In 1902, French cinema pioneer Georges Méliès released what was arguably the very first science fiction film: A Trip to the Moon.

And taking inspiration from an 1860s Jules Verne novel, he had his characters travel to the Moon by being shot out of a giant cannon. Of course, when humans finally started taking trips to outer space, they didn’t go anywhere near a cannon.

They used rockets. And we’ve been relying on rockets ever since. But that doesn’t mean scientists aren’t trying to find alternatives!

So let’s take a look at five of the weirdest, most unhinged alternate proposals for how to get to space. And yes, that includes a technically successful attempt at bringing Jules  Verne’s space cannon to life. [SciShow Intro] Before we get too far into things, let’s not forget that using a rocket to get to space is already kind of wild. You’re essentially strapping  yourself to the top of a prolonged, controlled explosion, which is just asking for trouble.

Plus, rockets are hard to reuse. They were originally invented for fireworks and weaponry, where the thing getting launched doesn’t need to be intact afterwards. But there’s an even more important problem: rockets need to carry their fuel with them.

So if you want to launch something a bit heavier, you need more fuel. Which means your rocket needs more fuel to lift that extra fuel. And so on.

In the end, the cost of a rocket  launch grows exponentially as payload mass increases. So a lot of weird alternatives  to chucking something into space are trying to get around that. Let’s start with the one that wants to replace the majority of a launch’s rocket fuel with magnets.

In the early 90s, a NASA employee named John Mankins pitched an idea called Maglifter, because it would use magnets to, well, less lift and more hurl payloads into space. His audience was NASA’s “Innovative Advanced Concepts” program, or NIAC, whose goal is to pursue wild, out-there, pie-in-the-sky ideas. In other words, quite a few of these ideas turn out to be totally bunk.

But NASA finds it useful to look into them… just in case. That said, Mankins’s proposal wasn’t completely far-fetched. It’s based on the same kind of tech they use for maglev trains around the world.

But for Maglifter, the magnetic levitation basically creates a catapult. To get your payload into space, you put it onto a levitating carrier vehicle, and accelerate it along a few kilometers of rail. That rail is also sloped upwards… perhaps by building it on the side of a mountain… so that when the payload gets near the top, it flies out of its carrier, and off the rail going really, really fast.

Not fast enough to get into Earth’s orbit on its own, though. It would still need an extra boost from a small onboard rocket. But you’ve avoided rocketing through most of Earth’s atmosphere, and saved a huge amount of money in terms of fuel.

Over the next decade, NASA funded a much more thorough investigation, including a location scout to see where one of these Maglifter  platforms could be built. And one report claimed there were no “fundamental technological barriers”. So…it’s a start!

Then in 2001, one of the original inventors of maglev transportation proposed his own concept for a Maglifter-type system. He called it “StarTram”. But that guy’s vision was … a bit ambitious.

Perhaps the most eye-catching detail was that it involved a rail that climbed twenty-two kilometers above Earth’s surface. That’s almost three times  the height of Mount Everest, or twice the typical airplane cruising height. Not exactly easy to prototype.

So this idea hasn’t made it past the pen-and-paper stage, and right now seems to only consist of a couple of papers, a 2013 book, and StarTram’s fairly sparse website. But our next example actually  has a working prototype. Over the past decade, a startup company called SpinLaunch has raised over $100 million to build a giant space sling.

In other words, their machine spins a rocket-shaped payload around and around at supersonic speeds inside a giant, vertically mounted centrifuge, and then at precisely the right moment, lets go to hucks it into space. Or, rather, they huck it into near space. As with Mankins’s Maglifter design, the idea is to get the payload through the densest part of Earth’s atmosphere, and then let a booster rocket take over and get the payload the rest of the way.

As with any of these ideas, it’s one thing to merely come up with the concept. It’s another entirely to make it work. For example, that centrifuge also needs to be a  state-of-the-art vacuum chamber.

Because you don’t want your payload to deal with a bunch of drag as it pushes through a bunch of air molecules while it spins. But unlike Maglift and StarTram, SpinLaunch has actually made  it to the testing stage. Back in 2022, a prototype launcher flung a scientific payload to about eight kilometers up.

But the legally-defined edge of space is one hundred kilometers up, so the company still has a ways to go. You probably shouldn’t plan a visit to space on the ultimate theme park ride just yet. Or ever, since this system  isn’t built to transport humans.

As the payload spins, it experiences an acceleration that’s thousands of times greater than what you feel day-to-day. Meaning if you tried to hitchhike a ride, you’d feel like you weighed thousands of times more than you do right now. For accelerations that high, it’s a challenge to ensure non-living cargo makes it to space in one piece, let alone squishy human passengers.

So, instead, you might want to try a gentle climb through the atmosphere in a slow-moving elevator. You’ve probably heard of space elevators as a futuristic way to move either cargo or people beyond our atmosphere. We covered them over a decade ago.

And sure, that’s a pretty unhinged idea. But you know what’s even moreso? Taking a space elevator’s super long cable, severing it from the ground, and then making it spin.

Enter, the Skyhook. This idea was first proposed in the 60s, and seriously pursued by Boeing in the 2000s. And by “seriously”, I mean they were awarded not just one, but two rounds of NIAC funding to investigate the idea.

