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 drastically cut the price tag of launching satellites.
The company has raised millions of dollars in funding and is currently working at an old U.S. Navy weapons test facility in Alameda, Calif. It is 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, Calif.-based Longshot.
The launch begins with a simple gas-injection system at stages to move a payload along a tube, expelling it at high velocity aimed only 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 onboard booster rocket would be required to get the payload into orbit. The payload is not intended for a human passenger, but could be used to deliver satellites to orbit or bring supplementary material or equipment payloads to astronauts.
“Every time we double in length the peak energy and pressure are cut in half. Eventually it’s a pipeline and not a rocket,” says Grace, who adds that the gas pressures and temperatures of a kilometer-long launch system would be comparable to that found in natural gas transmission lines.
A New Take on a Old Idea
The concept of using a very large gun to put an object into space is one Grace likes to say he 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 U.S. military developed the Super High Altitude Research Project (SHARP) in the 1980s and achieved a few supersonic test firings. After the project was canceled in the mid 1990s, one of the developers of SHARP tried to develop the technology as a civilian venture called Quicklaunch. That company went defunct in the 2010s.
Founded in 2021, Longshot has a long road from garage demonstrations to a viable launch system. The company made headlines earlier this year with some high-profile investments, including $2.8 million from the U.S. Air Force SBIR and $4M from Starship Ventures, Draper Assoc., and other investors including OpenAI head Sam Altman.
Now the start-up is working to convert these funds into real projects. Working out of the U.S. Navy’s old Alameda facility will allow the construction of larger test firing tubes while still close to the company’s Bay Area headquarters. “It’s an indoor test facility for naval guns, the U.S. Navy more or less abandoned it for 20 years and were going to tear it down,” says Grace. The test facility will allow Longshot to assemble and fire a 300-ft prototype of the launch system. But this is just a prelude for larger-scale tests.
“The Panama Canal for Space”
Longshot is still awaiting NEPA approvals to begin work on a patch of land alongside the Tonapah regional airport near the town of Tonapah in Nye County, Nev., where it plans to build a much larger gun approaching a size that could get a payload into orbit.
“The Nevada site is one-mile long, 100-ft wide, and would have a tube made of steel with a 3-ft interior diameter,” sys Grace. “It will stretch over half a kilometer, and would have multiple [gas injection] boosters along it.” Rather than rely 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 one boom with all that temperature and pressure, we have pop, pop, pop all the way down. And the longer we can make it, the more gentle it can be.”
Once approvals are secured, Grace says construction would involve a lot of the same materials and labor found in natural gas transmission. “Each injection [into the tube] is pressurized gas, so we’ll have a lot of nitrogen handling, hydrogen handling, big compressors. And in terms of material sourcing and flanging and welding, we expect it’s the same kind of pipe welding you find in gas infrastructure.”
Test firings so far have been into catch boxes and berms rather than going for launch distance, but the company is exploring obtaining permission to send a payload “to some altitude,” says Nathan Saichek, Longshot’s chief technology officer. The company has begun in-house designs for the Nevada facility, but Saichek says their aerospace expertise sometimes interferes with construction engineering tasks. “What we need is a civil engineer; aerospace engineers [like us] will over-engineer a concrete pad.”
The Nevada location is also convenient for another line of business Longshot is exploring. The land is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site, where the U.S. military has long run experiments on 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 over the test site, which the U.S. military may find useful for other kinds of tests. “Kind of hypersonic skeet shooting for Uncle Sam to test things out,” he says.
While there are practical military testing applications for their system, Longshot’s real aim is to reach a price point of orbital delivery well below what any rocket-based deliver system could achieve. As it transitions to building larger-scale projects, the company is looking for partners in the civil engineering and construction sector to help them.
“This is the Panama Canal for space. What we are doing in Nevada will change this from a technical project to an infrastructure project,” says Grace. “I would love for one big engineering firm to solve all of our problems, but until I’m spending hundreds of millions of dollars I’m not worth their time. But underneath the surface of the average engineer is an aerospace fan, so we’ll see.”
