Spinlaunch... Can it succeed?

[AVGresponding]

And being in a hurry is rarely a great advisor either.

Those who are not in hurry will be outcompeted and become irrelevant. Let's compare Spacex and Blue origin. Blue Origin was founded 1¹/₂ year earlier and had a much better funding. Yet they did not launch a single orbital class rocket yet. Spacex on other hand in a year launches more payload mass to the orbit than everyone else combined.

What a load of rubbish.

There are so many factors involved in what it takes to succeed that to attribute it to one rather nebulous one of "being in a hurry" is sloppy thinking of the laziest kind.

The fact remains that Tesla is vastly over-valued, which makes it increasingly risky to use to leverage loans, Hyper Loop has been an epic cash-drain (despite the funding assistance from outside), and the situation with the Starlink system is also a massive cash drain.
Covid has probably not helped with the Raptor production problems, whatever other problems may exist, but again, you can't just wave a magic wand and make things happen. This isn't some random mass production line that you can just take anyone from the street and with a few hours training make them competent, this is highly specialised manufacturing.

[wraper]

And being in a hurry is rarely a great advisor either.

Those who are not in hurry will be outcompeted and become irrelevant. Let's compare Spacex and Blue origin. Blue Origin was founded 1¹/₂ year earlier and had a much better funding. Yet they did not launch a single orbital class rocket yet. Spacex on other hand in a year launches more payload mass to the orbit than everyone else combined.

What a load of rubbish.

There are so many factors involved in what it takes to succeed that to attribute it to one rather nebulous one of "being in a hurry" is sloppy thinking of the laziest kind.

The fact remains that Tesla is vastly over-valued, which makes it increasingly risky to use to leverage loans, Hyper Loop has been an epic cash-drain (despite the funding assistance from outside), and the situation with the Starlink system is also a massive cash drain.
Covid has probably not helped with the Raptor production problems, whatever other problems may exist, but again, you can't just wave a magic wand and make things happen. This isn't some random mass production line that you can just take anyone from the street and with a few hours training make them competent, this is highly specialised manufacturing.

There are other factors, but if you are slow, you are almost guaranteed to fail unless you have a never ending cash flow from the government. It's you who write rubbish since none of Elon's companies implement Hyperloop projects you talk about. All that he contributed was an idea that others picked up. Starlink is a cash drain right now but also a massive cash cow once it has a massive user base (which is somewhat delayed by electronic component shortage).

[AVGresponding]

There are other factors, but if you are slow, you are almost guaranteed to fail unless you have a never ending cash flow from the government. It's you write rubbish since none of Elon's companies implements Hyperloop projects you talk about. All that he contributed was an idea that others picked up. Starlink is a cash drain right now but also a massive cash cow once it's fully implemented.

Do you do any due diligence before you post?

https://www.cnet.com/news/elon-musks-boring-loop-is-finally-transporting-passengers-in-las-vegas/

[wraper]

There are other factors, but if you are slow, you are almost guaranteed to fail unless you have a never ending cash flow from the government. It's you write rubbish since none of Elon's companies implements Hyperloop projects you talk about. All that he contributed was an idea that others picked up. Starlink is a cash drain right now but also a massive cash cow once it's fully implemented.

Do you do any due diligence before you post?

https://www.cnet.com/news/elon-musks-boring-loop-is-finally-transporting-passengers-in-las-vegas/

And it has nothing to do with Hyperloop.  . Nor it had any massive investment. It's dirt cheap FWIW.

[fourfathom]

And being in a hurry is rarely a great advisor either.

Those who are not in hurry will be outcompeted and become irrelevant. Let's compare Spacex and Blue origin. Blue Origin was founded 1¹/₂ year earlier and had a much better funding. Yet they did not launch a single orbital class rocket yet. Spacex on other hand in a year launches more payload mass to the orbit than everyone else combined.

What a load of rubbish.

There are so many factors involved in what it takes to succeed that to attribute it to one rather nebulous one of "being in a hurry" is sloppy thinking of the laziest kind.
[... some irrelevant examples regarding Tesla and Hyperloop ...]

Of course there are many factors involves in success or failure!  Nobody is claiming otherwise.

But if you dawdle you get left behind.  In the two start-ups I've worked for we were quick to a new market sector (local-loop and metro fiber optics tele/datacom) with a good product, while the established companies were still "studying the market" and figuring out if they could adapt their legacy gear to the new situation.  They eventually launched new designs and bombarded the customer-base with marketing vaporware.  Yes, they eventually delivered a product.  In the meantime, we had delivered and were selling our systems, becoming the front-runner in the industry for those sectors.