In their version, called HASTOL, you’d start by loading your payload onto a specialized, hypersonic plane to fly up to the edge of space. That’s where it would meet the cable, and hook the payload onto the end of it. But remember, the cable is spinning the  whole time this is happening, so if your timing’s off, the end will just go up up and away and you’d have to wait for it to come back around.

But assuming the hook was successful, the payload would stay on the end of the cable, and be lifted into space as the cable spun. When it got to the top of the “ride”, the payload would be released, and get flung even further away from Earth. So, it’s a bit like SpinLaunch’s release out the centrifuge chamber, but the actual spinning is much much slower.

Now, over time, the cable’s  spinning would slow down, reducing how much energy it can give to the payload you’re trying to fling. So every once in a while, you’d need to use booster rockets to get it back up to speed. But overall, it’d still be less rocket fuel than conventional launch systems… at least on a per-mission basis.

Because you’d also have to  get the whole skyhook system launched into Earth orbit, and Boeing’s plans definitely didn’t call for anything particularly light. Different versions of the skyhook idea can vary exactly how long the tether is, and how far down into the atmosphere it reaches. The version Boeing proposed included a tether that was 600 kilometers long.

And it would fling payloads from the edge of space out to geostationary orbit, which is about 35,000 kilometers up. That’s the distance where the speed you need to maintain an orbit matches  how fast the Earth spins. If you were up there, you’d constantly hover above the exact same spot on the ground.

It’s an ideal spot for satellites. So assuming we were willing to lift a massive skyhook  contraption into Earth orbit to save money on rocket fuel in the long run… What other challenges are there? Well, you’d need a cable that was both long enough and sturdy enough to do the job.

And that might not be as impossible a task as you might think. After all, we can make internet cables that criss-cross the world’s oceans, and one skyhook report claimed you could make a sufficiently long cable without any exotic sci-fi materials. But ultimately, the jury’s still out on how cost-effective such a project would be.

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That link gives you 20% off an annual premium Brilliant subscription. And you’ll get the first 30 days for free. Compared to maglev space  trains and space elevators, our next entry might seem a  bit less BALS-to-the-wall.

But it’s more, because it’s literally

BALS: Balloon Assisted Launch Scheme… slash System. And yes, we are talking  about using a fancy balloon to lift a rocket up to the top of the atmosphere before launching said rocket. It’s not the first time we’ve done it, either, but we were calling them rockoons back then. The acronym BALS comes to us courtesy of both a 2008  NASA summer research project for college students, and also a couple of grant proposals that the US Air Force awarded a small business in the mid 90s.

Once again, the idea here  is super easy to propose, but a lot harder to put into practice. Like, you have to make sure your balloon is made out of a material that can handle lifting your payload to a desired altitude. But the main issue with BALS may be how hard it is to control where your balloon goes after you let it go.

Still, this method is appealing  to many smaller groups because it’s just so cheap, especially for small payloads. You don’t need kilometers of high-tech cable, or a vacuum chamber centrifuge. So several startups have taken a crack at BALS in recent years, even if commercial success has so far proven…elusive.

And finally, it’s time to  talk about the giant cannon that humans used to successfully  shoot stuff into space. Just like Jules Verne dreamed  of all those years ago. Still not humans though.

Again the accelerations you’d be dealing with here are way too high for a human body to tolerate. The payloads were just the size of a child. Our story starts in Canada of all places, with the engineer Gerald Bull.

In the early 1960s, he used his expertise in weapons and ballistics to craft a proposal for a real-life version of Verne’s space cannon, and then got both the US and Canadian governments to fund it. The project was called

HARP: the High Altitude Research Project, and Bull claimed its goal was to acquire, quote “engineering and scientific data on the upper atmosphere.“ I’m sure the military had other plans for it, but this episode isn’t about why people want to get stuff into space. It’s about unhinged ways to get to space. And taking a 36-meter long, 40-centimeter wide gun barrel gifted to you by the US Army, sticking a 15.5-meter muzzle onto the end… …packing it full of gunpowder “patches” and an 84 kilogram payload… …and then pointing the whole thing just 5 degrees off of vertical and firing… is definitely unhinged. Over a few years, HARP managed to install these space cannons at a few different sites.

You can even check out the remains of one if you’re ever in Barbados. And in 1966, it launched an atmospheric probe to an altitude of about 180 kilometers. That’s well past the 100 kilometer threshold.

And it’s still a ballistics world record. According to one report, there were plans to shoot payloads into proper Earth orbit, but that never happened. By 1968, the US pulled all of its funding, and HARP was all but decommissioned.

But Bull’s story doesn’t end there. In the 1980s, he helped Saddam Hussein with an Iraqi version of the space cannon called Project Babylon. They built some prototypes, but the project came to an end when Bull was assassinated in 1990.

Project Babylon never managed  to launch any rockets. Or at least, that’s what the  partially-redacted CIA report we looked at claimed. But after HARP had its heyday, the space cannon has been  re-proposed a couple of times, thankfully only for peaceful space exploration.

Some startups are involved, but nothing’s reached the testing stage yet. So it looks like Verne’s vision  of sending anything into space courtesy of a giant cannon will have to remain science fiction for now. Of course, these ideas aren’t  the only non-rocket proposals for getting things into space.

If we missed out on your  favorite wacky way to get there, let us know in the comments! Or if you just want to  impress upon us how cool it is that we can catch rockets now, that’s okay too. [ OUTRO ]