Longshot's Space Gun: Firing Cargo Without Rockets
Longshot Space Technology, an Alameda, California startup co-founded by CEO Mike Grace and CTO Nato Saichek, is building a large gun to fire cargo toward space. The company has raised about $20 million from venture investors. Those details were published October 13, 2026, in a report timed to its appearance at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. TechCrunch
The concept uses a horizontal steel pipe with tanks of high-pressure gas attached at ports along its length. As the projectile travels down the barrel, each tank releases gas at a precise moment to add energy. The push is spread across many small compressed-gas injections rather than a single propellant charge. The effect is a series of timed shoves instead of one explosion. Longshot says the system has reached Mach 4, or four times the speed of sound, to date. Current tests use a 70-foot gun with a six-inch diameter near Barstow, California. The company expects to soon fire a 140-foot-long gun with a 30-inch diameter at its Alameda test site. TechCrunch
The scale-up plan calls for a 30-inch-diameter gun that is 328 feet long, later extended to about 3,000 feet. Longshot says that extended gun will be the largest gun on the planet and will launch 220-pound payloads to Mach 8, or eight times the speed of sound. Bore diameter, barrel length and injection timing are the main scaling controls, because exit speed grows with the number and coordination of those staged pushes. The projectile is a lifting body, a shape that creates lift like a stubby wing. After leaving the horizontal barrel, it climbs on its own without the gun being tilted upward. Longshot has received several U.S. military contracts for hypersonic testing, work that fits the current Mach 4 performance while the orbital system is still in development.
That progress follows earlier steps. In September 2024, the company closed over $5 million in new funding to build a 500-meter-long gun in the Nevada desert to push 100-kilogram payloads to Mach 5. In 2023, it set a target for kinetic-launch systems able to send mass to orbit for $10 per kilogram. On its website at longshotspace.com, listed as Ground-Based Launch Systems, the company describes a reusable system that keeps more launch energy and equipment on the ground for non-human cargo of all kinds, including satellites and hardware built to survive high-speed launch.
The site lays out a long-term path meant to lower the cost and complexity of reaching low Earth orbit, which Longshot presents as intended to cost less than Starship orbital access. It defines the multi-injection pneumatic cannon as a long tube using many small injections of compressed gas from separate tanks spaced along the barrel that fire as the payload passes. Those repeated injections allow gentler individual pushes while still reaching high exit speed without damaging the barrel. The site points to a cannon nearly 10 kilometers long, with force on the payload around 250 Gs at that length, notes that a phone can survive around 700 Gs, and states that human bodies have limits on sustained acceleration far tighter than what electronics or structural payloads can handle.
The October 13, 2026 account was written by Tim Fernholz and published at 11:05 AM PDT. CNET also covered the effort with a piece titled "World's Largest Gun Aims to Shoot Satellites Into Space" on September 4, 2026.
The broader context here is the split between near-term business and long-term plan. Hypersonic test shots sell speed and fast turnaround now, using payloads already built for extreme conditions. Orbital cargo is a harder task, requiring speed beyond the atmosphere, heat protection, and exact placement in orbit. Barrel exit speed alone does not solve those problems.
In my view, that order of operations is practical. It lets Longshot improve gas handling, timing controls, barrel life and lifting-body flight while earning revenue from test demand, and it leaves the full orbital vehicle for later. If the approach holds, the new capability would be bulk, hardened supplies sent on short notice, with hypersonics as the testing ground. That is a smaller market than general launch, but it opens useful options at lower cost.
