's somehow managed to get funding. They have taken a novel idea and progressed it further with funding. But there is one major issue that your video totally did very good job of dismissing and that's the structure of the satellite itself and where that 10,000G loading is. And before you dismiss me I was doing Finite Element structural simulations on discarding sabot projectiles at 200,000G while an undergraduate in 1987. Also from that time. When the Challenger accident happened the biggest issue for satellite manufacturers was that all the satellites built for launch on the shuttle had to wait until the shuttle could fly again. They'd all been built for launch on a vehicle that took of at 4G of less. They couldn't just be moved over onto a Delta or other because the tended to launch at over 20G and some over 30G and the satellite structures were not up to it. Also from that time is the Pegasus air launched vehicle which has since become one of the most reliable launch systems ever (3 outright failures, 2 partial failures and 45 successful launches including the last 31). When it was being designed I remember the discussions of how they had to redesign for the horizontal launch and consider how that affected the vehicle structure and the payload structures for those loads. A capacitor and other parts on a circuit board is one thing, but the physical structure of the satellite is another thing entirely. This was actually where project HARP failed. By the time they had satellite structures strong enough to handle the launch loads there wasn't much left for payload. Is this system novel? Yes Does it have some things worth spending some money on? Probably Is it going to be a came changer? NO. Where I think this system is going to come unstuck is with that much mass swinging at those revolutions any failure is going to massive damage if not destroy the system. No matter how hard people try things fail. I have worked in safety systems and failure analysis and this screams on the what happens when things fail scenario.
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