Had we been slower, the big guys would have delivered an adequate product and this would have become the defacto standard, making it virtually impossible for us to penetrate the market.  Even though our stuff was less expensive, had a smaller footprint, used less power, was more flexible, and all-around better -- the benefits of starting with a clean sheet of paper, rather than evolving and still supporting a legacy design -- once the traditional players get a big enough installed base it's really hard to replace them in the network, except around the edges.

I'm sure some products are less sensitive to the "installed base" factor, but certainly most are to some extent.

You may notice that I didn't even mention investments or burn-rate, but these are also critically important.  There is a valley of death for a new company, financially and competitively, and you really need to get through that as quickly as possible.  While not screwing up.

[AVGresponding]

And it has nothing to do with Hyperloop.  . Nor it had any massive investment. It's dirt cheap FWIW.

Indeed it has nothing to do with hyperloop, despite initial promises to the contrary. And I'm not sure $50-odd million counts as dirt cheap, and again, is a broken promise, as it was supposed to cost less than 1/5 of that.

[wraper]

And it has nothing to do with Hyperloop.  . Nor it had any massive investment. It's dirt cheap FWIW.

Indeed it has nothing to do with hyperloop, despite initial promises to the contrary.

Huh? What promises and by whom? Not to say there is no sense to make a short hyperloop, you will need to stop before you can accelerate to the speed where it would matter.

And I'm not sure $50-odd million counts as dirt cheap

Yes it's very cheap for a tunnel.

is a broken promise, as it was supposed to cost less than 1/5 of that.

Bullshit.

[Nusa]

And it has nothing to do with Hyperloop.  . Nor it had any massive investment. It's dirt cheap FWIW.

Indeed it has nothing to do with hyperloop, despite initial promises to the contrary. And I'm not sure $50-odd million counts as dirt cheap, and again, is a broken promise, as it was supposed to cost less than 1/5 of that.

To put that in perspective, look up the cost of a single Falcon 9 launch. Vegas Teslas in Tunnels is clearly peanuts in the grand scale of Elons projects.

[bdunham7]

Yes it's very cheap for a tunnel.

Not for the Potemkin tunnel that it is!   

[wraper]

Yes it's very cheap for a tunnel.

Not for the Potemkin tunnel that it is!   

Prices of regular tunnels:
New York: $1.5 – $2.5B per mile
Other parts of United States and Australia: $600 – $900M per mile
Vegas loop is 1.7 miles long and consists of 2 tunnels. Even considering they are comparably narrow, it's very cheap.
BTW Vegas loop tunnels have larger diameter than deep-level tunnels in London Underground. Are they Potemkin tunnels too?

[wraper]

Which Tube lines are deep level?
The Bakerloo, Central, Jubilee, Northern, Piccadilly, Victoria and Waterloo & City lines are deep-level tube lines, using smaller trains that run through two circular tunnels with a diameter of about 11 feet 8 inches (3.56 m)

Vegas loop has 12ft inner diameter.

[Rick Law]

Tesla had a similar issue with ramping-up Model 3 production. Elon slept a few months at the factory at that time. Of course there is no magic wand, if there is a problem, it needs to be solved, and it's what Elon intends to do.
Nonetheless that article is a complete garbage, not real news.

And he also recently admitted, that Tesla was as close to bankruptcy as it could get due to the delay in ramping up the production.

The current SpaceX problem surprised me to a degree.

SpaceX really is not revolutionary but some incremental improvement.  It reduce cost in large part by good execution instead of revolutionary technology.  I would have imagine they mind their operations like a hawk to ensure good execution.

Given Musk's Tesla model3 experience, I expected his operation(s) to be smoother than it seem so far.  The virus lock downs and panic that happened in the last couple of years may have been a factor.

SpaceX is a good thing for the industry.  I would not like to see it fail.

[AVGresponding]

And it has nothing to do with Hyperloop.  . Nor it had any massive investment. It's dirt cheap FWIW.

Indeed it has nothing to do with hyperloop, despite initial promises to the contrary.

Huh? What promises and by whom? Not to say there is no sense to make a short hyperloop, you will need to stop before you can accelerate to the speed where it would matter.

And I'm not sure $50-odd million counts as dirt cheap

Yes it's very cheap for a tunnel.

is a broken promise, as it was supposed to cost less than 1/5 of that.

Bullshit.

The promises on speed and cost were made by Musk himself. Now I'm done talking to you, as you clearly don't care to do any of your own research, and I have better things to do.

