Stupid question.... Why isn't Spinlaunch located at a higher elevation than where they are to reduce air resistance and require less energy and cost? Why not Alma, Colorado which is at 10,000 feet?
When you consider location, you need to take into account many factors. Like workforce availability, logistics, land use planning and so on. It may be the best place in one regard but a complete showstopper in others. In US AFAIK all of the serious launch sites are located on the coastline, so rockets fly over the water and not populated areas.
10,000 feet doesn't make enough of a difference. 60 miles is where one can reasonably consider low earth orbit as lowest and that is over 300,000 feet. 10,000 feet will help but not significantly.
Spinlaunch's problem is not just with the launch machine. They can engineer all the launch machine problems away -- at great cost but it is doable. The main issue really is the
payload must withstand 11,000g at their planned mach 3 launch. That is a lot of force for the payload to deal with and (re)engineering the payload to survive that will be a very expensive thing to do. One can imagine the work in recreating a PCB so that every component on the PCB will survive being pulled by a force 11000x its own weight.
Furthermore, mach 3 is not enough. The escape velocity is around mach 33, so mach 3 launch will need rocket booster to take it all the way up. You don't need escape velocity to orbit since orbiting means you are not escaping by definition. We can't estimate the velocity they actually need since we do not know the aerodynamics of the launch vehicle. We do know that whatever shape it is, some air resistance will be there. Both
Air-drag and Centripetal force are proportional to V2 . 2x velocity means 4x the force. 10x the velocity means 100x the force. Mach 33 is 11x mach 3, so it will be 11
2x11000 = 1,331,000g centripetal force and that is before adding extra velocity to deal with the air drag!
The $ saving is the difference of "traditional" vs "spin" launch cost. I just can't see it as practical (financially and otherwise) to strengthen most kinds of payloads with the budget for strengthening limited to max $ delta of "traditional" vs "spin" launching. Even with raw material (such as water, or liquid rocket fuel) will require a strengthen container and 1.3 million g needs a lot of strengthening to handle.
Spinlaunch being technologically feasible maybe is a yes, but Spinlaunch being economically viable is a no in my book.