> spin launch is going to have to withstand both lateral and vertical Gs.
I wonder if there is a trick to rotate the craft between disconnection and hitting the atmosphere so that the forces are in the same direction for both?
You would have to do the rotation in the short straight section in the vacuum chamber after it is released from the centrifuge. The craft is traveling extremely fast at this point and you only have maybe 50m or less to do the rotation. I think doing a 90 degree rotation in this timespan (25ms or so, because you’re traveling at 2km/s) would need extreme rotational acceleration which wouldn’t be much gentler on the craft, and you would need some system that can actually achieve this rotation in this short time.
I wonder if there is a trick to rotate the craft between disconnection and hitting the atmosphere so that the forces are in the same direction for both?