The space economy is evolving at an astonishing rate, with the final frontier quickly emerging as a potential source of tourism, precious metals and scientific breakthroughs we can’t even imagine yet. But if we hope to reach these lofty ambitions, we’ll need a more affordable, efficient alternative to traditional rockets.
What Is Longshot Space?
Longshot Space is a company developing a pneumatic cannon that can propel objects to nearly hypersonic speeds using compressed air. The company’s technology could be used to test the military’s hypersonic weapons, and it could eventually launch materials to space.
Tech moguls like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have dominated this conversation for years, developing reusable rockets at their companies SpaceX and Blue Origin, respectively, to bring down costs and eventually enable the colonization of space. But Mike Grace, a former NASA lab tech, argues that rockets — even reusable ones — are far too expensive to move the gigatons of material humanity would need to establish a lasting foothold beyond Earth. So he’s taken a radically different approach at his startup Longshot Space, developing what is essentially a gigantic, high-powered potato gun that uses pressurized gas to shoot payloads into orbit.
“Rockets are really expensive and fragile,” Grace said in a promotional video. “What we need to do now is we need to move enormous amounts of material to space at the absolute lowest cost.”
Longshot is still in early days, but its approach has already attracted several high-profile backers, including billionaire investor Tim Draper and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (who just so happens to be in a years-long feud with Musk). It’s even been awarded contracts with the U.S. Air Force to work on hypersonic testing. If the company succeeds in making its device a reality, it wouldn’t just compete with SpaceX and the like — it would change how humanity goes to space entirely.
What Is Longshot Space?
Longshot Space is an Oakland-based aerospace startup developing a pneumatic cannon that could one day launch stuff into space. The company was founded by CEO Mike Grace and CTO Nathan Saichek in 2020.
Unlike a rocket propelled by fuel, Longshot Space’s device uses compressed gas to launch projectiles through a long 60-foot-long horizontal pipe. The pressurized gas is periodically injected through the sides of the pipe, gradually increasing its speed through each of the three boost stages. The cannon, which is housed in a storage shed in Oakland, can propel a payload of up to 6 inches in diameter to Mach 4.2, more than four times the speed of sound.
This is just a technology demonstrator, though. To actually launch objects into lower Earth orbit, the company would need to increase its velocity fivefold to Mach 25. This will require a bigger pipe with more injection stages and a lighter (and therefore faster) gas like hydrogen, which is too flammable to be used in an urban area like Oakland.
In 2025, Longshot plans to relocate to the Nevada desert, where it will be able to use hydrogen gas and create an accelerator that’s more than 500 meters long — nearly 30 times larger than its current iteration. With an internal diameter of about two feet, this upgraded accelerator would theoretically allow Longshot to propel a payload of up to 100 kilograms beyond Mach 5, which is the threshold for hypersonic speed. At this speed, the Department of Defense could use Longshot’s accelerator to test materials for hypersonic missiles without scheduling an expensive rocket launch.
If Longshot is able to cash in on being a hypersonic testing company, it will then set its sights on its ultimate goal of developing an orbital launch system — a project so big and loud it would require the company to move somewhere even more remote, like northern Australia. To reach orbital speeds of roughly 17,000 miles per hour, Longshot estimates it would need to build a 10- to 15-kilometer-long pipe that could send a 2-meter, 3,000-kilogram projectile with 500 kilograms of payload into orbit. Grace says this could happen as early as 2029.
How Does Longshot Space’s Technology Work?
Longshot’s technology relies on kinetic energy, which is the energy a projectile possesses due to its motion. The idea isn’t entirely new; it builds on earlier kinetic launch concepts like Quicklaunch’s light-gas gun, Project HARP’s supergun and the German military’s V3 cannon from World War II.
Here’s the basic process:
- Initial Launch: The projectile is shot into motion with an initial burst of compressed gas. The pressure behind the projectile is separated from the vacuum chamber ahead of it through metal “burst disks” that are triggered to pop so the projectile can pass through it.
- Acceleration: As the projectile travels down the launch tube, additional bursts of compressed air are injected through ports along the side of the pipe. Attached to the projectile is a long, angled tail that catches this gas, enabling it to travel faster than the gas itself. “The impact of the gas on the tail squeezes it down the barrel just like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube,” Saichek said in a company video.
- Precision Control: Timing the bursts of gas to hit the tail end of the projectile requires sub-millisecond precision, which Longshot achieves with a custom-built light gate that is triggered when the projectile passes through a LED beam.
As of August 2025, Longshot Space’s 60-foot space cannon is a mere demonstration of its future potential. The company plans to build a longer launch tube that would allow for more bursts of compressed air, increasing velocity while spreading out gravitational forces over greater distances to protect the payload. As Longshot refines its design, it eventually hopes to achieve speeds that are high enough to launch payloads directly into orbit. A small rocket engine may be needed for the final leg of this journey.
