> The company plans on building a larger version of the accelerator, which is capable of launching a payload in excess of 440 pounds (200 kg) and at speeds of over 5,000 miles an hour, plenty of speed to reach low earth orbit.
5000 mph is actually not orbital speed which is approximately 18000 mph.
So will the scaled up version spin a "second stage" fully fueled to launch it?
Yes. I believe the idea is to get the rocket up to where the atmosphere is extremely thin so you don’t need much fuel to complete the journey. The hard part of the initial acceleration through the thick atmosphere which burns most of the fuel is bypassed.
But on the other hand you add a lot of mass to deal with the air heating and increased structural loads. Will be interesting to see if it ends up being worth it.
I'm mostly curious how they deal with the sudden change in load on the spinner.
I believe their plan is smaller satellites. I remember a video saying the Gs weren’t too bad, just in a different direction at first.
The problem is more maximum physical size right now. The centrifuge is only so big. So it couldn’t launch full size satellites (in the initial full scale design) even if they were light enough.
But is fine for launching multiple CubeSat like things at once.
It's "not too bad" in the sense that lots of electronics (e.g. phones) can already withstand the high accelerations - they have to otherwise they'd break every time you dropped them. It's still very high acceleration though.
5000 mph is actually not orbital speed which is approximately 18000 mph.
So will the scaled up version spin a "second stage" fully fueled to launch it?