Russian designer appreciated the American air gun for “shooting” into space

“A Fiction That Has No Perspective”

A new way to deliver cargo into Earth’s orbit – using a 10-kilometer pneumatic gun – was proposed by specialists from the private American company Longshot Space. This publication reports Newatlas. According to the developers, with the help of compressed gas, the cargo will fly into orbit at a speed of Mach 30 (36.751 km / h). In this way, it will be possible to save millions of dollars on rocket launches. Launching 1 kilogram of cargo with a cannon can cost as little as $10. This is 2000 times cheaper than delivery by rockets.

The gun is planned to be built of metal and concrete. Company director Mike Grace notes that his startup is different from the development of competitors SpinLaunch, which is designed to pre-accelerate a capsule with weights in a centrifugal chamber. His cannon was developed on the basis of the ideas of projectile acceleration, which were proposed as early as the beginning of the 19th century.

It is assumed that the multi-stage “accelerators” of the XXI century will work as follows. First, a small (so as not to destroy the device itself) pneumatic shot simply sets the capsule with a load in motion, and then additional blows from compressed air tanks, precisely timed, give the load an additional push as it passes through the pipe.

This concept, the developers note, was also used in the V-3 or Hardworking Lieschen cannon, which Nazi Germany began to implement towards the end of World War II. This gun was captured by American troops.

According to Grace, the cannon, which was never useful for military purposes, is likely to have its say in peaceful space – to deliver cargo into orbit. The main idea is to retrofit a large “gun” with compressor pumps along the entire length of the barrel. As a result, the capsule will fly out of the “muzzle” at a speed of about 30 thousand kilometers per hour and, thanks to the small angle of elevation of the gun, fly into low earth orbit.

The director of the company explains that he will not use the cannon to launch people into space, as accelerating from zero to Mach 30 in one second is “a great way to turn a person into a wet place.” But for launching into orbit more stable things needed by astronauts, it will come in handy.

The developers have already built a small prototype of their space gun, the initial speed of which has already exceeded Mach 2.2. Once it reaches Mach 5, the company will be able to start selling its services to test hypersonic aircraft.

Despite the fact that the developers have already received state funding, their gun has a number of drawbacks. Firstly, it is the need to use large tracts of land, and secondly, crushing hypersonic strikes, which, even in the desert, can stun entire ecosystems.

However, the Russian expert – academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, ex-director of NPO Energomash named after. V.P. Glushko Boris Katorgin expressed doubt that the Americans would succeed at all.

– If you burn gas in the barrel of the gun, it will still help to achieve decent speed. This is impossible in a kinetic way. This is a fiction that has no perspective. No other way to deliver a payload into orbit, except for rockets, has yet been invented.