Can A Giant Potato Cannon Throw Things Into Space Cheaper Than Rockets? Longshot Think so!

LongShot space are a SF Bay Area company who have resurrected the hypersonic projectile launcher with an eye to scaling it up to the point it could launch payloads into space at a lower cost that traditional rockets. And while this lofty goal is a long way off, they do have a contract to build a launcher able to throw test payloads at mach 5 for the Department of Defense who want to test hypersonic payloads.

This is by no means a new idea, in fact I made a video about gun based launchers over a decade ago https://youtu.be/Moo5nuLWtHs
However a more scientific discussion is found in this paper:
"A comparison of distributed injection hypervelocity accelerators" A. J. Higgins
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268456817_A_comparison_of_distributed_injection_hypervelocity_accelerators

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