It will be possible to get into space without resorting to rockets. Yesterday, November 11, the portal thedrive.com He reported that the American company SpinLaunch has successfully tested a centrifuge that will be able to send small satellites into orbit.
SpinLaunch was founded in 2014 and since then has been working on creating a smaller copy of the kinetic accelerator. A vacuum-sealed centrifuge rotates a projectile without an engine at a speed several times faster than the speed of sound before releasing it, sending it into the upper atmosphere and eventually into orbit.
SpinLaunch Centrifuge Demonstration
The first test flight of the prototype - the so-called suborbital accelerator - took place at the spaceport America in New Mexico on October 22, but the company announced this event only yesterday. "This is a radically different way to accelerate projectiles and launch vehicles to hypersonic speeds using a ground-based system," said Jonathan Yaney, CEO of SpinLaunch.
A projectile containing a payload and a two-stage accelerator
Image source: thedrive.com
The installation shown in the video is a prototype in scale 1:3. At the same time, it has already at 20% power "accelerated a 3-meter projectile to many thousands of miles per hour, lifting it kilometers into the sky." In the future, the company intends to equip its "objects thrown into the atmosphere" with a rocket engine to put them into orbit. At the same time, the final goal is to create an installation that will be able to deliver satellites into orbit without using rocket engines.