How Much Money Has Longshot Space Raised So Far?
In 2021, with $30,000 from friends and family, Longshot built a prototype out of PVC pipe that could propel a light projectile to Mach 1.8. Later that year, the startup earned $750,000 from the Air Force’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award.
“That’s what basically cracks the company open,” Grace said in a company video.
With a stamp of approval from the U.S. Air Force, Longshot raised a $1.5 million pre-seed funding round from several investors, including Space Fund and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The funding from the Air Force and VC investors allowed the company to rent a former auto shop building in Oakland, expand its team and build an accelerator that could reach Mach 4.2.
In 2024, Longshot raised a combined $5 million from venture capital investors and the U.S. Air Force’s Tactical Funding Increase (TACFI) program, which matches venture capital investments. With this funding, the company plans to construct a 1,600-foot accelerator in the Nevada desert.
Potential Advantages of Longshot’s Approach
Cheaper Than Rockets
Space launches are currently dependent on rockets, which are expensive and environmentally taxing. Longshot is offering a cheaper, more sustainable alternative, as it is not bogged down by the weight of rocket fuel or the expense of rocket boosters and aerospace-grade materials built to withstand high heat and pressure. Longot’s accelerator, by contrast, is built from more available materials, like concrete and steel.
In the not-too-distant future, Saichek told the First Principles podcast that the military could test its hypersonic missiles at its Nevada site for less than $100,000. The company hopes to eventually reach a launch price of $10 per kilogram, which is far cheaper than the cost of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 ride-share, which charges $325,000 for the first 50 kilograms and $6,500 for each additional kilogram.
More Frequent Launches
Rocket launches are also limited by the time it takes to refurbish the rocket and prepare for liftoff. SpaceX reached 170 orbital launches in 2024 — almost all of which with Falcon 9 — and it’s aiming for 170 launches in 2025. While a launch every other day is impressive for a rocket, Longshot estimates it could operate at a much higher cadence, providing more frequent supply runs to space.
Challenges of Longshot’s Approach
Land Acquisition
While the physics behind Longshot’s concept may work on paper, there are some practical limitations to building a 15-kilometer cannon. The accelerator would not only occupy a large land footprint, but it would have to be very remote, as its sonic booms would very likely be harmful to both people and any surrounding wildlife. These safety and regulatory concerns may make it difficult for Longshot to acquire land, even in remote areas.
Air Resistance
Once a projectile leaves Longshot’s vacuum chamber, it will be slowed down by the more dense, moist air in the Earth’s environment. On the First Principles podcast, Saichek estimated the projectile would lose a kilometer per second due to drag in the atmosphere. This could be countered by increasing the speed at which the projectile exits the cannon, he said.
Guiding the Projectile
Longshot has not yet developed technology to steer the projectile to orbit. Hypersonic speeds are not conducive to advanced navigation systems, so Saichek told the First Principles podcast that it comes down to shifting the projectile’s center of mass. The re-entry vehicles for intercontinental ballistic missiles do this through precision actuators, but Saicheck wonders if they might be able to avoid active guidance altogether.
“It hits the atmosphere, and as the heat shield gets ablated, we could dope the heat shield to have it ablate more in one area rather than another,” Saichek explained. “That could cause our center of mass to shift, which could cause us to change our trajectory. Once you get through that layer of doping, you get through a different layer of doping that changes your trajectory again. That would be a very cool set of technologies to exist. I don’t know if they exist, or if we could do that.”
G-Force Durability
Another challenge with using kinetic energy is that it requires a large amount of initial force. This type of gravitational force makes it impossible to transport humans, as well as more fragile materials. Some satellites may have to be redesigned to withstand the high gravitational forces. Unlike other kinetic accelerators, though, Longshot is able to distribute that force over numerous stages of boosters. While other accelerators may subject the payload to 20,000 Gs — or 20,000 times the force of gravity felt standing on Earth — Saichek told the First Principles podcast that Longshot could bring its average acceleration down to about 600 or 700 Gs. For context, most smartphones can withstand a drop from 6 feet, which could be hundreds — maybe even 1,000 — g-forces.
“Modern cubesats and even small sats probably won’t even require much modification to fire in a longshot system,” Saicheck told the First Principles podcast.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is the CEO of Longshot Space?
The CEO of Longshot is Mike Grace. After an internship at NASA’s Ames Research Center, he earned a master’s degree in genetics and worked at several aerospace and biotech startups.
What does Longshot Space do?
Longshot Space is developing a pneumatic cannon to shoot payloads into space. After an initial kick of compressed gas, the payload is propelled to greater speeds with additional bursts of compressed gas injected through the side of the cannon barrel.
