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In detail about SpinLaunch - the most zealously kept secret in the space industry

The company is building a huge centrifuge to throw rockets into space




SpinLaunch vacuum centrifuge will accelerate the rocket to 8000 km / h. This computer generated image shows the inside of a centrifuge.

Last summer, the mysterious space company settled in a huge warehouse in the solar industrial area surrounding Long Beach Airport. Solar bunnies from turboprops jumping on the glass panels of the building. Across the street, a retro-styled McDonnell Douglas sign rises above a former aerospace giant factory, and around the corner, Virgin Orbit is developing rockets to launch in the air.

A suitable location for the headquarters of SpinLaunch , a company breathing new life into the long-standing idea of ​​using giant mechanical slings to throw rockets into orbit. The author of this daring plan is a serial entrepreneur.Jonathan Yenie . For years, he managed SpinLaunch, working at a former Silicon Valley microprocessor factory near Google. Today, the company is ready to open a real rocket factory, which will produce launchers, and, if everything goes well, will take the first steps into space.

During my fall visit to the factory, SpinLaunch workers were still unpacking after moving. We walked between the giant spread out sheets of steel, and Yeni told me how his launcher would work. The centrifuge is so large that it will fit a football field, will spin the rocket for about an hour, gradually increasing its speed to 8000 km / h. A unit with a load - a satellite up to 100 kg in weight - will experience overloads that peak tens of thousands of times higher than gravity. Upon reaching the starting speed, the centrifuge will release the rocket and send it to the stratosphere. On the threshold of space, she will start the engine for the last push into orbit.



It is difficult to accept the idea that an object weighing thousands of pounds [ apparently, this refers to the rocket itself / approx. perev.] can reach space after it is unwound on the surface of the Earth. It sounds crazy, and the company will have to prove a lot to discourage critics. So far, she has managed to unwind a 5-pound load to a speed of 1800 km / h and toss it into a steel wall. However, these tests and space are separated by about 50 km and huge air resistance. Not to mention the problems of building a 100 m long centrifuge with a lever strong enough to withstand a rocket the size of an SUV.

Yeni hopes to get all the evidence this year. The company plans to conduct its first suborbital launches in the winter, at a new test site in New Mexico. If the system works, then SpinLaunch promises to reduce the cost of launching small satellites into space by almost 20 times. Even more important may be a change in the frequency of starts. Yeni suggests that the accelerator will be able to do five starts a day; most of the companies making missiles will not be able to make so many launches in a month. In an era of huge concentrations of satellites, when thousands of satellites are planned to be launched into low orbit in the next decade, Yeni believes that the time has come for SpinLaunch.

Four million bucks and a crazy idea


Like many space entrepreneurs, Yeni has been obsessed with space for his whole life. However, only in 2014 did he try to turn his passion into a career. He says he was trying to launch a media-related startup at the time. Not finding funding, he decided to move on. Thinking about what to do now, he returned again and again to the Cold War military project called HARPin which the United States used giant cannons to shoot objects into space. HARP proved that you can go out into space without a rocket, and Yeni decided to independently create a kinetic launch system. He assembled a rig proving the concept to work, a mechanical sling capable of accelerating bullet-sized objects to supersonic speeds. He showed it to several business angels and raised some money.

But he needed help. In 2014, he called his guesthouse neighbor, Ryan Hampton, a foreman in construction and industry. Hampton led underwater welding at oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico when Yeni came to him with his project. Hampton recalls: “He said: I have four million bucks and a crazy idea, do you want to join?”

Hampton could not resist. In January 2015, he flew to see the installation made by Yeni. She was not particularly impressive. Yeni showed his desktop centrifuge and calculations spreadsheets. However, Hampton became interested in this: he realized that SpinLaunch would be a “damn cool project”, and signed up for the position of the first employee.

Yeni had ideas, and Hampton had experience building different plants, but they still needed aerospace engineers. A few months later, on a warm spring day, the couple climbed into Cessna Yeni and went to the edge of the Mojave Desert, where dozens of college students gathered to test their missiles. The duo hoped to hire employees there.

One of their goals was David Rennes of the University of San Diego. He spent several weeks interviewing SpinLaunch by phone, and for interviews with a personal presence, circumstances were unfavorable. “At that time, I did not sleep 36 hours, so I was a little crazy when I met Jonathan,” recalls Rennes. Nevertheless, the meeting went well. He took college leave and went to San Francisco to work at SpinLaunch, where he works as chief mechanical engineer.

