Amazon Patents A Launch System That Would Use A Long Whip To Fling Payload Into The Air Or Into Space

Amazon Patents A Launch System That Would Use A Long Whip To Fling Payload Into The Air Or Into Space

   Most of the writing I do on this blog deals with conventional launch vehicles utilizing standard propellants. There other ideas for how to get payloads into orbit. Amazon just patented a system to whip small payload into space.   

Gur Kimchi is the Amazon Prime Air Vice President. According to their website, Amazon Prime Air is “a future delivery system from Amazon designed to safely get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles, also called drones. Prime Air has great potential to enhance the services we already provide to millions of customers by providing rapid parcel delivery that will also increase the overall safety and efficiency of the transportation system.”    

Kimchi and Amazon inventor Louis LeRoi LeGrand III filed a patent application in 2017 for a launch system that would use a miles-long whip controlled by a swarm of drones to launch payloads into low Earth orbit. Then orbiting platforms would use tethers to transfer the payloads to higher orbits. More mundane applications were mentioned in the patent such as using small versions of the system to launch drones or other aerial vehicles from ships at sea or from planes in the air. Packages could be thrown to an airship (covered by an earlier patent) that would serve as a flying fulfillment center. The whip launch patented was published this week.   

Amazon has filed a number of bizarre patents which were never actually turned into hardware and this may prove to be the case with the whip launch system. An Amazon spokesman said, “Patents take multiple years to receive and do not necessarily reflect our current product roadmap. Like many companies, we file a number of forward-looking patent applications that explore the full possibilities of new technology.”    

Kimchi and LeGrand said in their patent application, “Existing methods of launching aerial vehicles generally rely on energy-inefficient processes. For example, in order to launch a payload at high speed, conventional processes utilize fuel, e.g., rocket fuel, to launch aerial vehicles. In addition, the fuel must be carried by the aerial vehicle that is being launched, thereby increasing the weight of the aerial vehicle and requiring correspondingly more energy to complete such a launch. Accordingly, it may be desirous to launch aerial vehicles and/or their payloads at high speed using energy-efficient, controlled and repeatable processes.”    

Based on the description in the application, Amazon could use the whip launch system to send thousands of satellites into orbit for its Project Kuiper broadband data constellation. Project Kuiper will take as much as a decade to deploy three thousand two hundred and thirty six satellites in order for the full constellation to bring the Internet to “tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet.” The inventors considered a lot of space-based applications. They discussed such topics as low Earth orbit versus geostationary Earth orbits, orbital inclination, Hohmann transfer orbits and ways to control tethers on platforms used to change the orbit of satellites.    

One of the main features of the whip launch system involves the use of aerial vehicles attached along the length of the whip. These vehicles could be quadcopters that draw current from the whip or they could be heavier duty aircraft. The system would use swarm intelligence to control the attached aerial vehicles to differentially impart speed to different parts of the whip. The result would be that payloads at the end of the whip were accelerated to supersonic velocities. The aerial vehicles could reposition themselves along the whip as needed to launch a whole sequence of payloads. The whips could be up to five hundred miles long.    

There is a space startup called Spinlaunch that is developing a giant catapult to fling payloads into orbit. Outside experts have studied the specifications for the Spinlaunch system and say that it could work. However, the payloads would have to have their own conventional rockets to increase their velocity.