Can Spinlaunch Throw Rockets Into Space? 

2021, the year we created the Space Trebuchet...

As young Anakin said, "I'll try spinning, that's a good trick"

Well, at least when shit goes wrong it'll be entertaining. "The capsule is clear-cutting a 200 foot wide path through southern Texas and is expected to come to rest in Baja California sometime next Thursday."

Recruiter: "Would you like to be an astronaut?" Volunteer: "Absolutely yes!" Recruiter: "Spin launch test is in a few days" Volunteer: "Did you say spin launch???"

Easy, just use it to throw a whole new smaller spinlaunch that throws another spinlaunch, and so on, into space.

Crazy idea: toss the counterweight on the revolution after the launch. Bearings *can* take half a revolution with horrible imbalance, right? Bonus points if the counterweight is a second rocket

"Yeet!" Haha thats a perfect one word description of this project 😆 I hope they can accomplish their goals.

10:03 - "There's no vacuum [on the moon]" - Scott Manley, 2021

Regarding balancing on release, they could release the counterweight simultaneously into a water capture pool.

Putting a space trebuchet on the moon and powering it with solar energy. Now, that's pretty much the ideal futuristic fuel-free yeetinator.

I like how their office building is nicely aligned with the rotation plane of this thing. I bet this provides some extra motivation not to screw up the release.

Basically this is like Hyperloop or space elevators. Simple in theory, but with giant technical problems in practice. What i've noticed, in demo videos of such projects, they create "working prototypes" that don't address any of the issues that actually make them impossible.

FINALLY -- a company that seriously *deserves* the swoopy ellipse in their logo.

engineer: sir, we have run out of fuel to launch the rocket today commander: just yeet it (edit: i know literally everyone who's comment reaches a certain point does this, so yeah

I hope Spinlaunch goes full scale. I've seen all of the "Engineering Disasters" episodes and I eagerly await a new episode.

This looks like something Kerbals would build and overengineer to Yeet.

Looking forward to the new series, Star Trek: Yeet Space Nine

8:00 If they replaced Liberty's torch with a giant catcher mitt they could also attempt full reusability.

No. Spinlaunch won't be yeeting any rockets into space. It would be super dangerous and cost ineffective. This is on par with the Hyperloop BS. Supersonic on exit, Pffft... The projectile could go a lot faster if it's back end left the same opening the nosecone made. A whole 7 seconds of footage shows you that the projectile starts tumbling soon after leaving the salad spinner.

I'm sure it could dry a load of laundry fairly quickly if all else fails.

I hope to live to see satellites being yeeted into orbit.

So like. We can't call this a "launch" we have a duty to call these "yeets" "Yeet in T minus 5, 4, 3, 2,1"

Thunderfoot hasn’t steered me wrong so far with his breakdowns on why different pieces of technology won’t work and I fear he will be right again. It would be cool if this thing worked but it seems to me like they are exaggerating how good this thing works. The hyper loop or the solar roadways or the water producing machines. They all sound great and seem possible but they all fail because we just don’t have the tech to make them work yet. At this moment stuff like this feels like a waste of money to me.

"I like rockets, but I also like the CERN supercollider." Spinlaunch: Allow us to introduce ourselves

I remember my friend and I tried to make a railgun for our high school science fair using capacitors from kodak cameras. We had it work maybe once or twice, then our rail gun turned into a mini-welder, and would just weld our little projectiles to the rails hahahaha

This sounds like something straight out of the aperture science playbook.

This creation is utterly bonkers and I love it. This is Houston, we are Go for spin!

Can't wait for the blooper reel to come out. One this is guaranteed, any launch failure is going to be SPECTACULAR!

holy crap, the engineering challenges in this are mind boggling

"Like one millisecond to hit that very narrow exit channel" If I'm not mistaken, at 450 RPM 1 millisecond is almost 4 degrees. I don't think they have that much wiggle room there.

So basically if the release goes wrong at any point you have a missile filled with explosive fuel launching at hypersonic speed directly into your only launch system which is also the world's biggest vacuum. What could possibly go wrong?

the whole time i'm thinking, do this on the moon, lower ev and no atmosphere, and then Scott finally gets to it. Seems like a good application for moving materials off of bodies with little or no atmosphere and low gravity, i.e. asteroids, moons, but possibly Mars too? atmospheric pressure is way lower and gravity is 0.4g.

Thunderf00t has done a video on this. Recommend checking it out if you haven’t yet :)

I love how since we haven't quite yet perfected large scale electromagnetic railguns we've decided to throw them with a trebuchet instead

Scott: "Do the math!" Me: Ah... no.

