Longshot Space wants to make space launch dumb — and really cheap
Summary
Rockets are among the greatest feats in human engineering, but to Longshot Space CEO Mike Grace, theyre an overly exquisite solution to the problem of sending megatons of inert mass to space.You need something that is dumber and much cheaper, both to build and to operate, he said in a recent interview.Longshots answer is a kinetic launch system that will be capable of reaching hypersonic speeds and shooting projectiles to orbital velocities, for less than the cost of a Netflix subscription. Energy is stretched out over space and time; freed from the demands of vertical lift, such systems can suddenly be built out of concrete, rather than aluminum.But there is no free lunch, especially in aerospace, and Longshots cheap prices will come with some major trade-offs. So the question is, how do you drive the price of putting material in space through the floor?Elon Musks SpaceX is also looking to solve this problem, with its super-heavy Starship vehicle that will be capable of lifting upward of 250 metric tons to orbit in an expendable configuration. Since closing a $1.5 million pre-seed round last April, from investors that include Sam Altman, Draper VC and SpaceFund, and being awarded a direct-to-Phase II SBIR from the Air Force Research Laboratory, Longshot has built a test accelerator from its headquarters in Oakland, California, and achieved speeds up to Mach 2.2. Grace said he anticipates demonstrating speeds north of Mach 5 within a month.In the short-term, Longshot wants to piggyback off the U.S. Department of Defenses need for hypersonic capability, land some contracts, and use that revenue to essentially subsidize the development of a really big, really cheap launch system for space.