Centrifugal rocketry

This story about a "centrifuge" for launching rockets seems not to be an April Fools joke. The idea is to spin a rocket (and counterweight, of course) in a vacuum centrifuge with arms 100m long until they reach about 30 revs/second, and then let go the rocket and counterweight--opening the vacuum doors at the same time. The rocket starts off with O(3000m/sec) speed, which gives it a good start and means it doesn't need nearly as much fuel. That sounds nice. Sort of.

Of course the G-forces are about 10,000G. Your support arms are going to stretch. The rocket will presumably sit in a drop-away cradle to keep it from breaking to bits. I imagine the rocket nozzle would be squashed or smashed unless the cradle somehow supported it too.

When the newly released system hits air like a brick wall, what sorts of turbulence will it get, and how badly will it get knocked about? And the air will hit those spinning arms pretty hard once it gets inside the chamber.

Let's see. I want the rocket to go up. That means the counterweight has to be released down, so you need a tunnel--and a pretty deep one--to let the counterweight fly far enough away that when it hits the side of the tunnel and skitters in a different direction, the back-spray doesn't injure anything. I think that problem is solvable, albeit with the odd re-digging of the bending tunnel.

I don't want to think of what a liquid fuel rocket (think of all the tiny valves!) would look like after getting squashed by 10,000G sideways (not the direction rockets are usually required to be strong in), and I would want to be far away from a solid fuel rocket at release time. Or during spin-up, for that matter.

And I'm not sure how you'd release the thing--maybe explosive bolts? I don't think a magnetic system would hold, and if you have metal to metal you might get cold spot-welding and an unpredictable release.

One comment I saw suggested that this could be a weapon. I don't see how it would be useful. If you spin it up and release solid projectiles, they'll land pretty hard--but you have a relatively slow rate of fire and a known and fixed position you're firing from. And uncertainties in the initial direction thanks to eddies in the air outside will make tiny changes in the projectile's trajectory which would be magnified into big misses at long range. The "rods from God" start out with little interference, and would only hit large resistance as they near the target: exactly the opposite.