Longshot wants to replace rockets with a very large gun.
The startup is building a cannon designed to fire cargo into orbit, skipping the usual stack of fuel, engines, and controlled burns that define a rocket launch. The pitch is cheaper, more frequent trips to space to support space-based data centers, part of a growing push to move AI's power-hungry server farms off a planet that is running short on electricity and cooling capacity. Longshot is set to demo the concept at a major startup conference, the kind of event where young companies pitch big, expensive-sounding ideas to a room full of investors.
Gun-launched payloads aren't a new idea - Gerald Bull's Project HARP fired shells toward the edge of space in the 1960s, and SpinLaunch has more recently tried a spinning kinetic launcher for satellites. What's new is pairing that old idea with orbital data centers, a concept that only makes sense if the economics of launch get dramatically cheaper than anything SpaceX or its rivals currently offer.
A gun powerful enough to reach orbit, and cargo tough enough to survive being fired from one, are both still open engineering problems. Rockets won out for a reason.