Cost has always been an issue when looking to deliver payloads into orbit around the Earth, but aerospace technology start-up Longshot hopes to build a ground-based pneumatic launch system to dramatically lower the price of launching satellites.
The company has raised millions of dollars in funding and currently operates out of a former US Navy weapons testing facility in Alameda, California. It’s also nearing approval to build a much longer launch tube in the Nevada desert. But there are still many challenges as they work to build a viable launch system.
“This is a civil engineering project that produces an aerospace result,” explains Mike Grace, CEO of Oakland, California-based Longshot.
The launch begins with a simple staged gas injection system to move a payload along a tube, ejecting it at high speed aimed just a few degrees above the horizon. In theory, this could achieve incredibly high supersonic speeds with a long enough tube and enough pressure applied, meaning only a small booster rocket would be needed on board to put the payload into orbit. The payload is not intended for a human passenger, but could be used to carry satellites into orbit or carry additional material or equipment payloads to astronauts.
“Every time we double the length, the maximum energy and pressure are halved. After all, it’s a pipeline and not a rocket,” says Grace, who adds that gas pressures and temperatures in a kilometer-long launch system would be comparable to those found in natural gas transmission lines.
A new take on an old idea
The concept of using a very large gun to put an object into space is one that Grace likes to say she borrowed from Jules Verne and his 1865 novel. From the Earth to the Moon. There have been other attempts at similar launch systems over the years.
The US military developed the High Altitude Research Project (SHARP) in the 1980s and achieved a few supersonic test shots. After the project was canceled in the mid-1990s, one of SHARP’s developers tried to develop the technology as a civilian company called Quicklaunch. This company disappeared in the 2010s.
Founded in 2021, Longshot has come a long way from garage demos to a viable launch system. The company made headlines earlier this year with some high-profile investments, including $2.8 million from the US Air Force SBIR and $4 million from Starship Ventures, Draper Assoc. and other investors, including OpenAI head Sam Altman.
Now the start-up is working to turn these funds into real projects. Working at the former U.S. Navy Alameda facility will allow the construction of larger test tubes while still being close to the company’s Bay Area headquarters. “It’s an indoor test facility for naval guns, the U.S. Navy abandoned it for about 20 years and was going to tear it down,” says Grace. The test facility will allow Longshot to assemble and fire a 300-foot prototype of the launch system. But this is only a prelude to large-scale testing.
“The Panama Canal for Space”
Longshot is still awaiting NEPA approvals to begin work on a piece of land next to Tonapah Regional Airport near the town of Tonapah in Nye County, Nevada, where it plans to build a much larger cannon approaching a size that could put a payload into orbit.
“The Nevada site is a mile long, 100 feet wide, and would have a steel pipe with a 3-foot inside diameter,” Grace explains. “It will be more than half a kilometer long, and it would have multiple ones [gas injection] thrusters along it.” Instead of relying on a single burst of energy to propel the payload, the Longshot method has smaller bursts of gas injected along the way. “So instead of a boom with all that temperature and pressure, we have pop, pop, pop all the way down. And the longer we can do it, the smoother it can be.”
Once approvals are obtained, Grace says construction would involve many of the same materials and labor found in natural gas transmission. “Every injection [into the tube] it’s pressurized gas, so we’re going to have a lot of nitrogen handling, hydrogen handling, big compressors. And in terms of sourcing material, flanges and welding, we expect it to be the same type of pipe welding that you would find in gas infrastructure.”
Test shots so far have been at catch boxes and berms rather than at launch distance, but the company is exploring getting permission to send a payload “at a certain altitude,” says Nathan Saichek, Longshot’s chief technology officer. The company has begun internal designs for the Nevada facility, but Saichek says his aerospace expertise sometimes interferes with construction engineering tasks. “What we need is a civil engineer; aerospace engineers [like us] on concrete platform engineering”.
The Nevada location is also convenient for another line of business that Longshot is exploring. The land is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site, where the US military has conducted long-running experiments with new weapons and countermeasures. Saichek notes that while getting a payload into space will take years of development, a launch system could send supersonic payloads to the test site, which the US military may find useful for other types of testing. “Kind of a hypersonic shot for Uncle Sam to test things out,” he says.
While there are practical military test applications for its system, Longshot’s real goal is to reach an orbital delivery price well below what any rocket-based delivery system could achieve. As it moves on to building larger-scale projects, the company is looking for partners in the civil engineering and construction industry to help them.
“This is the Panama Canal for space. What we’re doing in Nevada will change this from a technical project to an infrastructure project,” says Grace. “I’d love for a big engineering firm to solve all our problems, but until they spend hundreds of millions of dollars it’s not worth it. But beneath the surface of the average engineer is an aerospace fan, so we’ll see.”
