Kind: captions
Language: en
since the 1950s Rockets have been our
go-to Workhorse for sending people and
payloads into
orbit they are some of the most complex
machines ever built the ultimate boost
into the
sky but they aren't exactly
new even modern rockets have historic
routs going back in time some ancient
projectiles were powered by chemical
explosives like gunpowder in 1232
Chinese soldiers repelled a Mongol Army
using flaming arrows likely propelled by
simple
Rockets today Rockets are far more
powerful able to send humans to the moon
and the International Space Station
solid rocket ignition but Rockets have
limitations putting things in orbit is
hard it takes a lot of
energy Rock
are hard they take a lot of energy
basically the amount of fuel required
for Rockets to reach you know the outer
reach of our atmosphere is the limiting
factor something like 92 93% of the mass
of any rocket is is fuel leaving about
five or 6% for the actual structure and
only 2% for the
payload there is a high demand to put
things into space but there are limited
means of getting it
there but that may soon change if
engineers at a company called spin
launch can make the dream imagined in
this promotional video a reality spin
launch is a highly unique way to get to
space the idea itself goes back to
caveman times it's a sling a sling is an
ancient Hunter's weapon it's an
improvement on the arm and shoulder's
ability to throw a
stone archaeologists have found ancient
evidence of slings some at least 12,000
years
old for Jonathan yany the sling is an
inspiration it rotates and at the end of
a rotational element you have really
really high speed so Jonathan embraced a
radical
idea use that speed to launch a
spacecraft into orbit a sling is
something you spin around and basically
the more you can spin it the more Force
you can basically put on the release of
whatever you're slinging out but if you
scale this up that same principle has
the ability to launch a rocket into
orbit that's
incredible that idea has been met with
skepticism so the spin launch team has
much to prove it is one of those ideas
that's just sounds too crazy I think
it's good to look at things from a place
of skepticism uh at the outset but then
you have to be objective about looking
at well what are the underlying physics
and what might really be
possible the spin launch team is using
electricity to generate rotational speed
faster than the speed of sound the
proposed payload a satellite encased in
a bullet-shaped shell must withstand up
to 10,000 G's or 10,000 times the force
of Earth's gravity until it is
released at just the right
moment once the aerrow shell gets around
40 Mi up the casing would separate to
allow two small rocket engines to propel
the payload the rest of the way to low
earth orbit the arm itself that's
actually spinning around needs to be
able to with understand it to a certain
degree as well so you have a need to not
only make sure that it's structurally
sound but there needs to be Precision in
the timing and the programming of that
actual release point I don't have any
classical training as an
engineer I self-educate I read a lot of
books lots of books and then I read them
again because I didn't really understand
them the first time I became an engineer
along the
way the team's first goal was to build a
proof of concept Mass accelerator at 1/8
scale to validate the key Technologies
and and use it as a test bed to spin
potential spacebound components at many
times the force of Earth's
gravity also known as as gForce is and
uh G represents one unit of Earth
gravity when a pilot pulls up on the
Yoke of of their Jet and they make a
hard turn they'll feel the equivalent of
multiple times Earth gravity upwards of
hgs for example but spin launch payloads
will have to withstand forces orders of
magnitude stronger as many as 10,000 G's
so the team is working on building and
testing components that can survive such
extreme acceleration you know in some
ways we humans are sort of timid we feel
most comfortable with things that look
like things we're used to so you can't
really tell at the outset whether that
thing that you're going that's
outlandish is really going to work today
the spin launch team is asking a
critical question
can a payload like a cubat survive
10,000 G's so a cubat is this
miniaturization of satellites literally
making them into these little Cube
components so this 10 cm x 10 cm by 10
cm unit is one piece that can be added
on top of each other like Lego
blocks so we have some of the most
critical subsystems that you would see
on any satellite we have a solar cell
here it generates a current that charges
this battery up and then the battery
stores that energy right and distributes
it to all of the critical subsystems
that require electricity so the OBC or
the onboard computer is one of them this
is the the brains of the satellite the
team is confident the cube as a whole
Will Survive but so far they've only
tested individual components and never
the whole system you know it's a very
very common strategy in engineering to
say we're going to break this problem
into small parts we're going to solve
each of the original parts and then
we're going to put it back together
again the team aims to test some of the
components that are typically found on
cubesats starting with the
computer so this is saying effectively
its power rails are all working
correctly it looks to be talking to the
world just fine so far they know that
the battery pack is particularly
vulnerable a preest of the battery pack
system system didn't make it out of the
accelerator in one
piece this gave us a great Benchmark
when it hit
7,650 GS that it was pretty darn
close and we didn't have to do all that
much to make it compatible with our
launch environment the batteries aren't
designed for 10,000 GS native the spin
launch engineering team had to figure
out how to make the batteries more
resistant to the high G forces so this
is the original we saw these batteries
laying on top of each other the concern
there is that when you're on the bottom
of the stack you're getting three
batteries worth of mass squished on to
plus your own Mass y this orientation of
the battery cells didn't work out so
well in the spinner the g-forces are
going this way and you can even see the
bolts are embedded and bent into the
base here one of the things that we did
was turn it sideways right Let each
battery support itself and itself only
so we're going to fully populate this
satellite with all of the key subsystems
that we're testing out here this is the
pre-spin test of the solar cell 1.2
volts and then after we're done with the
test we will check it out again and make
sure that it's still getting a similar
uh voltage reading this is going to be
the first time that this unit with
everything in it the battery pack the
computer is spinning up to 10,000
GS reaching the acceleration required
for launch is itself a difficult
engineering problem there we go at those
speeds needs friction just from the air
would be intense so the inside of the
accelerator is actually a giant vacuum
chamber if you can pull all of the air
out of it then there's no more air
resistance and consequently heat on the
rotational structure there we go now
we're going to go let the the vacuum
chamber draw down the pressure and then
we can spin
up accelerating system
[Music]
9,000
1.1 9596 97 98 10,000 10,000 G's coming
down diry
[Applause]
[Music]
well look at that I don't hear any
rattles looks like it's
intact the pressure one feels when
you're hoping for success is mostly
about the incredible personal human
investment that's gone in and not
wanting to let down all of your
colleagues when the moment of truth
comes let's crack it
open I'm going to test voltage on the
solar cell yeah so 0.8 that's in a
reasonable range okay so now we will
take out the computer looks like it is
intact it's still responding when we
send it messages so it looks pretty good
I would say that that was a successful
test pretty cool
woo spin launch has done what Engineers
do methodically design test evaluate and
repeat as they step their way up to a
system big enough to send payloads into
low earth
[Music]
orbit we went to the desert of New
Mexico to build a flight test system you
know at a large scale that would allow
us to essentially prove that we had not
only the technology validated we could
test our own ability to construct and to
execute on a system with this magnitude
and
scale launching at 1/3 scale was a
powerful
Milestone spinning the payload to more
than 1,000
[Music]
mph it was an emotional moment from the
team yet you have to have a little bit
of Faith to bring something like this to
that level and to that that scale
we've conducted 10 successful
back-to-back flight tests we haven't had
a single failure and I think that's a
testate to the practicality of the
technology this will be for the first
time since we've gone to space as a
species that we'll be doing it
differently it's common for engineers to
build on an old
technology transforming it with new
materials to scale their way to
innovation
it's with a spinning arm that's throwing
satellites into space that's totally new
how could that not be exciting