Spinlaunch... Can it succeed?

[rs20]

2.13

[Rick Law]

We can discuss Spinlaunch to no end, but I'm personally pretty sure it will never go anywhere while having eaten a ton of cash. Where's the popcorn?

The success or failure of the actual business aside, can we have a straw poll that in 10 years time:
1) Spin launching will be a thing
2) They'll get something small and token into orbit as a test but that'll be it. Too many issues to be practical.
3) They had no chance, the concept is just doomed to impracticaility.

I'm sitting about 2.5

I am at 3.0!  They may be able to shoot up an object like a solid projectile to sub-orbital altitude, but they won't be able to do anything that needs a booster rocket.

But before they even get that far, market research should tell them that their customer would rather spend a little more to launch on regular rockets than spending the time and money to harden the payload.  Time is money.  Hardening the payload for 11000g will take research time, testing time, and implementation time -- plus, reliability (of the payload object) would likely suffers after the payload object's exposure to such high G environment.

[BrianHG]

But before they even get that far, market research should tell them that their customer would rather spend a little more to launch on regular rockets than spending the time and money to harden the payload.  Time is money.  Hardening the payload for 11000g will take research time, testing time, and implementation time -- plus, reliability (of the payload object) would likely suffers after the payload object's exposure to such high G environment.

This....
Their only potential market would be sending raw materials to space, but, we are already considering mining for raw materials already in space or on the moon which wont require spinlaunch...

[PlainName]

I don't see it going anywhere either, but I'm hoping they'll have enough goes to make some interesting videos.

[madires]

I would say that Spinlaunch has the same destiny as Hyperloop. It's only a matter of time, i.e. how long they are able to find people giving them money to burn.

[SiliconWizard]

Yeah. Whether it's practical or not is (quite funnily) a secondary concern to most of those investors. All they see it that there is huge market potential, and that I'm certainly not denying. That's how startup financing works, right? Huge market potential, tons of bullshit wrapped up in pretty videos and powerpoints, and a few PHDs in the team to show investors how serious and qualified those guys must be.

[Rick Law]

But before they even get that far, market research should tell them that their customer would rather spend a little more to launch on regular rockets than spending the time and money to harden the payload.  Time is money.  Hardening the payload for 11000g will take research time, testing time, and implementation time -- plus, reliability (of the payload object) would likely suffers after the payload object's exposure to such high G environment.

This....
Their only potential market would be sending raw materials to space, but, we are already considering mining for raw materials already in space or on the moon which wont require spinlaunch...

If an asteroid in collision course with earth is discovered early enough, one of the proposed method of steering the asteroid off the collision course is throwing objects off that asteroid in a continuous stream.  There, a spinlaunch doing the rock throwing may work rather nicely.

[fourfathom]

That's how startup financing works, right? Huge market potential, tons of bullshit wrapped up in pretty videos and powerpoints, and a few PHDs in the team to show investors how serious and qualified those guys must be.

Yes, but occasionally it's real, and can be made to work.  The trick for an investor is to figure out the difference between easy, hard and impossible.  The good ones steer clear of easy and impossible, taking the chance that hard may turn out to be too hard.  If the choice was obvious we would all be investing our lunch money in start-ups.

I think Spinlaunch is hard, but close to impossible to make a profit with because it's impractical (except perhaps as a rock-thrower) given the alternatives.

[EEVblog]

But before they even get that far, market research should tell them that their customer would rather spend a little more to launch on regular rockets than spending the time and money to harden the payload.  Time is money.  Hardening the payload for 11000g will take research time, testing time, and implementation time -- plus, reliability (of the payload object) would likely suffers after the payload object's exposure to such high G environment.

And the other problem is that it is completely different design and testing to what's been done for 50 years now.
If you are developing a satellite, or you going to even think about developing the new design and test methodologies required to use this new launch process? It could be a complete non-starter business from that aspect alone.

[AVGresponding]

Just see Thunderfoot vs. Space X. Uniquely the only scam company in the world to successfully operate a manned space program.

