2024-12-10
10 分钟The Economist Hello, this is Alok Jha,
host of Babbage, our weekly podcast on science and technology.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
We've chosen an unmissable article from the latest edition of The Economist.
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Calling a firm spin launch in an industry where the first part of that name is a way of life might seem a hostage to fortune.
But though the company is no slouch at PR,
spin here refers to how its cargos will be dispatched from Earth's surface by an armature rotating inside a vacuum chamber rather than on a rocket.
After an hour's steady acceleration,
the projectile will be fired out of the chamber at 2.2 kilometres a second.
Only when it is around 62 kilometres up will a small motor ignite to carry it the rest of the way into orbit.
SpinLaunch in Long Beach is part of a cluster of new space firms in and around Los Angeles.
They are heirs to a century-old aerospace tradition, rebooted in 2002 when Elon Musk,
a then little-known entrepreneur,
rented a warehouse in El Segundo for a start-up called SpaceX.
The 200 kilogram payloads that SpinLaunch will handle are minuscule compared with those now launched by SpaceX,
whose Falcon 9 rockets can loft nearly 23 tonnes.
But small can be beautiful.
The Electron launch vehicles made by Rocket Lab,
one of SpinLaunch's neighbours, have only slightly larger loads, 320 kilograms.