Silicon Valley start-up raises US$40 million to catapult rockets into space — an idea Jeff Bezos once said had ‘all sorts of practical problems’
Spinlaunch wants to use kinetic energy, sourced from ground-based electricity, for its launch system
By Jeremy Berke
A Silicon Valley start-up wants to catapult rockets into space — and it’s raised US$40 million to do it.
Heavyweight investors like GV (Google’s venture fund), Airbus Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins all contributed to Spinlaunch’s US$35 million series A— announced last week — bringing the total amount the startup has raised to US$40 million.
But the idea at the center of the company’s value proposition — using kinetic energy to whip small satellites and rockets into orbit — is one that Jeff Bezos, the centi-billionaire Amazon CEO and founder of private space company Blue Origin, said had “all sorts of practical problems.”
The Bezos criticism comes from “Space Barons,” a new book from Washington Post reporter Christian Davenport. The book chronicles the early days of the rivalry between Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Bezos in the race to privatise spaceflight.
“It’s the kind of thing you could dispose of as a credible idea in a few hours of analysis,” Bezos said, according to Davenport. “So far as we know, nobody had ever considered that.”