Scott, you *so* missed the opportunity: "I'm Scott Manley, YEET safe."

Nope, cannot be done.

I can’t wait to see one explode!

This would work wonders as a Moon to Mars launcher. No atmosphere No air resistance

I can't help but be doubtful on this project, and I really hope they don't plan to have their buildings as close to the chamber as they look in the renders! all that energy is going to cause some insane failures if it goes wrong and I wouldn't want to be within miles of it.

"Those kinds of Gs can strip the flesh from your bones" Hmm, that could be a problem for human rating this launch system >.>

Amazon would no doubt love to start testing one to launch peoples' orders with it. "It's in your ZIP code somewhere, so we show it as delivered. Start looking."

Thunderfoot already debunked this as more or less a scam.

So it's a high-tech Punkin Chunkin' centrifugal launcher on an epic scale. I heartily approve.

Reduce the amount of instantaneous rebalance needed. Use a dummy weight on the opposite end, release at same moment, down into a bore hole.

I just spent months spec'ing out a new balance machine for jet engine rotors to reduce variability during balance operations...the requirements for Spin launch make my brain hurt 😄

It seems to me that a projectile going from a vacuum to lower atmosphere at 6x the speed of sound would be like slamming into a mountainside. The compression effects would be similar to a meteor hitting the atmosphere from space.

I love how when we build contraptions to get things to space, even when you try to avoid using fuel, the energy requirements force you to make a very controlled bomb one way or the other.

To this day one of my favorite sayings is, "Orbit is halfway to anywhere."

And yet nobody talks about the fact, that creating and maintaining such a vacuum chamber is an insane issue. Especially, when the projectile has to penetrate a barrier capable of holding the atmosphere. And the projectile has to somehow stabilize after hitting a wall of atmosphere rushing in. The arm is still spinning at high speed so friction will be a problem... Remember those guys, that had a "prototype" of a water creation device, that could extract water from the air? And they claimed, its not a dehumidifier, when it still was a dehumidifier? I love, that we have so much money today, that we can use it to fund bullshit projects like this. They did not even manage to have a vacuum in their chamber during the test....

This is the most kerbal way to yeet something into space. Even after SpaceX.

I think for the small sat Leo market this will definitely make a ton of sense. Reusability is one thing but entirely removing a stage is even better!

This is the most old school/Jules Verne style sci-fi crap I've ever seen. EPIC

I'm an aerospace engineer(ex Boing, UAC) and from my knowledge of physics this looks very impossible. Hopefully I'm wrong and I wish guys all the success!

Definitively a dope engineering project 🤯 just like Scott said, this might be developed on earth but it makes a whole lot of sense to use it on the moon or mars.

Honestly this is the most gmod/kerbal-esque idea I've ever seen applied. It's probably one of the most batshit dangerous sounding things ever too, a fast spinny thing is already insanely dangerous, now we get a HUGE fast spinny thing.

Now they just need to bring a bunch of acoustic engineers to redesign the exit shaft orifice so when the in-rush of atmosphere enters the chamber through the burst bladder after firing, it makes the "YEET" noise! 😆

4:30 that white thin film is supposed to hold the atmospheric pressure? with that big area? magically desintegrating without damaging the rocket??? no way!

10:03 "There is no air to worry about, there is no vacuum" What is it then? *WHAT IS IT SCOTT??*

Spinlaunch: We are going to spin the rocket at a speed of 2km/s, and then yeet it up into space. The astronaut sitting in the rocket: Wait what?

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin: "After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest to the USA to bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline" Spinlaunch: "How about a Trebuchet?"

CG is alive and well in the 2020's. Who needs actual engineering when some pretty pictures can garner you millions in funding . . .

As a kid I dreamt up a rocket that was lifted to the stratosphere by huge hydrogen balloons which at the crucial moment would suck in the hydrogen and simultaneously burn it as rocket fuel to exit the final stretch. Unfortunately Elon Musk wasn’t about back then to finance my crayon designs.

I'd imagine that to re-balance the rotating arm at release, they could concurrently release a weight near the axis of rotation that would travel down the arm. The transfer of that weight ought to also slow the rate of spin through some conservation of angular momentum. (Where's my hand-waving Unicode emoji when I need it.)

The killer app for this is for getting consumables into orbit: water, oxidizer, fuel, etc. 10k gravities? No problem

I love you, Scott, but sometimes your enthusiasm vastly exceeds your willingness to actually look critically at these ideas.

