Rockets are, infamously, a real pain in the butt. Our old friend physics forces rockets to be built with almost no room for error, and even then only a small fraction of their weight makes it to orbit.

There are, at least in theory, other ways to do the job — space elevators, centrifuges, or a big chain hanging from a satellite in space and scooping up cargo from Earth. (Blue Origin spent some time thinking about that one before the idea wound up in a Neal Stephenson novel.)

And then there’s an idea dating all the way back to Jules Verne: Use a big gun to shoot a projectile into space.

Longshot Space Technology, a startup based in Alameda, California, is working on exactly that. The co-founders, CEO Mike Grace and CTO Nato Saichek, see an opportunity to take a technology that has already proven its worth, and apply it to the pressing need for space launch. The startup has raised about $20 million from venture investors in service of its mission.

When it comes to frontier technology, Grace says, “you can build something that has a lot of novelty, or you can do something really hard. ” What SpaceX did with NASA rocket research, he says, Longshot will do with multi-injection guns — designs that give a projectile extra boosts as it moves down the barrel — built for World War II and during 1960s research programs.

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