Longshot Space is an aerospace pioneering company which has just concluded a funding round of over $5 million, which comprised venture capital and non-dilutive funding from the TACFI program of the U.S. Air Force. This funding will aid the development of a so-called radical kinetic launch system, aimed to replace conventional rockets with a giant miles-long “gun”. The company’s aim is to significantly lower the cost of launching payloads into space-ultimately boasting an incredibly attractive $10 per kilogram while the market price today is roughly $6,000 per kilogram for ridesharing on SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
The exciting concept is that of payloads accelerating gradually up to hypersonic speeds before being launched into orbit. To be able to do this, Longshot is building a 500-meter-long prototype in the Nevada desert; the company has also moved its testing from Oakland, California, where it had been doing its work. This was necessary because cityscapes are not suitable as homes for payloads that are growing in size and could also represent a threat to urban populations. The Oakland prototype of Longshot overshot the 4.6 Mach benchmark, but subsequent tests would have needed even longer tubes and abundant supplies of the highly flammable hydrogen gas that led the company to close the Oakland operation for safety reasons.
The chosen location at Tonopah, Nevada, offers space for safe high-speed testing. “We’d kinda rather not blow ourselves and other people up,” said Longshot CEO Mike Grace, encapsulating another important reason the company had for leaving a testing ground that wasn’t quite up to its standards. The Tonopah region is also steeped in aerospace development history, having been associated with the F-117 stealth bomber, among other oddities of tourism such as the Clown Motel.
The long shot works with two primary principles: an accelerant gas to push a plate forward with multiple injections and squeezing the payload from the sides. The first system into Nevada is a multi-injection gun with a 30-inch diameter that is squeezed and designed to achieve Mach 7 without the squeezing mechanism.
This ambitious project was designed with the aim of diminishing gravity forces upon lift-off for payloads. The idea was to achieve a level of g-forces in the range of 500 to 600 times manageable. To get an idea of how much more extreme that would be, the force a traditional rocket exerts is roughly on the order of 3 Gs when it launches. Particularly appealing is Longshot’s approach for payloads and missions that cannot tolerate the extreme conditions imposed by other kinetic launch systems, such as SpinLaunch where the payload is accelerated to over 10,000 Gs.
The latest round saw attendance of prominent investors, including the likes of Starship Ventures and Myelin VC. Longshot Space can now move ahead with the FAA’s approvals to build its new launch system in Nevada now that the firm has secured financial backing. The firm has also proposed in the Department of Defense’s Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonics Test Bed MACH-TB program that seeks private industry’s capabilities for hypersonic testing.
