Abstract
Robert Peterkin (Director of Operations, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems — the firm that built the U.S. Navy EMALS aircraft catapult) is the most credentialed industry voice publicly advocating lunar electromagnetic launch. His positions are documented in a late-2023 report to the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and a June 2024 Space.com interview. Peterkin advocates an evolutionary path: scale-up of the existing operational EMALS system on the USS Gerald R. Ford (which accelerates a 30-ton aircraft to flying speed in under two seconds, ~95 m/s) to achieve "higher speed, at lower mass, for reliable lunar launch." He frames the technology as fundamentally cost-advantageous because it "can use abundant solar energy as a prime energy source instead of importing chemical rocket fuel from Earth." His stated demonstration milestone: "to prove viability, we need to demonstrate that this approach can achieve a lunar orbit speed for at least 100 launches without needing to replace launcher components." This is a sober industry-engineering framing — Peterkin is not predicting near-term operational systems but identifying the next required Earth-based demonstration.
Key claims
- lunar-economy-claim: "A not-too-distant future lunar economy will make use of these lunar resources to resupply, repair, and refuel spacecraft in lunar orbit at lower cost than delivering terrestrial resources from Earth's deep gravitational well." (AFOSR report, late 2023)
- emals-evolution-recommendation: "The U.S. government should fund an evolution of the existing electromagnetic aircraft launch system, now operating reliably on the U.S. Navy's Gerald R. Ford nuclear aircraft carrier." (Space.com, June 2024)
- demonstration-milestone: "To prove viability, we need to demonstrate that this approach can achieve a lunar orbit speed for at least 100 launches without needing to replace launcher components." (Space.com, June 2024)
- energy-source-framing: "Electromagnetic launcher represents a superior choice, because it can use abundant solar energy as a prime energy source instead of importing chemical rocket fuel from Earth."
Reviewer notes
Peterkin's quotes provide the credentialed industry-engineering anchor for "this is a serious near-term R&D path, not science fiction" — but he is also notably non-committal on schedule and cost. His 100-launch life-cycle threshold is a useful operational milestone that does not yet exist in any tier-S evidence — and is well below the cycle-life requirements of any economically meaningful operational system (Handmer's 10 Mt/yr design needs ~30 launches/min × 24 hr × 365 d = ~16 million launches/yr, so 100 launches is the equivalent of <1 minute of operation at Handmer's design rate). Load-bearing for our q7 timeline: Peterkin frames the next Earth-based demonstration milestone, not a deployment. The gap between Peterkin's 100-launch demo target and Handmer's 10⁷ launches/year operational target is ~5 orders of magnitude in cycle life — a useful sanity check on how far we are from operational deployment.