| HN Mirror

As long as you launch an object capable of aerodynamic control (glider), you can compensate for wind by launching with excess energy/speed. Launching could be easy by a catapult of a couple hundred meters (50m distance for 100m/s speed gives 10g, 200m distance for 200m/s gives those same 10g.

My best idea would be a flywheel, because for 5kg mass (including a sled/rope), and assuming force-limited operation, you'd need 100kW peak power at the end for the 200m long 200m/s exit speed installation.

Spin the flywheel, and engage a clutch to connect it with a winch that pulls the sled via a (Dyneema) rope. There are magnetic clutches that provide precise control over the force, allowing it to run the glider/rope near their structural limits.

Rough, back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest viability of 25m long catapults that launch suitable freight at ~200m/s, but "suitable" here means ~100g, likely requiring fancy rigid foam fillers for the box and limiting to sufficiently solid freight.

If you figure out how to dig a 100~400m deep, 2~3m diameter hole cheaply, you could save massive horizontal space. Launching out of an elevator shaft of a highrise or on the wall of a tall building could be practical, too. Just drag a thin rope up behind the sled, and use it to pull the main rope back up. The sled should be far too light on it's own. Click/hook in the next glider, while getting the flywheel back up to speed. This should allow 10~20s spacing on a single sled/guide, and up to ~2s if you robot-mount the glider fast enough to the next sled on an array of parallel guide rails. As soon as one glider clears the launch space, the next one could be moved in. That'd be important to the economics of building / converting a tower for such a use case.

And even if the contents require long (and thus horizontal) catapults, it might be feasible to launch the empty glider from much smaller (50m vertical would also solve most clearance issues) facilities to use most of the range for actual delivery.