This sounds regrettably naive. I've worked on the mechanical design of space instrumentation for quite a few missions. The guy that they quote in the Wired article is 100% correct when he points out that 10,000 g's will destroy essentially any satellite payload. So, for this to ever be feasible, we just need to figure out how to completely scrap all existing knowledge of satellite payload engineering and start from scratch. Guys, this is gonna work! I just need another four billion dollars by Sunday.
Surprisingly, 10,000g won’t do much of anything to solid state material. I’ve spun a grape at 5000g, and to my disappointment, after 10 min, it still looked like a grape. We use up to 200,000g to separate lipids from serum in plastic tubes. The issue is that centrifugal force only gets interesting if you have a free mass of significant density compressing the mass of interest. Maybe I’ll take some pics and spin a grape at 10,000g this week to demonstrate.
Cool! Please, do so. Could you do it on both seedless and 'normal' grape? How long does it take your centrifuge to get to those speeds? EDIT I'd also love to get data like lengths (arm, grape), masses and whatever else you can measure without being inconvenienced. I'm intrigued by the mystery of the unsquashable grape, but wouldn't want to impose beyond what I wrote before.Maybe I’ll take some pics and spin a grape at 10,000g this week to demonstrate.
I believe you, but satellite payload designs are driven by material considerations entirely unrelated to assuming a static load more than 1,000x the current norm (~3 g). Just off the top of my head, a PEEK high voltage detector fixture engineered to sit inside of an aluminum housing assembly (known to exist) is donezo. Honestly, I'd enjoy eating my words and seeing this concept work. It just won't, perhaps especially when considered from a practical costs vs. revenue perspective. We want that grape vidja/pics though. And we know you're not doing genetics stuff, it's really uranium enrichment. ;) ;) ;) "hello, FBI", m'POTUS, etc.