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b_b  ·  1109 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: SpinLaunch conducts first test of suborbital accelerator at Spaceport America

I'm in biotech so I have a lot of experience with centrifuges of various types, though almost all small. If you unbalance a centrifuge that weighs, say, 50 kg, by a few grams and you run it at 2,000 g, you get some serious wobble. You let it run for more than a few seconds and the machines all set themselves down, because you'll fuck the bearing quickly. You get to 100,000 g and then you're talking about balancing to the hundredth of a gram. Obviously it's all relative, and here I'm sure they've designed to the known forces and expected changes in angular momentum, but I just don't see how you don't break the rotor arm here. Maybe a sliding counterweight on the opposite arm that can be brought to the center immediately upon release? You could change the moment of inertia pretty quickly that way.