Quicklaunch is an inactive US company attempting to use a type of space gun to launch payloads into

low Earth orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an geocentric orbit, orbit around Earth with a orbital period, period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an orbital eccentricity, eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial object ...

. It is a

university spin-off University spin-offs (also known as university spin-outs) are companies that transform technological inventions developed from university research that are likely to remain unexploited otherwise. They are a subcategory of research spin-offs. Prom ...

of the SHARP project which ended 2005.

Quicklauncher

The Quicklaunch proposed firing apparatus was a

light-gas gun The light-gas gun is an apparatus for physics experiments. It is a highly specialized gun designed to generate extremely high velocities. It is usually used to study high-speed impact phenomena ( hypervelocity research), such as the formation of ...

using

hydrogen Hydrogen is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol H and atomic number 1. It is the lightest and abundance of the chemical elements, most abundant chemical element in the universe, constituting about 75% of all baryon, normal matter ...

as the working gas and natural gas as the explosive heat source. Heating and pre-pressurizing the hydrogen working gas takes 10 minutes before the shot and most of the hydrogen is recovered by a muzzle muffler at the end of the launch tube to be reused for subsequent launches. The gun would be, for the most part, submerged in the ocean. Its horizontal and vertical direction (

azimuth An azimuth (; from ) is the horizontal angle from a cardinal direction, most commonly north, in a local or observer-centric spherical coordinate system. Mathematically, the relative position vector from an observer ( origin) to a point ...

and

elevation The elevation of a geographic location (geography), ''location'' is its height above or below a fixed reference point, most commonly a reference geoid, a mathematical model of the Earth's sea level as an equipotential gravitational equipotenti ...

) could be adjusted based on customer launch requirements. The proposed launcher was designed to give projectiles an initial speed of while the Earth

orbital speed In gravitationally bound systems, the orbital speed of an astronomical body or object (e.g. planet, moon, artificial satellite, spacecraft, or star) is the speed at which it orbits around either the barycenter (the combined center of mass) or ...

is . The projectile design therefore included a one-stage rocket which ignites some time after launch. The designed payloads could include spacecraft, satellites, consumable, water or fuel to supply a

propellant depot An orbital propellant depot is a cache of propellant that is placed in orbit around Earth or another body to allow spacecraft or the transfer stage of the spacecraft to be fueled in space. It is one of the types of space resource depots that ha ...

in orbit. Projected costs to orbit were .

Project phases

# A one-year 2 million dollar project to break the record height of for a projectile fired from a space gun, which was achieved in

Project HARP Project HARP, for high altitude research project, was a joint venture of the United States Department of Defense and Canada's Department of National Defence created with the goal of studying ballistics of re-entry vehicles and collecting uppe ...

. # A two-year 10 million dollar project to launch to orbit a payload each time. # A two-year 50 million dollar project to launch to orbit a payload each time. # A three-year 500 million dollar project to build and operate multiple long Quicklaunchers called the QL-1000 that are capable of launching propellant payloads to orbit. The goal is to supply of fuel to orbital propellant depots yearly.

Hiatus

In a 2016 article, Hunter remarked that the work had been put in stasis due in part to

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman. He is known for his leadership of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has been considered the wealthiest person in th ...

's company,

SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly referred to as SpaceX, is an America, American space technology company headquartered at the SpaceX Starbase, Starbase development site in Starbase, Texas. Since its founding in 2002, the compa ...

, taking up the challenge of reducing costs to orbit. Hunter however invited someone with a similar level of money and motivation, to take a fresh look at the approach. Later, Hunter ran a new start-up called Green Launch that is also developing a space

References

External links

Shooting right for the stars with one gargantuan gas gun
- Excerpt from 1996 Smithsonian Magazine on Hunter's work with SHARP. The final paragraph contains the financial assessment. *SHARP Gun Accelerates Scramjets to Mach 9", by William B Scott, Aviation Week and Space Technology, September 9, 1996, page 63.
Video Interview of John Hunter - Gas Station In Space
moonandback 2011
Audio Interview of John Hunter
on The space show * detailed PDF of a land based version {{Non-rocket spacelaunch Space guns Aerospace companies of the United States Private spaceflight companies Space access

Quicklauncher

Project phases

Hiatus

See also

References

External links