Space Shot

Maybe it's just me, but this sounds like the kind of approach to space travel that would have been disproven by Wile E. Coyote:

Giant Slingshot: New Way to Space?

All space projects get into orbit pretty much the same way – by burning lots of rocket fuel, a spaceship powers itself past the sky. But what if there was a different approach? What if we could throw something so hard, it would wind up in space? At NASA's behest, Ed Schmidt and Mark Bundy of the Army Research Lab are looking at ways of firing projectiles into orbit.