[wraper]

The promises on speed and cost were made by Musk himself. Now I'm done talking to you, as you clearly don't care to do any of your own research, and I have better things to do.

Quite familiar reaction when someone was caught on BS and have nothing to say to prove the point. Funny to hear from you about a what Musk supposedly promised when you didn't even know the difference between Loop and Hyperloop. And did not provide any source proving of those supposed promises.

[DougSpindler]

Couple of questions.
1 - Do we have material today which could withstand the forces spinning an object that fast?
2 - When the object is released won't there be a massive imbalance which would case the spinning arm to fly apart?

[Nusa]

Read the thread, you'll get those questions answered as well as they're going to be.

[sandalcandal]

And it has nothing to do with Hyperloop.  . Nor it had any massive investment. It's dirt cheap FWIW.

Indeed it has nothing to do with hyperloop, despite initial promises to the contrary.

Huh? What promises and by whom? Not to say there is no sense to make a short hyperloop, you will need to stop before you can accelerate to the speed where it would matter.

And I'm not sure $50-odd million counts as dirt cheap

Yes it's very cheap for a tunnel.

is a broken promise, as it was supposed to cost less than 1/5 of that.

Bullshit.

The promises on speed and cost were made by Musk himself. Now I'm done talking to you, as you clearly don't care to do any of your own research, and I have better things to do.

Other thread on the Vegas loop, particularly on the project costs. For those that "care to do your own research". The cost is actually less than initially estimated despite some very misleading claims from "skeptics".
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/elon-musks-vegas-loop-debunking/msg3557594/#msg3557594

Edit: The hypocrisy and delusion is incredible. "It was supposed to cost less than 1/5 of that" "you clearly don't care to do any of your own research" "Do you do any due diligence before you post?" 

[T3sl4co1l]

Well... not really.  No one here put up basic tensile, flex or bearing strength numbers that I recall, and I don't think we really have that many in-depth MEs here anyway.  I could pull up some basic numbers myself but I'm sure I'd miss something; there are more degrees of freedom in a mechanical system and I'd likely oversimplify the design.  Or someone could run a simulation; but I'm not sure that these sorts of things are all that easy or cheap to simulate?  (Is there an open/free stress/strain simulator?  Any good ones?)

Like, just for a very, very basic "sniff test" -- consider that guns exist, and work.  Right?  So there's at least as much strength to propel something supersonically, and they were already looking at doing it in the past (i.e. escape velocity by gas propellant).  It's not much of a stretch to bear the same tensile load quasistatic versus intermittent, and much stronger alloys are known today than were available back when they were researching big guns.  (Ballpark figure: a gun develops on the order of 30ksi peak; steels over 250ksi are readily available, give or take a suitably interested/licensed customer*.)

*Maraging steels are some of the strongest, and primarily used for nuclear centrifuges apparently.  So, that.  Aerospace is mostly fairly well regulated anyway so I don't see that that's a problem.

I suspect it's in the same order of magnitude, so needs an actual simulation or scale test to determine feasibility.  And there's a lot of room to play with balancing the release mechanism, and how much torque or wobble that causes in turn, and how much the arm can bear, and how stiff it should be (more flexible to allow the displacement, or less to bear the forces?), etc.  This is just plain old engineering, something you need to sit down and crank.

Tim

[sandalcandal]

SpaceX really is not revolutionary but some incremental improvement.  It reduce cost in large part by good execution instead of revolutionary technology.  I would have imagine they mind their operations like a hawk to ensure good execution.

Given Musk's Tesla model3 experience, I expected his operation(s) to be smoother than it seem so far.  The virus lock downs and panic that happened in the last couple of years may have been a factor.

SpaceX is a good thing for the industry.  I would not like to see it fail.

Really going to ignore the self-landing reusable booster thing as "not revolutionary"? The only other "reusable" rocketry was the space shuttle and that really isn't reusable in a meaningful way by both in time and cost.

[jonovid]

there is a lot of fake science surfacing in recent years.
its as if the tree of knowledge of good and evil has reached full maturity.
IMO Elon Musk should go to the Moon not Mars     baby steps  before doing more .  a low G hotel and space resort on the Moon is way more achievable then
say a crematorium on Mars if something goes wrong.
 
Spinlaunch IMO is a total and complete fail. centrifugal force would utterly destroy any so called spinlaunch payload.
long before reaching any ballistic velocity needed to put any projectile into orbit.

[Nusa]

SpaceX really is not revolutionary but some incremental improvement.  It reduce cost in large part by good execution instead of revolutionary technology.  I would have imagine they mind their operations like a hawk to ensure good execution.