I went by SpinLaunch here in LongBeach last year. After leaving, I had also thought, why not a railgun? I did some calculations and figured out the instantaneous G's produced on release .... 10,000G's to zero instantaneously. That's not the same as building G's from 1 to 10,000 gradually over hours. Not sure what they're planning on firing, but survival would be difficult for most payloads. Also, I didn't hear anything about the massive imbalance incurred during release and how they intend to keep it together ..... The only thing I could think of is to release the same amount of mass from the counterbalance at the instant of launch. Then, where is that mass going to go? Into a capture tunnel buried underground?

They could have called it the Yeetomatic 9000 and they went for Spinlaunch, what a waste.

For anyone having difficulty imagining what 100,000 tons of force looks like, the battleship Yamato displaced only 70,000 tons.

Mr. Manley, I really appreciate your channel, you are very knowledgeable about rocketry and space travels, I know you are not a debunking channel, but please, you should take all this things with much more than a pinch of salt, and don't fuel with awe any more than it had already been fueled by much more gullible people than you. As cool this idea sound the technology in question have a lot of limitations, some of which are already shown in the test run, and that it's not full scale

"Spinning's a good trick, let's try that!" I can't believe nobody's made this reference yet, so I feel obligated to do so.

Excitement rating: *DEATH* Intensity rating: *DEATH* Nausea rating: *DEATH* "Mkay, let's try setting mega yeet 1 to 45mph..."

Brings a whole new meaning to the term “vomit comet”.

Besides all of the other problems, how would this thing not rip itself apart when it instantly becomes the most unbalanced centrifuge in history the millisecond after launch? I greatly respect Scott Manley. But he needs to examine this with a more critical eye.

You mentioned there were some issues with dynamic stability after launch - I wonder if this has anything to do with the 'rocket' not travelling perfectly straight. In the clip where the rocket is breaking through the frangible panel over the launch tube, you can see that it 'tears' a slot through the cover rather than breaking a single hole, meaning the rocket is 'crabbing'. Clearly this is why the aperture is rectangular and not circular or square, which suggests they anticipated this. This reminds me of the method archers use to test the alignment of the nock point on the bow string, by firing arrows through a sheet of paper. If the arrow leaves a slit in the paper, it is not flying straight.

This is an interesting engineering project. I wonder how much "stretching" the arm has to endure? Thanks for the video Scott.

"The idea is not new" - quite an understatement. The Idea predates the use of rockets to launch things to orbit - it even predates the suggestion that rockets *could* be used to launch payload to orbit! It was suggested in the late 1860's in a science fiction novella called "The Brick Moon".

"I'm Scott Manley, _throw_ safe"

Congratulations to the spinlaunch computer render team for generating lot's of media attention and all those investment dollars! Maybe you can invent a machine next that can scan a drop of blood for all kinds of illnesses

Technology investors need to hire an engineer to tell them if their investment is stupid or not.

The amount of suspension of disbelief this requires is staggering.

you could install something like this on a meteor that you’ve just mined, in order to transfer material back to where it needs to go

Spinlaunch seems like a very suboptimal idea for earth, but put this thing on the Moon and Mars and you got a perfect launch system for Earth Returns.

that is the coolest thing I've seen (today).. are these guys the winners of the old "pumpkin Chuckin" contests from the early 2000's? trying to find new higher highs? really cool story, can't wait to see how they progress.

It's pretty clear they didn't actually have even a 50% vacuum on the test launch. A larger design would need a very thick "foil" to not rupture under vacuum and would damage the rocket and payload, so a synchronized explosive port cover ejection would be necessary. Payloads and rockets will become very heavy to meet the 10,000 g load for an hour and half. I have heard they usually do not go over a momentary 80g spec. Payloads have moving parts, unfolding solar panels, unfolding antennas and such. What practical payload is ever going survive the centrifuge? Cellphones have no internal moving parts (beyond small lens focusing), so they can be mostly cast in resin for strength. Cellphones are not a reasonable example. Comm satellite? Optics heavy mapping satellite? Deep space telescope? Not a chance. Maybe a kinetic impact inteceptor (e.g. SM2 family) could be made tough enough, but the existing ones already work just fine. The missile will need a heavy heat shield to launch at mach 7 at sea level, eliminating much of the streamlining needed to keep some velocity up to upper atmosphere. The initial high negative Gs when entering sea level air density would make it very difficult to start the rocket engine, so it would have to fire inside the vacuum, possibly damaging the centrifuge housing. The "missile" was clearly tumbling coming out of the foil, which is no way to launch a rocket. This problem can probably be solved, but if the release is requiring millisecond timing, then the de-tumbling release offsets are likely to be one tenth that time or less, which may never be reliable enough. Did you notice how wide the exit port was? And in the direction of the tumble? Looks like compensation for a known flaw. Air rushing in and hitting the high speed centrifuge arms/blades would destroy them and the housing, so some kind of air lock gate would be needed and it would have to move that metal gate open and closed almost as fast as the rocket without breaking anything. This one design concept of a centrifuge launch is spawning a large number of complications that require delicate fix after more delicate fix. It feels like a bad design with many patches, which never works as well as a good design, which would tend to eliminate complications. Even if you could make it work part of the time, there will be a design concept that is much better because it is simpler, making this design obsolete. But the thing to watch is that they are lying and/or lying by omission. I find it hard to believe that they have done mach 6 launches from this current system that were not explosively destructive. They did not have a vacuum. The missile was tumbling for 2 or 3 rotations. The test missiles are more or less solid metal, because nothing else can take the load.

