Short version: SpinLaunch is now a satellite company that still talks about the big slingshot. The money and the near-term plan say “Meridian Space,” a 280-sat LEO broadband constellation built by Kongsberg NanoAvionics, bankrolled so far by a $12 million Kongsberg check in April and a fresh $30 million round in August. The kinetic launcher remains a glossy rendering and a test pad in New Mexico. The business is pivoting toward something that might actually produce revenue while the centrifuge idea continues to marinate.

The tech story you know. They built a 33-meter subscale vacuum centrifuge at Spaceport America and flung stubby projectiles to tens of thousands of feet, then did a 2022 payload flight with NASA and Airbus hardware that survived the ride. The full orbital machine is supposed to be roughly football-field sized, with a carbon-fiber arm in a 100-meter steel vacuum chamber, giving a payload a multi-km/s shove before a small rocket stage finishes the job. Physics doesn’t object to the shove; it objects to doing it at sea level through thick air, high dynamic pressure, and ugly heating while your satellite guts absorb thousands of g for minutes. That’s why most of the claimed cost advantage lives in PowerPoint.

Management finally read the room. Founder Jonathan Yaney handed the controls to COO David Wrenn in May 2024. Less than a year later SpinLaunch rolled out Meridian and let the quiet part be said out loud: launch is a cost center, not a profit center, at least for them. If you can’t sell the slingshot yet, sell satellites and capacity, preferably ones designed to survive your eventual launch method. That’s a textbook hedge.

Site geography tells you what they really want. They locked a 100-year lease on Adak Island in the Aleutians, which is perfect for high-inclination traffic and a pain for low-inclination economics. The pitch is clean downrange, existing Navy-era infrastructure, and maybe wind power for the grid-fed centrifuge. Translation: a relatively permissive place to try something weird, years of environmental and licensing work ahead, and nothing close to a firm orbital operations date.

Back to Meridian. Kongsberg’s Lithuanian smallsat shop gets a €122.5 million order to build the first 280 buses, which is great for Kongsberg and helpful marketing for SpinLaunch. The most ambitious claim floating around is that a single launch could drop off 250 microsats. Call me when someone shows the ride-share manifest, spectrum coordination, ground segment, and replacement cadence that can compete with Starlink’s bandwidth and SpaceX’s launch price. For now this is a first-contract press cycle, not a solved business.

Cash and cadence are the real constraints. In December 2024 they scraped together about $11.5 million out of a planned $25 million, which looked like a down round in slow motion. The August 2025 $30 million top-up reads like runway to keep Meridian real and the Adak studies moving. None of this funds a 100-meter vacuum centrifuge, and they know it.

Bottom line for grown-ups: the centrifuge is clever engineering that keeps losing fights against atmosphere, materials limits, and payload practicality. The corporate pivot to an in-house constellation is the right survival move, even if it drops them into the most crowded market in space. If Meridian actually deploys and sells capacity, the slingshot might get another life as a specialized first stage for rugged payload classes. If not, the centrifuge will join the long museum of non-rocket spacelaunch concepts that were technically fascinating and commercially allergic.