Hampton says the early days of diabetes remind him of life on an oil rig. Employees lived and worked in an old microprocessor factory located just off Googleplex. On Rennes's arrival, living conditions were scarce. “Then our kitchen was a plastic table with a microwave,” he says. “We needed people with big ideas or those who had nothing to lose.” In their free time, the SpinLaunch team worked together in an impromptu rocking chair, watched movies in the "home theater", or relaxed while sitting around a bonfire pit, which was served by Yeni's first benchtop centrifuge.

The team quickly faced design challenges. The centrifuge they created had to be in a huge vacuum chamber in order to rid it of air turbulence and improve stabilization. And when they placed an order to build such a camera, only one contractor responded - with a price tag of $ 20 million.

Then the SpinLaunch team decided to build the camera on their own. Hampton, a specialist in underwater welding, became an expert in creating airtight seams, which corresponded well with the new task. Yeni ordered vacuum pumps on eBay and bought $ 500,000 worth of steel, after which the team began to build the sixth largest vacuum chamber in the world. It took them eight months to do this. “I think we all began to understand how much more remains to be learned in the world of science and engineering, simply because people have not tried this before,” says Yeni.

In 2016, they completed the construction of the first centrifuge. It was 12 meters in diameter, and too small to throw a rocket into space - but in essence its design was the same. A long lever, or leash, extends from a well-lubricated bearing that rotates the motor. The payload is attached to the end of the leash. To withstand extreme loads, the harness must be made of extremely durable materials such as Kevlar and carbon fiber.

After nearly two years of working 12 hours a day and six days a week, the SpinLaunch team was ready to launch the first true centrifuge. “We all crammed into a room full of monitors and cameras, located 15 meters away,” says Yeni. They checked that the system was in good shape and started to start. "They clicked on gas and broke the world record for the speed of rotational systems."

Over the next few years, the team conducted hundreds of high-speed tests. Most were needed to study and improve the system, and some were done to reassure skeptical investors and potential clients who did not believe that the payload would withstand extreme impacts. The team accelerated to high speeds solar panels, radios, telescope lenses, batteries, GPS modules and control computers; all equipment passed the test with little or no damage. In one test, Yeni attached an iPhone to a leash, and spun it to such speeds that he experienced a force 10,000 times greater than gravity. After that, he called a colleague on FaceTime. And each test was a small step towards space.


The first 12-meter prototype of the SpinLaunch centrifuge was built at the former headquarters in Sunnyvale.

The worst rocket ever


In the center of the cave-like SpinLaunch warehouse, Yeni walked over to the object and pulled off a tarp from it. This, he said proudly, is “the worst rocket of all.”

The drop-shaped rocket is 8 meters long, all black with a shiny silver tip, looks a bit overweight compared to the thin arrow-shaped forms of conventional rockets. Usually, only a small part of the mass of a rocket can be its payload - most of it takes fuel. Therefore, companies such as SpaceX require rockets the size of a building to put an object the size of a passenger car into orbit. In aerospace circles, this is called the "tyranny of the jet equation ."

But Yeni realized that if you launch a rocket onto the border of space that does not need to carry all the fuel necessary to take off to such a height, you can make it squat, and give most of its mass to the payload. What's even better, her engine doesn't have to be very good. Conventional orbital rockets are designed to squeeze all the efficiency from the engines to a drop to maximize the payload while overcoming gravity, the centrifuge will do all the hardest work to launch the SpinLaunch rocket.

In the SpinLaunch project, the rocket will be untwisted to launch speed, and then for a split second the outlet will open and the rocket will fly. According to the company’s patents, at the same moment, a counterweight rotating opposite the rocket will be detached so that the centrifuge does not loose and break. The rocket will continue to fly for about a minute, and at an altitude of about 61 km it will start the engine. At this altitude, the atmosphere will practically not resist the rocket, so in order to bring it to the first space speed of 28,476 km / h, it will take no more than a minute of engine operation. Another 10-second engine start will launch a rocket into orbit around the Earth.


Engineers around the first SpinLaunch orbital rocket; a centrifuge is visible in the background.

At least, according to the statements of Yeni. During my visit, the prototype of the centrifuge was not yet assembled, and Yeni could not show me videos wherever she was at work. He insisted that the calculations of SpinLaunch engineers are correct. Major investors - Airbus Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and GV (part of Alphabet) - also gave their blessing by investing $ 80 million in the company. Last year, the U.S. Department of Defense issued a contract to SpinLaunch to help build their centrifuge. And yet, due to the lack of evidence of the project's operability, most of it has only to be thought out.

Juan Alonso, an aerospace engineer at Stanford who has been doing security checks for one of SpinLaunch's investors, understands my caution. “This is an exotic technology, and for the first time hearing about it, you think that in principle it cannot work,” he says. But after checking all the calculations, Alonso gave the investment a green light.

