Sam Altman Is Backing a SpaceX Competitor That Wants to Shoot Stuff Into Space With an Enormous Gun

Rockets are cool, but they’re also being fired into space by Elon Musk, who is cringe. You know what is cool, though? A giant cannon that shoots stuff into space. It might be cheaper, easier, and more efficient, too. That’s the pitch of Longshot Space, an Oakland-based company that’s constructing an enormous gun with the goal of shooting things into space. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is an investor. On the surface, Longshot Space’s pitch is as simple as it sounds. “If you have an opportunity to do something that is grand and beautiful, you should. That’s part of what gets me out of bed in the morning. The other part is that what I get to work on on a day-to-day basis goes boom and is loud and is fun,” Longshot Space CEO Mike Grace said in a video on the company’s YouTube page. The world has sent an incredible number of satellites into space over the last few years. Low Earth orbit is riddled with stuff. Getting that stuff into space requires rockets, and rockets are expensive. Musk and Jeff ... Read full article.