Oh dear...

https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/tech/elon-musk-spacex-bankruptcy.html?fbclid=IwAR1M6zTAjhd4r-KN78zLHmPc6P1vPgd1aA0hmk0LEIM1Ho3R2_vN7_HtV6U

[PlainName]

Even if SpaceX go bust this afternoon, what they've already achieved is very worthy of note and 'scam' would be the last word that popped into my mind in describing it.

[AVGresponding]

Agreed. I'll state again, I don't recall Thunderfoot ever calling it a scam company. Musk is the "scammer", not SpaceX. If anyone is unable to differentiate between them, they are probably a "Muskie", or whatever the name for his fanboys/fangirls is.

It would be interesting to know why such key personnel have jumped ship; pure speculation but I suspect they were tired of Musk's extravagant and unfulfillable promises.

[wraper]

Just see Thunderfoot vs. Space X. Uniquely the only scam company in the world to successfully operate a manned space program.

Oh dear...

https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/tech/elon-musk-spacex-bankruptcy.html?fbclid=IwAR1M6zTAjhd4r-KN78zLHmPc6P1vPgd1aA0hmk0LEIM1Ho3R2_vN7_HtV6U

Oh dear, you bought that BS clickbait title  . Nothing goes bankrupt.

[AVGresponding]

I agree the headline is somewhat over-dramatic, that's not unusual. The meat of the story is a different matter, did you even bother to read it?

[Haenk]

Calling in for all hands on deck on the most important family day is pretty serious IMHO.
(Other than some of Musks' projects, i consider SpaceX as a pretty solid idea; however financing could be an issue, with mixing public and private lauches at different prices).

[wraper]

I agree the headline is somewhat over-dramatic, that's not unusual. The meat of the story is a different matter, did you even bother to read it?

Yes I read it. In a nutshell, Elon wants to rapidly improve Raptor production rate since it's too low for his ambitious business plan.

EDIT: original email itself. Also he posted on twitter.

Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago. As we have dug into the issues following exiting prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported. There is no way to sugarcoat this.
I was going to take this weekend off, as my first weekend off in a long time, but instead I will be on the Raptor line all night and through the weekend.
Unless you have critical family matters or cannot physically return to Hawthorne, we need all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster.
The consequences for SpaceX if we can’t get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume *nor* the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1 by itself is financially weak, whereas V2 is strong.
In addition, we are spooling up terminal production to several million units per year, which will consume massive capital, assuming that satellite V2 will be on orbit to handle the bandwidth demand. These terminals will be useless otherwise.
What it comes down to is that we face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.

Thanks,

Elon

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1465793233729069063

If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability / liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starlink & Starship, then bankruptcy, while still unlikely, is not impossible.

GM & Chrysler went BK last recession.

“Only the paranoid survive.” – Grove

[wraper]

That article is a sensationalist garbage with fake clickbait title and most of the context removed from "The meat of the story" as you say.

[AVGresponding]

You don't think that email paints a serious picture of a serious problem? You can't just wave a magic wand and make production issues like that disappear.   

[wraper]

You don't think that email paints a serious picture of a serious problem? You can't just wave a magic wand and make production issues like that disappear.   

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.

[fourfathom]

I haven't been following this, but it would be interesting to hear what "prior senior management" has to say about this.  But they probably can't due to NDAs and stock options (not that there's anything wrong, or unusual with that).  There is always the tendency to want to believe that big problems are on their way to being solved, until it becomes obvious that they can't be without some major tactical upheaval.  It's happened so some extent on every big project that I've worked on.

[CatalinaWOW]

This is one of those things where there is a thin line between amazing progress and amazing failure.  Musk has previously described the cash chasm that Starlink must past through before reaching profitability.  For success he must get large revenue streams from Starlink, which requires large constellations of satellites.  Nothing technically impossible about this, but getting it done before the cash runs out is a real problem.  Apparently he was counting on Starship to get this constellation into place quickly and relatively economically.  Again, doesn't appear to be technically impossible, but requires solving a great many problems in a hurry.  Faster than anyone has solved them before.  He has already done many of the things, but there are a lot to do.  Some of which (regulatory issues for example) are not really anything he has a lot of control over.   

[SiliconWizard]

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

[fourfathom]

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

You have to be in a hurry.  But you also have to get it right.

[Haenk]

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.

[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.