Posts Tagged ‘slingatron’

Just Sling It Into Space

Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

We blogged about the Slingatron years ago, so it’s nice to see it’s back. This time, via Kickstarter

We firmly believe this may be the most important Kickstarter project you will ever have the opportunity to back and to be involved with. The Slingatron is a mechanical hypervelocity mass accelerator that has the potential to dramatically increase flight opportunities and reduce the cost of launching payloads into earth orbit, thus helping to make humanity a truly spacefaring species. The Slingatron technology can be incrementally grown in performance and size to ultimately launch payloads into orbit. Our Kickstarter project goal is to build and demonstrate a modular Slingatron 5 times larger in diameter than the previous existing Mark 2 prototype. It will be used to launch in our laboratory a 1/4 pound payload to 1 kilometer/sec. That is about 2,237 mph! If launched straight up at that speed, a payload would reach an altitude of about 51 km, neglecting air resistance. This Kickstarter project is an important next step in the development of the Slingatron because it will provide vital technical information, practical experience, and cost data on what will be required to build a full-scale Slingatron orbital launch system in the future.

Let’s hope this time they have the foresight to make sure their domain name doesn’t expire.

Check out the test…