How building 'the world's biggest gun' could change the game for space cargo
| | | On this episode of the Space Minds podcast, host David Ariosto speaks with Mark Bigham, vice president of defense programs at Longshot Space Technologies Corporation, a new hardware startup developing hypersonic technology.
They talk about a new technological approach for launching mass at hypersonic speeds, an idea for improving launch cadences from several times per week to hundreds of times per day and how a hypersonic system could change the economics of sending cargo into orbit.
| | | | | | | David Ariosto: This is probably, for a lot of people, one of the first times they're hearing about Longshot. Without getting lost in the physics of this, I wonder if you could explain what you're doing and what the real problem you're trying to solve is.
Mark Bigham: We're taking a radically different approach to accelerating mass to very very high speeds to get it into orbit. ... What the founders of Longshot came up with is to use a multi-injection mass driver. This is similar to a gigantic potato gun, which injects gas behind and on the side of a projectile to make it move very very fast.
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