Launching payloads to space has always relied on rockets — powerful, expensive, and complex. Longshot Space Technology, a startup based in Alameda, California, believes there’s a different path: a ground-gun that can shoot cargo into space. Revealed at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, their approach promises radical savings and reusability.
What’s the tech?
Longshot is building a series of so-called multi-injection guns: long steel barrels with multiple high-pressure gas tanks spaced along the sides. As a projectile moves down the barrel, each gas port ignites in turn, accelerating it in stages. The startup has proved this concept works using a 70-foot, 6-inch-diameter gun at a test site in Barstow, California, reaching speeds near hypersonic.
Next, Longshot plans to build a 140-foot, 30-inch gun at its Alameda facility, followed by a massive 328-foot, 30-inch version, with ambitions to scale up to 3,000 feet. The ultimate goal is to launch 220-pound payloads at Mach 8. To really reach space, they project needing a gun about 10 kilometers long and nearly 10 feet in diameter — large, but potentially game changing if it works.
Funding, use-cases, and economics
The company has raised about US$20 million from venture investors to pursue this vision. In the meantime, its guns are already pulling double duty with contracts from the U.S. military. Longshot’s tech can support hypersonic testing — firing projectiles for next-gen interceptor systems — at a fraction of the cost of traditional range operations. The idea is low cost, reusable, and fast.
If fully realized, Longshot expects its system could reach launch cost as low as US$50 per kilogram. That price would significantly undercut current orbital launch costs, which need to fall closer to around US$300 per kilogram for ambitious ideas like orbital data centers to work.
Challenges ahead
Physical size is a major constraint: finding locations large enough, safe enough, and permitted by regulation to build and operate guns spanning from hundreds of feet up to multiple kilometers. Engineering challenges also grow as the size of the barrel and projectile increase — from material strength to trajectory control and thermal loads. Projectiles must also carry their own propulsion to get from high speed exit into orbit.
Longshot’s approach does not require the gun to be aimed high; rather, its projectile is shaped like a lifting body so that it generates aerodynamic lift as it travels through the atmosphere, gradually gaining altitude after launch.
Already, the company is advancing its prototype efforts: ramping up barrel lengths, propulsion staging, and refining launch materials. Each new build aims to push Mach speeds higher and payload capacities larger.
Analytical Angle: For decades, the cost and logistical complexity of rockets has been a major barrier to routine access to space. Longshot’s ground gun concept shrinks first-stage engineering and fuel consumption into reusable, terrestrial infrastructure — potentially slashing launch costs by an order of magnitude. If the company can overcome the environmental, regulatory, and engineering obstacles, this could redefine what’s possible for satellite deployment, planetary science, and even space station resupply. What to watch: whether they can build operational long guns, wrangle safety and permitting, and scale up both barrel size and payload mass without losing efficiency.
