I got used to designing things for orbital flights, with those ~1.5 g accelerations. You don't even think about the static load, it's entirely about the noise / random vibrations environment. Then I did a sounding rocket, and the lead scientist forgot to mention that there's a 10 g static load on top of the noise. Those suckers really fire off quick, which is fantastic when you're trying to fly through a very dynamic auroral feature, but yeah I ended up putting in these ugly little splints at the last second to shore up some problem spots. No software analysis, and no QA, because sounding rockets are too cheap. Quick peer review. Worked like a charm.

The idea of designing scientific instrumentation for a Mach 6 noise environment a few milliseconds after the jerk of -10,000 g's over 0 seconds (hopefully it's 0 seconds, for attitude control! Hey does anyone know what happens when you divide something by zero?) reverberates through my shit is so funny that I can't wait to talk about it with my old boss.

Drag. It's proportional to the square of the velocity, and inversely proportional to altitude. Having the fastest portion of your "first stage" SpinLaunch equivalent while you're at your lowest altitude is so stupid. So, so stupid.

Fuckin' Gerald Bull got 84kg 80km past the Karman Line with fucking cordite.

Sure, but they shot almost straight up. So at (suborbital) apogee, the projectile had about zero velocity tangential to the axis connecting the projectile to the center of Earth. SpinLaunch will need to be angled only maybe 20 degrees or so above the horizon. The fact that their only field test facility was flinging shit straight up doesn't bode very well. Yes, a rocket begins by going straight up, but then angles over to push your tangential velocity up. The vertical-ish part of a rocket's ascent also gets you out of the thickest part of the atmosphere quickly, too. Meanwhile, ScamLaunch needs to travel through muuuuuch more atmosphere because of the release angle being close the horizon. There's no getting around that.

I feel like the NASA evaluation they've committed to is plenty enough taking of public monies for me.

Seriously, a space elevator is such a better direction to push in than this, and I'm not totally convinced that's feasible either. I wanna see how quickly tectonic drift becomes problematic, for starters. You gotta keep it dead center of the equator. If we could make the top anchored to a captured, well-controlled asteroid parked in GEO? Might work. We'd have no choice but to de-orbit shittons of space junk, tho. I still think a moon base shooting UV or even X-rays to de-orbit junk when facing the Pacific, once a day, is the best solution I've come up with, or heard anywhere, for that matter. The tracking software should... cost a few $'s.