The concept of launching a satellite into space using a cannon was first conceived by Isaac Newton in 1678. Since then, various superguns have been built, including the infamous Big Bertha. In 2007, Ballistic Flight Group LLC was founded with the goal of building the first cannon capable of launching a projectile into orbit, which could reduce launch costs by a factor of 10. It is likely that an orbital cannon will eventually be built.
Yes, it certainly would; it just hasn’t been done yet. The concept of launching a satellite into space using a cannon was conceived as early as 1678 by Isaac Newton, in his Principia Mathematica, where he used the concept of an orbital cannon as a thought experiment to illustrate the principles of gravity. In 1865, Jules Verne, the father of science fiction, wrote a story, From the Earth to the Moon, in which a group of daring men used a huge cannon to fire on the moon.
It wasn’t until WW1 that so-called “superguns” actually started to be built. The Germans built a “Paris cannon,” a 28-meter-long cannon capable of firing a 105-kilogram shell over 120 kilometers (75 miles). The idea was to strike the city of Paris from the safety of the German border, and the project was successful. Even though the payload was relatively tiny and the gun was inaccurate, its main effect was psychological. It was the first time such a colossal cannon had been built.
The Germans also built superguns for World War II, such as the infamous railway gun, Big Bertha, which was again used to subdue Paris. However, the large guns proved relatively impractical for warfare, as they required a large military detachment for protection and were stationary or slow-moving, making them easy to spot and destroy by air attack.
From the 1950s until his assassination in 1990, the field of superguns was dominated by a rogue physicist turned arms dealer: Gerard Bull. In 1961 Bull built a 36 m gun with the help of the US Navy and in the 1960s used it to launch over 200 atmospheric probes up to an altitude of 180 km (112 mi). This established the feasibility of using cannons to launch payloads in suborbital trajectories.
Much later, in 1988, Bull was commissioned by the Iraqi government to build a “Project Babylon” supergun: a very long-range artillery piece. Although Bull was assassinated before the gun could be completed, a “BaBabylon” gun was built with a 45m barrel and a range of 750km (466mi). Project Babylon’s full guns were to be 156 m long and, if they worked, would be capable of launching a 200 kg payload into orbit on a rocket-propelled projectile at a cost of only 600 US dollars (USD) per kg. But components of the incomplete Babylon gun were later confiscated or destroyed by the United Nations during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
More recently, in 2007, a visionary MIT aerospace engineering graduate, Ben Joseph, founded a company called Ballistic Flight Group LLC, to build the first cannon capable of launching a projectile into orbit. The goal is to use a combination of ramjet and conventional cannon technology to launch a 2000 kg (4400 lb) payload into orbit. This is called ram accelerator technology. If it were to happen, this orbital gun could reduce launch costs by a factor of 10, bringing the current cost of about $5,000 USD per kilogram of payload down to about $500 per kilogram. Since the forces on the payload exceed 2000 gravities, this wouldn’t be a viable way for humans to get into space, but it could be very useful for launching supplies for space stations. The cost of the cannon is estimated at $157 million, which is quite cheap by the standards of today’s launch technologies. It seems fairly certain that an orbital cannon will eventually be built – it’s more a question of “when” than “if.”
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