There's a moment in Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon when a group of Civil War artillerymen decide the logical next step is building a giant cannon to shoot people at the lunar surface. Longshot, an Alameda-based startup, is working on something similar—minus the people, plus a fair amount of Department of Defense funding.
The company announced a $5 million seed round from South Park Commons on June 23, 2026, bringing total capital raised to $20 million. That money is going toward what Longshot calls a multi-injection gas accelerator: essentially a very long tube that uses precisely timed blasts of compressed gas to hurl payloads toward space at hypersonic speeds. No rockets required.
If it works—and that remains a substantial if—the economics could be startling. Longshot is targeting launch costs around $10 per kilogram, a figure that would make it roughly 600 times cheaper than current SpaceX rideshare pricing. Whether that's achievable at scale is the question every investor in this round is effectively betting on.
Physics First, Fragile Cargo Never
The basic idea is straightforward, even if the execution is anything but. Traditional rockets haul enormous quantities of propellant skyward, burning it to fight gravity every inch of the way. Longshot wants to do that work from the ground, using infrastructure that can fire again and again without needing to rebuild the launcher each time.
The company's Oakland-area prototype has already accelerated test articles to Mach 4.6, according to reporting from September 2024. The system is designed to subject payloads to somewhere between 500 and 600 times the force of gravity—a brutal environment that rules out humans, delicate electronics, or anything resembling a conventional satellite. What it doesn't rule out: hardened military sensors, bulk raw materials, or purpose-built components designed to survive the ride.
Think of it as the difference between mailing fine china and shipping gravel. Longshot is firmly in the gravel business, at least for now.
Where the Money Goes
The new capital will fund construction of a test facility in Nevada capable of pushing 100-kilogram payloads past Mach 5. The company is also scaling up its engineering and manufacturing operations and has brought on Mark Bigham, Raytheon's former Chief Innovation Officer, to handle government sales and strategic partnerships.
That government angle isn't window dressing. Longshot has already pulled in almost $750,000 in early Small Business Innovation Research funding from the Air Force, plus roughly $2 million through the AFWERX TACFI matching program in September 2024, as SFGATE reported in February 2025. The company has also submitted a proposal to the Pentagon's MACH-TB hypersonic test program—the same initiative that awarded Rocket Lab a $190 million contract for 20 test flights back in March 2026.
The bet here seems to be dual-use from the start: prove the technology works for defense applications while building toward commercial orbital launch. It's a playbook that's worked for other space startups, though few have attempted something quite this… kinetic.
The Cap Table
Longshot closed a $1.5 million pre-seed round in April 2023 with backing from Sam Altman, Draper VC, and SpaceFund, TechCrunch reported that July. A follow-on raise in September 2024 brought in a bit over $5 million, combining venture capital from Starship Ventures and Myelin VC with the Air Force TACFI award. South Park Commons' $5 million seed round completes the current funding picture at $20 million total.
"Longshot's technology has the potential to fundamentally reshape access to space," said Aditya Agarwal, a general partner at South Park Commons, in the company's announcement. The firm's involvement signals comfort with long development timelines and capital-intensive hardware bets—this is not a software play that scales overnight.
The investor roster tilts toward backers who appreciate physics-first moonshots. Whether they're right is a question that will be answered in Nevada, assuming the FAA approvals the company was pursuing as of September 2024 come through.
The Path Forward (and Its Obstacles)
Longshot is aiming for near-term revenue by offering hypersonic testing services to defense contractors—a pragmatic move that could generate cash flow while the orbital capability matures. The Nevada test range represents the next major validation milestone. Success there would mean demonstrating not just raw speed but trajectory control, thermal management at extreme velocities, and payload survivability under conditions that would turn most spacecraft into scrap.
CEO Mike Grace has been direct about the value proposition: launch costs at $10 per kilogram would represent an order-of-magnitude shift in what's economically feasible in orbit. At that price point, you start unlocking markets that don't currently exist—bulk materials for orbital manufacturing, rapid satellite constellation replenishment, even kinetic planetary defense scenarios that sound like science fiction until you do the math.
The catch, of course, is that none of this matters if the technology can't scale. A prototype hitting Mach 4.6 in Oakland is one thing. Reliably flinging 100-kilogram payloads into stable orbits, repeatedly and safely, is quite another.
But Longshot now has $20 million and a former Raytheon executive to find out if artillery and aerospace can, in fact, meet somewhere past Mach 5. Verne would probably approve—though he might have preferred they aim for the Moon.
