As many everyday Alamedans joined the rest of America in watching NASA’s livestream of Artemis II circling the moon on TV, other people here on the island were working away in the Longshot Space facility across the lagoon from the USS Hornet on Alameda Point. They’re building a sort of space gun that they hope will be capable of launching a satellite… seriously.
Longshot CEO Mike Grace, who got his early technical experience in the Army as a combat engineer and paratrooper stationed in Afghanistan, according to the San Francisco Business Times, originally built a multi-injection PVC cannon in his garage, which was eventually modified into a 20-foot-long version.
“The prototype fired foam projectiles at Mach 1.8, demonstrating the ability to accelerate projectiles with a multi-injection system with low hardware costs,” the Longshot website states. That laid the groundwork for the construction of Longshot’s accelerator.
The idea for the space gun was based in part on a German weapon built in World War II called the V3, Grace said in a company video.
“In World War II, the Germans built a bunch of crazy super-weapons,” Grace said. “One of them was the V2 [a rocket], the other was called the V3, which was a multi-injection gun. Turns out that wasn’t a very good weapon, but it was a very good way of making things go very, very, very fast at a very low cost. So we think we can build something very similar to the V3 … and use it to put stuff into space.”
The Longshot accelerator “is never going to be appropriate for putting you or me into space,” Grace said, but it will be useful for taking “large stuff to extremely high speeds and putting it directly into orbit.”
How it all began
Grace started the project by firing potato guns in his garage in 2020 and “steadily gained traction,” according to the Business Times. “He hired on employees and moved the project to Oakland — but firing massive space guns in a dense urban area was sure to violate city ordinances, not to mention neighbors’ sensibilities.”
The corporate office remains in West Oakland, but Grace moved the test site to a building on Alameda Point that had formerly been used by the Navy to test the Phalanx gun, a radar-guided, anti-ship weapon. Longshot reportedly shares the space with a group of machinists who build sculptures for Burning Man. The space has 18-inch-thick, high-density concrete walls with steel plates on either end where the projectiles would land, the publication stated.
“Finding this facility just made me super mad that I hadn’t known about it three years earlier,” Grace told the magazine. “It was comically perfect for us.”
Longshot’s big space gun has a 20-foot, 30-inch-thick gun barrel powered by pressurized nitrogen gas. Grace believes it can eventually launch supplies to space colonies much more cheaply than SpaceX rockets. Of course, as the Business Times article points out, that’s a theory that is at best “light-years from fruition, and faces a litany of smaller challenges like acquiring permits in Alameda to larger ones like finding suitable space to build a roughly 10-mile-long gun barrel.”
Meet the CEO
For a guy who runs an aerospace hardware startup, Mike Grace is surprisingly down to earth. In his bio for Longshot’s blog, he started by describing himself as someone who “also does a lot of childcare.”
At the time, he was caring for “the adorable 18-month-old child” of one of his longtime housemates as well as an infant who was then “a tender nine weeks old and just starting to get out of the wrinkly stage.”
So in addition to his 60 hours a week as CEO of Longshot, Grace was doing about 40 hours a week of childcare to help his single-mom housemate who was working full-time at Google, and a friend who was “the lead engineer of the team I tricked into building this awesome space-gun.”
And when he was not working or taking care of a baby, he was spending time with his wife.
“My life is crazy busy and very exhausting,” he wrote. “I also feel the best (emotionally, not necessarily physically) I have ever felt in my life. My every waking moment is spent engaged in acts of significant creation. …The childcare I do is a pure and delightful privilege. Basically, ditto Longshot, my precious little-bitty space-gun prototype.”
