The idea sounds like pure science fiction: a giant cannon that hurls satellites toward orbit at 28,400 km/h, using raw kinetic energy instead of towering rockets. Yet a new generation of space engineers is trying to turn that vision into hardware, echoing a concept Jules Verne imagined 160 years ago and forcing the launch industry to rethink what it means to leave Earth.
Rather than strapping payloads to columns of burning fuel, these projects treat space access as a problem of extreme velocity, precision engineering, and clever economics. If they succeed, the same basic physics that once inspired a Victorian novel could reshape how quickly, and how cheaply, humanity can build infrastructure beyond the atmosphere.
From Verne’s Moon Gun to real hypersonic launchers
Long before anyone lit a rocket engine, science fiction was already sketching out ballistic routes to space. When Jules Verne wrote his novel From Earth to the Moon, he imagined a colossal cannon that would fire a crewed capsule skyward, a vertical barrel sunk into the ground and aimed straight at the heavens. In that story, the launch site, the engineering debates, and even the social spectacle around the shot all revolved around the same basic challenge that still defines orbital flight today: reaching the brutal speeds needed to break free of Earth’s grip, without destroying the vehicle or its passengers in the process.
Modern physics has since put hard numbers on why Verne’s cannon would have been lethal. Analyses of the concept show that a projectile accelerated to orbital speed over the length of a gun barrel would experience crushing forces, on the order of thousands of g, far beyond what a human body can survive. Technical discussions of Verne’s idea, including work that revisits the scenario beginning with the phrase When Jules Verne, calculate that the acceleration required to reach space this way would be closer to an artillery shell than a gentle rocket ascent. That is why today’s cannon concepts focus on rugged satellites and cargo, not people, even as they borrow the same audacious spirit that powered Verne’s fiction.
Verne’s surprising technical foresight
Even if his launch method was deadly, Verne’s instincts about spaceflight were often uncannily accurate. In his lunar tale, Verne placed the launch in North America and imagined that The United States would be the nation to send the first crewed vehicle around the Moon, a prediction that would not be fulfilled for more than a century. Historical reviews of his work note that Verne’s analysis of the mission architecture, from the circumlunar trajectory to the recovery of the capsule by a naval vessel, anticipated key elements of the Apollo program with eerie precision.
That mix of wild imagination and grounded calculation is exactly what today’s space-gun engineers are trying to channel. Verne did not have access to modern materials science or computational fluid dynamics, but he understood that reaching the Moon was a problem of energy, velocity, and careful planning. By revisiting his ideas with twenty-first century tools, companies now hope to keep the boldness while discarding the parts that modern physics has rendered impossible, turning a literary moon gun into a practical way to loft hardware into orbit.
The modern “giant cannon” chasing 28,400 km/h
In industrial hangars and desert test sites, that literary vision is being rebuilt as steel, composites, and vacuum chambers. One hypersonic launcher concept has been described as a giant cannon that accelerates payloads to 28,400 KM/h, a speed that puts it in the same league as orbital velocities and makes the comparison to Verne’s gun more than just a metaphor. Reporting on this project notes that its designers explicitly frame their work as a real-world echo of a story imagined 160 Years Ago, a deliberate nod to the way fiction can seed engineering ambition.
The hardware behind that poetic framing is anything but whimsical. At full scale, the system is designed to fire compact satellites at 28,400 KM/h using a long, evacuated barrel and a precisely timed burst of energy, with the goal of slashing the cost of launch and turning access to orbit into something closer to industrial logistics than bespoke rocketry. Coverage of the project, including detailed descriptions under the heading This Giant Cannon Propels Satellites, emphasizes how closely the basic idea tracks Verne’s narrative while relying on modern materials, sensors, and guidance to keep the payload intact.
SpinLaunch and the rise of kinetic launch startups
Alongside linear guns, another group of engineers is betting on rotational energy to solve the same problem. One high profile example is a US company that has built a massive vacuum chamber and spinning arm to fling payloads toward the sky, using a kind of mechanical slingshot instead of a traditional booster. The firm behind this approach, which presents its technology and test footage on its official site at SpinLaunch, argues that by front-loading most of the energy on the ground, it can shrink the rocket stage that finishes the climb to orbit and dramatically cut costs.
The physics is similar to the gun concept: accelerate a small, rugged satellite to a significant fraction of orbital speed, then let a compact propulsion system handle the final push and orbital insertion. In both cases, the payload must be engineered to survive extreme g-forces and rapid transitions from vacuum to atmosphere, which is why these early systems are targeting hardened electronics and “pancake-like” form factors rather than delicate telescopes or crewed capsules. The convergence of these ideas suggests that kinetic launch is becoming a serious alternative track in the broader commercial space race, not just a quirky side project.
Longshot’s Mach‑23 “potato gun” vision
Perhaps the most vivid expression of this trend comes from a California startup that openly describes its launcher as a kind of Mach‑23 potato gun for satellites. In interviews, the company’s leadership has framed the project as a way to use a very long barrel, high pressure gas, and precise timing to accelerate payloads to hypersonic speeds before they ever see a rocket plume. One detailed profile notes that the concept of using cannons to blast people or things into space has been around since at least the 19th century, but that this team is focused squarely on uncrewed payloads and modern materials, a distinction highlighted in coverage that examines how the concept of using cannons is being reimagined for the satellite era.
