In a former U.S. Navy facility outside San Francisco, engineers are routinely launching metal payloads at speeds faster than most aircraft can fly. There are no flames, fuel tanks, or multi stage boosters. Instead, a long steel barrel, pressurized gas chambers, and an explosive burst of air power each shot. The company behind the effort, Longshot Space Technologies, is reworking an idea imagined more than a century ago and turning it into a modern launch system that could bypass rockets entirely.
The concept traces back to Jules Verne, who predicted a giant cannon that could launch space-bound vehicles in the 1865 novel “From the Earth to the Moon.” The idea was fiction then, but Longshot is betting that modern engineering and materials science can make a version of it work at orbital speeds.
The space cannon from the novel “From the Earth to the Moon” from Jules Verne’s 1865 prediction. Credit: De Montaut/Wikipedia
At prototype scale, the company has already fired more than 100 test launches using a 20-meter barrel, reaching speeds over Mach 4. A larger 37-meter version is now being built, but these early systems are just preview units. The full scale design stretches an astonishing 40 kilometers. Rather than burning fuel to generate momentum, the system uses consecutive pressurized chambers to accelerate a projectile down the barrel until it exits at nearly 28,400 kilometers per hour. That velocity is fast enough to send cargo toward low Earth orbit with only a small propulsion kick at the end.
Engineers behind the program say this method is designed strictly for materials, not people. Cargo moving through the cannon experiences crushing forces far beyond what any crewed vehicle could endure. But that limitation is also what makes it so economical. Hardened cargo such as metals, batteries, satellite components, solar arrays, propellant tanks, and building modules can withstand high-g firing, reducing the need for rockets to carry mass that is not sensitive or fragile.
Even with protective designs, the physics are unforgiving. At hypersonic speeds, air resistance heats surfaces to temperatures above 1,600 degrees Celsius. To handle that, the project uses ablative shells that burn away during ascent, protecting the payload sealed inside. When the shell falls away, a small onboard motor handles final insertion into orbit.
Longshot’s estimated launch price—around ten dollars per kilogram—would undercut conventional rocket launch costs by more than 99 percent if achieved at scale. That possibility has attracted investors in Silicon Valley, including several figures already active in space technology. The U.S. Air Force has also awarded development contracts, partly because the cannon doubles as a hypersonic testing platform for materials and defense systems.
If Longshot succeeds, rockets will still be needed for astronauts, scientific missions, and delicate instruments, but bulk space cargo could be fired into orbit through an industrial launch gun. What once sounded like fiction is now firing test shots in a hangar, and the consequences could reshape how space infrastructure gets built.