The idea that an object weighing thousands of pounds can punch its way into space after spinning in circles on Earth’s surface can be hard to fathom. It might even sound crazy, and the company has a lot to prove to shake its critics. So far it has managed to spin an 11-pound dummy payload at more than 4,000 mph and send it crashing into a steel wall. Between those tests and the edge of space, however, are roughly a hundred miles and a whole lot of air resistance. Never mind the engineering work needed to build a centrifuge 100 yards wide, with an arm strong enough to support a roughly SUV-sized rocket.

Yaney hopes this is the year he achieves vindication. The company plans to conduct its first suborbital launches this winter at a new test site in New Mexico. Assuming the system works, Spinlaunch promises to reduce the cost of sending small satellites into space by a factor of almost 20. But the bigger deal may be its launch cadence. Yaney predicts the mass accelerator will be able to do five launches a day; most rocket companies can’t do that many launches in a month. In the era of mega-satellite constellations, which will see thousands of small satellites sent to low Earth orbit over the next decade, Yaney believes Spinlaunch’s time has come.

Four Million Bucks and a Crazy Idea

Like so many space entrepreneurs, Yaney has been obsessed with the cosmos all his life. But it took until 2014 for him to try to turn his passion into a career. According to Yaney, he had been struggling to build a media startup at the time. When he couldn't secure funding for it, he decided to move on. As he contemplated what to do next, Yaney’s mind turned again and again to a Cold War military project called HARP, in which the United States Army used a giant gun to shoot projectiles into space. HARP proved it was possible to get to space without a rocket, so Yaney set out to build a kinetic launch system of his own. He cobbled together a working proof of concept, essentially a motorized sling that could spin a bullet-sized projectile up to hypersonic speeds. He took it to a few angel investors and secured a small amount of funding.

But he needed help. In late 2014 he called up his old roommate from boarding school, Ryan Hampton, a whiz at construction and industrial operations. Hampton was running underwater welding operations on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico when Yaney made his pitch. As Hampton recalls, “He said, ‘I’ve got 4 million bucks and a crazy idea, want to come with me?’”

Hampton couldn’t resist. In January 2015 he flew out to see what Yaney had built. It wasn’t much. Yaney showed off his tabletop centrifuge and shared his spreadsheets full of calculations. But Hampton was hooked: He saw that SpinLaunch was “gonna be one hell of a project,” and signed on as employee number one.

Yaney had the ideas and Hampton the construction skills, but they still needed some aerospace engineers. So on a warm spring day a few months later, the pair climbed into Yaney’s Cessna and flew out to the edge of the Mojave desert, where dozens of college students had gathered to test their rockets. The duo was hoping to recruit a few of them.

One of their targets was David Wrenn, a junior at San Diego State University. He had been doing phone interviews with SpinLaunch for weeks, and the circumstances weren’t ideal for an in-person interview. “I had been awake for like 36 hours at that point, so I was semi-insane when I met Jonathan,” Wrenn recalls. Still, the meeting went well. He took a leave of absence from college and flew out to San Francisco to join SpinLaunch, where he now works as a senior mechanical engineer.

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Hampton says the early days of SpinLaunch reminded him a lot of life on an oil rig. Employees lived and worked at an old microprocessor plant SpinLaunch had taken over just down the road from the Googleplex. When Wrenn arrived, the living spaces were spare. “At that point the kitchen was like a microwave and a plastic table,” he says. “You had to have a lot of vision or nothing to lose, one or the other.” When they weren’t working, the SpinLaunch crew lifted weights together in a makeshift gym, watched movies in a “home theater,” or relaxed around a fire pit—the converted remnants of Yaney’s original tabletop centrifuge.