This video focused too heavily on the flaws of their prototype (vacuum chamber quality, the bearing housing, the angle the rocket came out) and the video production. None of that is nearly as interesting as whether it's possible, and what the hard problems to solve are.
I gather the issues are:
* Keeping the centrifuge from tearing itself apart once it loses the payload.
* Ablation of the skin of the payload from hitting 1atm at hypersonic.
* Aerodynamic instability from emerging from vacuum at tremendous speed (?)
These all seem like hard, but solvable, engineering problems. Undercuts the argument that this is "fundamentally impossible" like the video claims.
Also I didn't note "surviving acceleration" as a deal-breaker. Maybe for satellites or squishy humans it is, but launching raw materials into orbit would be amazingly useful, and e.g. blocks of steel don't care about g-forces
I gather the issues are:
* Keeping the centrifuge from tearing itself apart once it loses the payload.
* Ablation of the skin of the payload from hitting 1atm at hypersonic.
* Aerodynamic instability from emerging from vacuum at tremendous speed (?)
These all seem like hard, but solvable, engineering problems. Undercuts the argument that this is "fundamentally impossible" like the video claims.
Also I didn't note "surviving acceleration" as a deal-breaker. Maybe for satellites or squishy humans it is, but launching raw materials into orbit would be amazingly useful, and e.g. blocks of steel don't care about g-forces