Longshot Wants to Fire Cargo Into Space From a Gun — at $50 per Kilogram

By Grace Kim

Longshot Space Technology says it can put payloads in space for $50 per kilogram — roughly $22 per pound — if its plan to replace a rocket's first stage with a ground-based gun pays off. The Alameda, California startup has raised about $20 million from venture investors to chase that number.

For context: the much-hyped orbital data center industry needs launch prices to fall to around $300 per kilogram just to get started. Longshot's target undercuts that by a factor of six.

What is Longshot actually building?

Cofounders CEO Mike Grace and CTO Nato Saichek are scaling multi-injection guns — barrel designs that give a projectile extra boosts as it travels down the tube. The US built versions of this technology for World War II and 1960s-era research programs. The concept itself dates back to Jules Verne.

The hardware is straightforward to picture: a steel pipe mounted horizontally above the ground, with tanks of high-pressure gas attached at ports along its length. As the projectile moves down the barrel, the tanks fire at precise moments to accelerate it. Longshot has hit Mach 4 so far.

Grace frames the strategy as borrowed from SpaceX. "You can build something that has a lot of novelty, or you can do something really hard. You don't get to do both," he said. He describes SpaceX as a company that has "taken classically de-risked technology and scaled it aggressively" — NASA rocket research in their case, multi-injection guns in Longshot's.

The takeaway: no new physics, just old artillery engineering pushed to industrial scale.

How big do these guns get?

The company is firing a 70-foot gun with a 6-inch diameter at a test site near Barstow, California, and says it reaches near-hypersonic speeds. Next up: a 140-foot-long gun with a 30-inch diameter at its Alameda site. After that comes the build-out of a 30-inch diameter, 328-foot gun — with plans to extend it to about 3,000 feet, which would make it the largest gun on the planet. The team says it will launch 220-pound payloads at Mach 8.

And no, the barrel doesn't need to tilt upward. Longshot's projectile is a lifting body, so its shape generates lift and it aerodynamically gains altitude after leaving the gun.

The scale-up path is steep but mapped: each gun roughly proves the last one's numbers.

Who's paying today?

The US military is. It has awarded Longshot several contracts for hypersonic testing, which funds the ongoing gun development while the company proves the core technology.

Grace wants one of these guns built on a US military installation such as Fort Bliss, as infrastructure for testing the next generation of American interceptors. His pitch is blunt: "If you want to practice shooting down a Chinese or Russian hypersonic missile, wouldn't it be nice not to pay $30 million for that?"

"This is a way for half a million, a quarter of a million bucks, of doing hypersonic clay pigeons, throw them and shoot them down, and do it really fast and really cheap," Grace said.

In plain words: defense contracts are the bridge revenue between today's test range and tomorrow's orbital launcher.

Can a gun really reach orbit?

The team is confident it can scale the current design to accelerate payloads to 5 kilometers per second — more than 11,000 mph. That's fast enough to reach space if the payload carries its own propulsion and effectively serves as the rocket's second stage.

The catch is size. That gun would need to run 10 kilometers — about 6 miles — long and nearly 10 feet in diameter. Finding sites is the real bottleneck, not engineering. "The hard part is not building the thing, it's finding a place where they will let you build the thing," Saichek said.

The economics remain the draw: the system is cheap to build, cheap to fuel, and highly reusable. Spacecraft would need modification to survive this launch form factor, but at $50 per kilogram, satellite operators will have every reason to try.

Grace and Saichek will lay out more of the roadmap this week at TechCrunch Disrupt, running Tuesday through Thursday in San Francisco.