Elon Musk Is Making a Moon Catapult: What the Market Is Missing

In May of 1977, a laboratory at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts had a small team that bolted together a contraption out of about $2,000 of scrap parts, a row of around 20 copper coils, and a bank of ordinary car batteries. A physicist at Princeton built working versions of this machine almost 50 years ago out of scrap parts and car batteries in May of 1977. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sitting on the pad is something like 90 plus percent propellant by weight. Mass driver one in 1977 could pull its bucket at about 33 Gs, 33 times the force of gravity. A few years later at Princeton, mass driver two hit around 500 Gs, and then mass driver three around 1980 pushed past 1,800 Gs. Overall, this points to specialized systems and vertically integrated players shaping what comes next far more than surface narratives suggest.

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