Given Musk's Tesla model3 experience, I expected his operation(s) to be smoother than it seem so far.  The virus lock downs and panic that happened in the last couple of years may have been a factor.

SpaceX is a good thing for the industry.  I would not like to see it fail.

Really going to ignore the self-landing reusable booster thing as "not revolutionary"? The only other "reusable" rocketry was the space shuttle and that really isn't reusable in a meaningful way by both in time and cost.

The idea isn't revolutionary at all. SpaceX is just the most successful at making it work.

Reusable spacecraft go all the way back to 1962, when the reusable X-15 launched from a reusable B-52 and entered space, earning astronaut wings. An event that was repeated 12 times during the 199 flights of the program.

One of the gemini capsules flew twice.

You already mentioned the space shuttle.

There's the X-37, which you don't hear much about because it's military. They have two vehicles that have flown six long-term missions (the sixth is still in progress) since 2010.

Northrup Gumman Pegasus has put smaller payloads into low orbit from reusable carrier aircraft starting in 1990.

And of course Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic have both flown reusable vehicles now.

[Nusa]

IMO Elon Musk should go to the Moon not Mars 

If you haven't been paying attention, they are getting paid to go to the moon. Which will almost certainly happen before mars.

Spinlaunch IMO is a total and complete fail. centrifugal force would utterly destroy any so called spinlaunch payload.
long before reaching any ballistic velocity needed to put any projectile into orbit.

Really? Ok, suppose my so-called payload is oxygen, water, or powdered tang. How does centrifugal force destroy those so called payloads? Please think before you make all-inclusive claims that clearly aren't actually all-inclusive.

[jonovid]

IMO Elon Musk should go to the Moon not Mars 

If you haven't been paying attention, they are getting paid to go to the moon. Which will almost certainly happen before mars.

Spinlaunch IMO is a total and complete fail. centrifugal force would utterly destroy any so called spinlaunch payload.
long before reaching any ballistic velocity needed to put any projectile into orbit.

Really? Ok, suppose my so-called payload is oxygen, water, or powdered tang. How does centrifugal force destroy those so called payloads? Please think before you make all-inclusive claims that clearly aren't actually all-inclusive.

destroying any container holding any gas or liquid. 

also
magnetic levitation railgun or one km of Hyperloop vacuum tube up the side of a mountain is for more achievable the a spinner.
hypersonic rail-tube may still need to pop a vacuum cup at the summit so any hypersonic projectile can get into orbit.

[Nusa]

You're in the wrong thread for hyperloop. Go find the hyperloop thread.

[rs20]

Like, just for a very, very basic "sniff test" -- consider that guns exist, and work.  Right?  So there's at least as much strength to propel something supersonically, and they were already looking at doing it in the past (i.e. escape velocity by gas propellant).  It's not much of a stretch to bear the same tensile load quasistatic versus intermittent, and much stronger alloys are known today than were available back when they were researching big guns.  (Ballpark figure: a gun develops on the order of 30ksi peak; steels over 250ksi are readily available, give or take a suitably interested/licensed customer*.)

+1, and don't forget cannon-launched precision guided projectiles and smart bullets.

A completely unverified quote from the internet:

I have to be careful about what I say, since the details were shared confidentially, but yes they know that they have to deal with centrifugal forces, yes, they've done a significant amount of analysis and testing, and no, it's not an insurmountable problem. Artillery shells regularly see 2-3x the acceleration this vehicle would see, and many modern shells have electronics and mechanisms. It is totally possible to harden structures for those kind of loads, especially when they're well known in advance.

As for drag going through the atmosphere, once again, yes they will slow down, but the square-cube law means that its easier to get a high ballistic coefficient (which means you decelerate less from drag) with a large vehicle than a small round.

That doesn't mean that their system is bound to obsolete all existing rockets, just that they've put more thought and effort into this than you can easily tell from the existing public articles.

And as a sidenote:

Well... not really.  No one here put up basic tensile, flex or bearing strength numbers that I recall, and I don't think we really have that many in-depth MEs here anyway.  I could pull up some basic numbers myself but I'm sure I'd miss something; there are more degrees of freedom in a mechanical system and I'd likely oversimplify the design.  Or someone could run a simulation; but I'm not sure that these sorts of things are all that easy or cheap to simulate?  (Is there an open/free stress/strain simulator?  Any good ones?)

www.onshape.com and www.simscale.com plug together and both have useable free tiers -- all in the browser no less! And there are undoubtedly other free options available too. Just like an EM simulation though, the trouble is setting up the meshes and parameters properly, not finding the software.