The Super High Altitude Research Project (Super HARP, SHARP) was a U.S. government project conducting research into the firing of high-velocity projectiles high into the atmosphere using a two-stage light-gas gun, with the ultimate goal of propelling satellites into Earth orbit. Design work on the prototype space gun began as early as 1985 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and became operational in December 1992. It is the largest gas gun in the world.
Design and operation
Rather than a single straight barrel, the SHARP gun uses an L-shape design with two separate sections; the long steel combustion section & pump tube section is connected to the long launch tube (or barrel) at a right angle. rail-mounted sleds sit at both ends of the pump tube to absorb recoil energy from firing and a smaller sled is mounted on a perpendicular set of tracks at the aft-end of the launch-tube near the junction point.