00:12:35 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:12:35] S0: Their version is a centrifuge, Yeah, [00:12:37] S1: they're sort of like the difference is, we invest the energy over distance, and they invest it over time. So they spin up the centrifuge over a couple of hours. Our shots, you know, a full full scale system shot would take about two seconds to go down the length of the barrel, and then, you know, another ten, fifteen seconds to transit the atmosphere, and you're in orbit in less than a minute. Oh, yeah. So Spinlaunch, they they built a centrifuge, and they spun cubesats up to 10,000 g's and demonstrated that they work fine. And they they demonstrated a... I think it was either a control moment gyro or a momentum wheel. Basically, a bit of kit that you put on a satellite that is used for orienting a satellite, and they they spun that thing up on their centrifuge and demonstrated that it can handle 10,000 gs. And so it... They sort of demonstrated it's totally possible to design and build hardware that handles, frankly, like we think that's insane g loading. We're aiming to have our g loads be much much less than that. You know, if you take your cell phone, and you know, I I drop it onto the ground right there, know, that was four or 500 g's that that cell phone experienced right there just just... Maybe not... This is sort of soft carpet. But if that if that was concrete, you know, that'd be 500 g's easy. [00:13:46] S0: I I admire the commitment to the... To making the point. I assume you've done that before.
00:13:46 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:13:46] S0: I I admire the commitment to the... To making the point. I assume you've done that before. [00:13:53] S1: All the time. Yeah. No. Like, your your phones are really robust. Like, you know... He's like, I've [00:13:57] S0: gone through, like, 14 different phones.
00:13:57 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:13:57] S0: gone through, like, 14 different phones. [00:14:01] S1: This is... It's... It was a little bit risky. This is a relatively new phone. I don't have a case on it. But my my old phone, I've done it. I don't... I can't even say how many times. But but the... But I also I would hold it six feet up and drop it on the concrete. Like cell phones are are pretty robust. They're designed to handle hundreds of g's repeatedly, and the worst that often happens is like your screen gets chipped. Right? The electronics inside that thing, it's never the case that like, I dropped my phone and the the CPU popped off the board or something, right? We're designing the system to keep the g loading less than a thousand g's, and so we think that basically at that g loading, the electronics will have no problem surviving. That's that's, I would say, non controversial. The things that would be challenging is if you've got some geo sat might have giant solar panel wings on it that extend out. The largest geo sets, their wings extend out larger than a seven forty seven. So if you're gonna have these like, colossal deployables that are weight optimized and, you know, ephemeral things, like, yeah, those, you're probably gonna have to put some gussets on that. Or like, you know, make it out of steel instead of aluminum or something like that. But the thing is if you have to bump up the mass of your mechanisms by 10 or 15%, and in exchange you can launch for an order
00:15:15 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:15:15] S0: of 80 Right, plus it's a trade off. Like if you were driving down the cost of launch, there is a marginal cost to make it launchable, right, again, the economics become physics problems. [00:15:25] S1: We have a dream that like if you wanted to do a moon lander, instead of like going and designing a moon lander, you take a John Deere tractor, rip out the gas motor, stick in an electric motor, and replace the rubber wheels with aluminum wheels or something, stick in a shipping container, and send it to the moon. Like, because that would be so much cheaper than, like, custom designing a specialized aluminum moon landing. No, when it's $50 a kilogram, who cares? It's twice as expensive to send it to space as it is to it to Europe. Who cares? Presumably, [00:16:03] S0: use in environments like the moon is also one of the advantages here, right? Where you can do even more with this sort of a concept and probably drive down the cost even more. [00:16:13] S1: Oh, if we put one of these things on the moon? [00:16:16] S0: Yeah, mean is that something you're considering?
00:16:16 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:16:16] S0: Yeah, mean is that something you're considering? [00:16:18] S1: I mean, I think it's totally possible. There's a lot of oxygen on the moon. You know, you have to bake the rocks to get it out. But you know, the thing, we're we're a gas based accelerator. So you know, space is not notorious for being full of gas. But but you know, the moon would be reasonable because, yeah, even with an oxygen based accelerator, you know, speed of sound of oxygen's in the neighborhood of 300 and something meters per second. So we could easily go, you know, a kilometer. Exit velocity from the moon is like a kilometer per second. So we could totally do something on the moon with oxygen. We don't need hydrogen on the moon.
00:16:52 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:16:52] S0: Okay so that kind of brings me to a topic. I think you kind of just went through and sort of experienced it in real time there, which is one of the things I like about Longshot story and the giant potato gun is it sounds a little bit like a high school science project. I mean that in the most complimentary sense, but then taken to its logical conclusion. But there is a mindset behind that that is sort of, I guess, like a beginner's or learner's mindset, which is to say it is a credulous and curious mindset instead of an incredulous skeptical one. And it seems like there are so many ideas where it's very easy for them to not happen because you describe it, you're like we're gonna make a giant 15 kilometer long space gun and we're gonna shoot stuff into space. And like to most people that just sounds like, no you're not. That's insane. And then someone, if you are the type of person who can be like, let me do some math. [00:17:56] S1: What's the next step? What's the first thing I would need to figure out?