Although SpinLaunch has difficulty sharing accurate calculations, two patents issued by the company in 2018 and 2019 shed some light on this incredible physics. But, when I showed patents to several aerospace engineers from leading research universities, most of them were skeptical of what they saw.

The most serious criticism from the engineers concerned those overloads that the rocket will have to withstand in a centrifuge. During rotation, the rocket will experience loads of 10,000 times higher than gravity. An ordinary rocket, when entering space, has to deal with impacts that are 5-7 times higher than gravity. “No rocket can survive this, like electronics in a rocket,” says Dan Erwin, an aerospace engineer at the University of Southern California.

One former employee, on condition of anonymity caused by the signing of a non-disclosure agreement, acknowledged the gap between theory and reality. He described the prototype of the SpinLaunch centrifuge as a fairly simple machine that “any team of mid-sized engineers could assemble”. The employee said that scaling it up to a functional orbital launcher would be “very difficult," given the resources of SpinLaunch. He also noted the lack of experience among some leaders. “The ability to predict the emergence of a multitude of problems that are sure to appear was clearly lacking,” he said.

Yeni had heard such criticism before. He believes that the lack of such experience in the industry is at their best. “We assembled a team of engineers, for the most part too young to claim that SpinLaunch would not work,” he said. “They have a lot of energy and enthusiasm associated with the desire to know what happens.”

As for the impacts, he points to the long history of spacecraft that have survived a journey into space in conditions similar to those that the spacecraft will need to withstand in SpinLaunch, including giant U.S. Army guns and modern homing missiles capable of withstanding forces thousands of times greater than gravity. In addition, he said, his rocket will be stronger than the average device - it will be more like a combat missile than the Falcon 9 from SpaceX.

As the iPhone demo shows, electronic components can also tolerate extreme impacts during acceleration, although some modifications may be needed for particularly sensitive electronics. For example, the company has already registered patents for more durable solar panels and control modules that satellites use for orientation in space.

“SpinLaunch is not doing something fundamentally new - we just follow in the footsteps of previous developments,” says Yeni. Later this year, he plans to prove it during the first suborbital launch, which his system must carry out.


SpinLaunch employees study the interior of a 12-meter centrifuge prototype

Long road to space


Physics is not the only obstacle to the company. SpinLaunch will eventually need a launch pad on the coast so that their missiles do not pose a danger to the public. Finding the right place was more difficult than Yeni had expected. In April 2018, Hampton and Rafael Feldman, the project manager, flew to Hawaii to obtain permission to build their facility on the Big Island. Initially, the state authorities supported them, and even developed a $ 25 million investment plan that would allow Hawaiians to invest in the company through debt obligations secured by the government. However, during a tense meeting at the city hall in the Naalehu Community Center on the Big Island, near the place where SpinLaunch was planning to build its site, local residents brought down a flurry of criticism from local officials,accusing them of corruption, and worrying that the SpinLaunch site will destroy the local nature and become a threat to local residents.

“If in some way a place for this ill-conceived and crude project is allocated, then I will tell you where you can find me,” said one local resident. “You can find me at the gates of this enterprise, which has paved holy places and lava pipes, and I will be chained to these gates with kryptonite castles and chains until you get out of here.”

The gloomy atmosphere in the town hall led to the fact that funding did not take place, and SpinLaunch had to abandon Hawaii. In the meantime, they are looking for other offshore launch sites, the company is building a new testing ground on the mainland.

In May SpinLaunch began work in the spaceport "America"in New Mexico, where it is now building a centrifuge three times larger than the one in Los Angeles. Yeni hopes that they will be able to conduct the first suborbital test this year, and will launch objects weighing up to 50 kg at the White Sands shooting range. The tests will be a significant step compared to the launch of the five-kilogram cargo with which they have worked so far. Over the past few months, Hampton with a couple of dozen employees have lived near a spaceport in a temporary town of cargo containers. They have a jacuzzi, an archery range, and a virtual reality room - small activities designed to make life easier in the middle of the desert.

Yeni says that he is confident that their system will work within expectations, and that they will soon be ready for the queue of customers. A trip to space at SpinLaunch will cost $ 500,000 per launch, and Yeni says that he is ready to work only with companies that want to launch dozens or even hundreds of satellites.

The launch of even one such satellite into orbit will be a major achievement. The history of private space companies is for the most part a failure story, however, as if the space age Sisyphus, Yeni seems to like the difficulties. Space exploration requires courage to storm the unknown, and in the case of SpinLaunch the field of the unknown is quite vast. However, as a reward it will be possible to receive, no more, no less - a new door into space.

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