The Long Beach, California-based company is developing a launch system that uses kinetic energy as its primary method of take-off – a vacuum-sealed centrifuge spins the rocket at several times the speed of sound before it is released.
“This is a completely different way of using ground systems to accelerate projectiles and vehicles to hypersonic speeds,” SpinLaunch CEO Jonathan Yaney told CNBC. “This is about building a company and a space launch system that will enter the commercial market at a very high pace and launch at the lowest cost in the industry.”
Yaney established SpinLaunch in 2014. The company’s successful test at the U.S. Spaceport in New Mexico on October 22 marked an important milestone in the company’s progress. SpinLaunch has remained largely silent until now, and Yaney explained that this is due to the company’s ambitions.
“I found that the more bold and crazy the project, the harder you have to work-instead of talking about it outside,” Yaney said. “We must prove to ourselves that we can indeed accomplish this task.”
SpinLaunch has raised $110 million so far and investors include Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Airbus Ventures, Catapult Ventures, Lauder Partners and McKinley Capital.
The SpinLaunch suborbital accelerator is a one-third version, but it is still about 165 feet tall, “higher than the Statue of Liberty.” Yaney emphasized that this is the size required for the company to “true proof technology.”
There is a rotating arm in the vacuum chamber, and Yaney said it accelerates the projectile to a high speed, and then releases the vehicle for launch “in less than a millisecond”. The suborbital projectile is about 10 feet in diameter, but “its speed is as fast as the orbital system needs, that is, thousands of miles per hour,” Yaney added.
Yaney said: “We can basically verify our aerodynamic model to determine what our orbital vehicle will look like, and it allows us to try new technologies when it comes to release mechanisms.”
According to Yaney, SpinLaunch’s first suborbital flight used about 20% of the accelerator’s total power for launch and reached a test altitude of “tens of thousands of feet.”
Although there was no rocket engine on the aircraft for the first test flight, SpinLaunch plans to add the engine and other internal systems in future suborbital test flights. The company also plans to recycle and reuse its aircraft. Yaney pointed out that the company recovered the first aircraft, “it can definitely fly.”
According to the current SpinLaunch test plan, the company will conduct approximately 30 suborbital test flights from the US spaceport in the next six to eight months.
SpinLaunch is finalizing the design of its full-scale system, and Yaney said that testing so far has eliminated approximately 90% of the system’s risk.
Traditional rockets use a large booster and usually have several engines to lift off. This means that most of the rocket’s mass when it lifts off is fuel, and only a small part of the total mass can be used to carry the payload. Yaney said that SpinLaunch’s approach aims to subvert the “rocket equation”, which will “greatly” reduce the size of the rocket, as well as its complexity and cost.
SpinLaunch’s design of its orbital vehicle will be able to put approximately 200 kilograms of payload into orbit, equivalent to several small satellites.
The company is finalizing the location agreement for its first orbital launch system, and Yaney pointed out that it will not be in a US spaceport, but in a “coastal area.” Yaney said: “This is a location that needs to be able to support dozens of launches per day.”
SpinLaunch declined to comment on its backlog of customer launch contracts, but the company signed a contract with the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Department in 2019 for its first experimental orbital launch.