Forget rockets — Longshot wants to fire cargo into space from a gun. See it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026

We have been obsessed with vertical takeoff rockets since the Cold War. It is the way we have always done it, so it is the way we assume it must be done. But if you look at the unit economics of putting a payload into low Earth orbit, rockets are actually a terrible solution. They are heavy, they require massive amounts of volatile fuel just to carry the fuel they need later, and the failure rate is still high enough to make insurance premiums a nightmare for founders.

Longshot is taking a different approach that feels like it was ripped out of a Jules Verne novel. They aren't building a better rocket; they are building a massive gun. The goal is to use kinetic energy to literally fire cargo into the sky. It sounds like science fiction, or perhaps a cartoon, but the physics behind kinetic launch is actually much more grounded than the billionaire space race we are used to watching on YouTube.

The Logistics of Kinetic Launch

The core problem with traditional space travel is the tyranny of the rocket equation. To get a pound of gear into space, you need several pounds of fuel. That fuel has weight, so you need more fuel to lift the fuel. Longshot bypasses this by keeping the energy source on the ground. By using a multi-stage gas gun, they can accelerate a hardened projectile to hypersonic speeds before it even leaves the barrel.

For a builder, this shifts the complexity. You no longer have to worry about your satellite surviving a massive chemical explosion under its seat. Instead, you have to worry about the G-forces of the initial launch. It is a trade-off. We are trading the complexity of fuel chemistry for the complexity of structural integrity. If you can build hardware that survives a high-velocity punch, your cost to reach orbit drops by orders of magnitude.

Why Data Centers belong in the Dark

The immediate application for this kind of cheap, frequent launch capacity isn't sending people to Mars. It is moving the heavy lifting of the digital world off-planet. We are currently facing a massive energy crisis on Earth, driven largely by the power demands of AI training and large-scale data processing. Data centers require immense amounts of cooling and constant electricity.

Space offers two things in abundance: cold and solar energy. If Longshot can prove that firing cargo into space is repeatable and cheap, the logical next step is orbital data centers. Imagine a cluster of GPUs floating in vacuum, powered by 24/7 unshielded sunlight, cooled by the natural heat sink of the universe. You don't need a cooling bill when you are surrounded by a void.

The Founder's Skepticism

Now, let's be real. We have seen "space guns" before. The history of kinetic launch is littered with failed prototypes and government projects that never reached escape velocity. The engineering hurdles are massive. The friction of the atmosphere at the speeds required for launch can turn most materials into plasma. Longshot has to solve the heating problem and the guidance problem simultaneously.

As a founder, I look at this and ask: What is the minimum viable launch? Longshot doesn't need to put a human in a capsule. They just need to prove they can get a block of inert material into a stable orbit without it vaporizing. If they can do that, the market for "dumb" cargo—fuel, water, shielding, and ruggedized compute—is theirs for the taking.

• Lowered Barriers: Reducing launch costs means a garage startup could theoretically put a node in space.
• Frequency over Scale: Instead of one massive launch every six months, a gun allows for multiple shots a day.
• Hardware Durability: This forces a new standard for hardware design where structural rigidity is the primary metric.

What This Means for the AI Infrastructure

We are currently hitting a wall with terrestrial power grids. Every time a new LLM starts training, a local power authority somewhere starts sweating. If we can move that compute load to orbit, we decouple AI growth from Earth's limited energy infrastructure. Longshot is the delivery mechanism for that decoupling.

The skepticism here should be focused on the transition from the barrel to the vacuum. The physics of leaving the atmosphere at those speeds is brutal. But if the team can manage the thermal loads, they aren't just building a launch company; they are building the logistics layer for a post-planetary economy. They are making space a commodity rather than a luxury.

The most important innovation in space isn't a better engine; it's a cheaper way to leave the ground.

For builders in the crypto and AI space, keep an eye on the hardware requirements here. If orbital compute becomes the standard, we won't be designing for thin laptops anymore. We will be designing for radiation-hardened, high-G tolerant modules that can handle a trip through a pneumatic cannon.

The future of the cloud might actually be in the clouds—or just past them. Longshot is a reminder that sometimes the best way to move forward is to look at an old idea with new materials and better math. It is a long shot, as the name implies, but the upside for the global compute infrastructure is too big to ignore.

Read the original at TechCrunch Startups →