Juan Alonso, an aerospace engineer at Stanford who did due diligence for one of SpinLaunch’s investors, understood my reservations. Still, the scant public evidence that any of it works leaves much to the imagination. And last year, the US Department of Defense awarded SpinLaunch a contract to help develop its centrifuge. Major investors-including Airbus Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and GV (part of Alphabet)-have given their blessing too, pumping $80 million into the company. Instead, he insisted the math of SpinLaunch engineers was solid. When I visited the company, the prototype centrifuge was still in pieces and Yaney wouldn’t show me any videos of it in action. Whereas a regular orbital-class rocket is engineered to squeeze every last drop of efficiency from its engines to maximize its payload capacity while breaking the chains of gravity, most of the hard work for SpinLaunch’s rocket is done by the centrifuge.Įngineers cluster around SpinLaunch's first orbital rocket a centrifuge is visible in the background. Even better, the rocket’s engine doesn’t have to be that good. In aerospace circles, this is known as the “tyranny of the rocket equation.”īut, as Yaney realized, if you can spirit a rocket to the edge of space without having to carry all the fuel to get there, the rocket can be stocky and more of its mass can be dedicated to the payload. That’s why companies like SpaceX need a rocket as big as a building to carry a satellite the size of a car. In general, only a tiny part of a rocket’s mass can be its payload most of the rest is its fuel. This, he proudly said, was “the worst rocket ever made.”Ībout 25 feet long and solid black with a shiny silver tip, the rocket’s briolette shape looks bulky compared to the lithe, arrowlike forms of a typical rocket. In the center of SpinLaunch's cavernous warehouse, Yaney approached an object and pulled back its protective tarp. To withstand the enormous strain it will experience, the tether will have to be made of ultrastrong materials like Kevlar and carbon fiber. The payload attaches to the end of the tether. A long arm, called a tether, stretches out from an oil-slicked bearing powered by a motor. At 40 feet in diameter, it’s still too small to hoist a rocket into space, but the fundamental design is the same. In 2016 they completed their first centrifuge. “I think we all began to realize that there are so many things in science and engineering that have to be uncovered, simply because people don't try them,” Yaney says. Yaney ordered a few vacuum pumps off of eBay and $500,000 worth of steel, and the team set out to build the sixth-largest vacuum chamber, by diameter, in the world. As an underwater welder, Hampton had become an expert at crafting airtight seals, which translated well to his new task. So the SpinLaunch team decided to build it themselves. When they approached contractors to build the chamber, they got one bid-with a price of $20 million. The centrifuge they were building had to sit in a massive vacuum chamber to protect the system from air turbulence and stabilize it as it spun. The team quickly ran into engineering challenges. “You had to have a lot of vision or nothing to lose, one or the other.” When they weren’t working, the SpinLaunch crew lifted weights together in a makeshift gym, watched movies in a “home theater,” or relaxed around a fire pit-the converted remnants of Yaney’s original tabletop centrifuge. “At that point the kitchen was like a microwave and a plastic table,” he says. When Wrenn arrived, the living spaces were spare. Employees lived and worked at an old microprocessor plant SpinLaunch had taken over just down the road from the Googleplex. Hampton says the early days of SpinLaunch reminded him a lot of life on an oil rig. Subscribe to WIRED and stay smart with more of your favorite writers.
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