A kinetic launcher fires a 0.5 kg projectile at Mach 4.5 from the ground, avoiding the weight penalty that makes rockets carry 99% dead mass to orbit. Rockets fail once every 500 launches, a failure rate we'd never accept in cars.
This delightfully overblown piece of sewer pipe you see behind you is a gun that can push about half a kilogram up to about Mach 4.5. And like the idea of the super gun was sort of the same of the rocket in the sense that we're just going to launch a projectile super far. Super, super fast. A rocket has to carry all the energy and infrastructure and fly. Right. A kinetic launch system is just make it go super fast and let it go. So all the speed is being invested on the ground versus being invested in flight. You know, really, really great rockets deliver like 1% of their total mass to orbit. That's bad. And if they only blow up catastrophically 1 out of 500 times, that's an amazingly good rocket. And if you were to apply that standard to, say, your automobile, right? You know, it would be the size of a house and it would kill you monthly.