By targeting speeds on the order of Mach‑23, the company is effectively trying to give its payloads a massive “head start” toward orbit, so that a small, relatively cheap rocket stage can handle the rest. The approach borrows heavily from artillery engineering, but layers in modern guidance, adaptive structures, and careful trajectory planning to keep the satellite from burning up or tumbling uncontrollably. If it works, the result would be a launch system that looks less like a traditional spaceport and more like a sprawling piece of industrial infrastructure, with a long, fixed barrel and a steady cadence of shots rather than occasional, towering launches.
A 40‑kilometer gun and the economics of space infrastructure
The scale of these ambitions is perhaps clearest in plans for a 40-kilometer cannon that could loft satellites without relying on conventional rockets at all. A California company has begun early fire tests of this system, which is envisioned as a multi-stage gun stretching tens of kilometers, using sequential energy inputs to keep accelerating the payload along its length. Reporting on the project, including a detailed account titled Satellites, And the First Fire Tests Just Happened, stresses that the goal is not just technical novelty but a fundamental shift in the economics of space infrastructure.
By investing in a fixed, reusable launcher of that length, the company hopes to turn orbital access into something closer to rail freight than air travel, with high upfront capital costs but very low marginal costs per shot. The 40-kilometer figure is not just a curiosity, it reflects the need to spread acceleration over a long distance so that the g‑loads on the payload stay within survivable limits for electronics and structures. If such a system can be built and operated reliably, it could change the calculus for everything from broadband constellations to on‑orbit manufacturing, making it viable to send up large numbers of small, rugged components that assemble into bigger systems in space.
Spinning cannons and “pancake” microsatellites
Not all kinetic launchers rely on straight barrels. One US company is developing a giant spinning cannon designed to hurl hundreds of flat, disk-like satellites into space, using rotational energy to build up speed before release. Coverage of the project describes how this system aims to fling “pancake-like” microsatellites faster than a speeding bullet, with the payloads shaped to minimize aerodynamic stress as they punch through the atmosphere. A detailed report on the effort, labeled as US company to use giant spinning cannon, underscores how much of the innovation lies in satellite design as much as in the launcher itself.
By standardizing on thin, robust form factors, the company can optimize both the launcher and the payloads for the same extreme environment, rather than trying to adapt fragile, traditional satellites to a brutal ride. The vision is to fire off batches of these microsatellites in rapid succession, then have them maneuver into formation once they reach space, building constellations piece by piece. It is a very different mental model from the classic image of a single, large satellite riding atop a multi-stage rocket, and it hints at a future where orbital infrastructure is assembled from swarms of small, mass-produced components.
Engineering around g‑forces and atmospheric punishment
All of these concepts share a common enemy: acceleration. To reach orbital or near‑orbital speeds over the length of a gun barrel or spinning arm, payloads must endure g‑loads that would crush a human and can easily shatter conventional hardware. Technical analyses of Verne’s original cannon, including those that revisit his scenario under the heading From Earth, Moon, estimate accelerations on the order of thousands of g, a reminder of just how unforgiving this regime can be. Modern kinetic launchers try to tame that by lengthening barrels, staging energy inputs, and carefully shaping trajectories, but they still operate in a world where every component must be tested to survive enormous mechanical stress.
Then there is the atmosphere itself. A projectile leaving a gun or spinning launcher at hypersonic speed slams into dense air that can heat its surface, strip away material, and destabilize its flight path. Engineers respond with aerodynamic shrouds, ablative coatings, and guidance systems that can make tiny corrections at incredible speeds, but the margin for error is small. That is why many of these systems pair the initial kinetic boost with a small rocket stage that ignites only after the worst of the atmosphere is behind them, combining the brute force of a cannon with the finesse of a conventional launch vehicle.
Why a Verne-style launcher could rewrite launch economics
Despite the technical hurdles, the economic logic behind these giant cannons is compelling. Traditional rockets are mostly disposable stacks of fuel, with only a small fraction of their mass devoted to the payload that actually earns revenue. Kinetic launchers invert that ratio by concentrating investment in a fixed piece of infrastructure that can be reused thousands of times, while each payload carries only a small, relatively cheap propulsion system for final orbital maneuvers. Analyses of hypersonic gun concepts, including those that describe how Longshot’s launch system could reshape satellite launch and space logistics, argue that this shift could drive down per‑kilogram costs in a way that even reusable rockets struggle to match.
If launch becomes cheap and frequent enough, it changes not just how many satellites go up, but what kinds of business models become viable in orbit. Concepts like on‑orbit manufacturing, large-scale debris cleanup, or dense sensor networks for climate monitoring all depend on being able to send up hardware regularly without breaking budgets. A world where a 40-kilometer gun or a spinning cannon can fire off batches of rugged microsatellites at industrial cadence would look very different from today’s carefully scheduled launch manifests, and it would owe as much to a 19th century novelist as to any modern rocket scientist.
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