This will obviously get the funding. For start, it might be harder to use it on earth, but on planets like the moon or Mars, this is 100% how we will transport minerals back to earth! Considering how impossibly hard to get fuel on these places, and that the only reliable power you get is electricity. Also North Korea is extremely interested in this project as well :)

I don't think it's possible to adjust the arm after release, it's just going too fast. I bet they're going to have to release 2 payloads from each side at the same time at those sort of speeds. Dumping a sacrificial payload of the same weight into the ground. No way can you have an arm spinning at 7x speed of sound suddenly become REALLY unstable.

This sounds like the type of thing you'd have to destroy in episode 12 of an Ace Combat game.

This topic has already been debunked by Thunderf00t.

If they have a dead counterweight on the other end of the rotor they can release them simultaneously. This would keep the rotor balanced. The counterweight can just be launched into a hole in the ground. It would be carrying a lot of energy so you would need a deep cave :)

BTW, who else wants to hear Scott say “The centrifuge cannae take any more, Captain!” ?

On the airless Moon, an electrmagnetic linear accelerator would be just as good (See Robert Heinlein - 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress')

Dear Scott... for the first time (really!) I do NOT agree with your optimistic outlook. There ARE a number of hard ("physical") nuts to crack! (I write as a physics teacher)... plus the tremendous technological challenges. A few of them are: the balancing of the Rotor-system, seal breaking, keeping up the vacuum, heating it up, keeping it oriented (did not see anything of steering vanes or reactive devices...) so I am afraid this is a white elephant - in the best of cases... But apart from this controversial case, I very much!!! appreciate your channel, your lovely accent and your logic...

[MEANWHILE IN THE FUTURE] "What do you want to be when you grow up?" "A Yeetologist! I want to yeet rockets into space!"

These guys came to our school a few years ago, and presented a really interesting concept. The idea seemed pretty cool, they even explained the difference between quasi-static and dynamic loading and how most things can handle extremely high quasi static loading. They seemed to have the theory very well thought out. However, when it switched over to Q&A some of their answers to our questions about implementation were a bit unsatisfying. We asked about the release mechanism, asking about some of the issues proposed in this video. Essentially they shut us down saying they had a proprietary system that they couldn’t talk about. The next thing we asked was assuming you have this release thing working so that it doesn’t destroy itself, what happens if you get the timing wrong, what are the safety concerns. Mistiming by even a fraction of a second points an object with incredible momentum back toward earth essentially creating a kinetic bomb, even ignoring the chemical potential of the propellant. Again they said they had a proprietary system they couldn’t talk about and that they would have a berm constructed to stop the kinetic energy. Without further elaboration we were all kind of skeptical. Now obviously they aren’t going to explain everything in detail to a bunch of not yet engineers, but it felt like many of the challenges were not yet fully considered by the way they answered. However, this was a few years ago and it seems like they’ve made some progress in testing since then, and it’s still a really cool idea so hopefully they can successfully implement it. It would be really cool to see, and id love my initial skepticism to be proven wrong!

while this design might have problems due to atmosphere density on earth (which can still be partially alleviated by performing this on mountains, at 6km height air density is 50% less than at sea level), on moon this might be a very efficient tool

Throwing a 200 to 400lb object by spinning....hmmmmmm are they ready for the out of balance forces. Quick calculations and the advertised numbers do not agree with the specs...at all. Go do them for yourself. Radus...rpm...mass... vs thier stated loads and speeds.

This concept seems to impose a huge requirement of resilience on lateral acceleration to the payload (otherwise not required by its original mission)

The video of this thing critically failing and tearing itself apart is going to be spectacular.

It still blows my mind that the 'muzzle flash' from a rail gun isn't from chemical propulsion.