Very cool. I'm surprised that the turbulence/vibrations coming back from the pad on landing don't damage it.
SpaceX's Grasshopper Successfully Flew 325 Metres
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Re: SpaceX's Grasshopper Successfully Flew 325 Metres
#12Elon and the SpaceX team are kicking ass! 2 months ago they hovered at 250m: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUvbh-Z8Abk 6 months ago they hovered at the height of a 12-story (40m) building: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz-NYeH-CEY These guys are on a very fast learning curve. These near-ground tests are the hardest. Elon said that they will be using a fully reusable first stage in 2015, only 18 months away: http://…
Not sure I would call them the hardest. Stabilizing while traveling thousands of miles per hour in atmosphere to get to the point you can land like this seems much harder.
Re: SpaceX's Grasshopper Successfully Flew 325 Metres
#13Honestly I would like to see some spectacular failures. Just as Gwynne stated recently, if SpaceX doesn't generate a few craters with this program during testing it means they aren't trying as hard as they can. I'm glad Grasshopper will have its flight ceiling lifted soon with the new testing facility. Not to say a 100% flight record wouldn't be fantastic, but I'd really enjoy seeing the trend of doubling height to c…
Failures don't have to be spectacular to be useful. One of the nice things about a reusable vehicle (and one reason why rockets are so much more expensive than aircraft to develop) is that you can test things incrementally, such that a failure in whatever new thing you're trying won't doom the system as a whole.
Look at the Apollo program, for example. I doubt anyone would say they weren't trying as hard as they could, and yet the only failure I'd call "spectacular" was the very dumb and useless failure of Apollo 1. There were lots of other failures, of course. Apollo 11 had persistent trouble with the computer during landing, nearly leading to an abort. Apollo 12 got hit by lightning on launch, twice, and the mission was only saved by quick thinking. Apollo 13, in addition to the famous explosion that happened partway through the mission, lost an engine on launch. On later investigation, it turned out that the engine loss was due to massive oscillations in the rocket that would have torn it apart within a few more seconds if the engine hadn't fortuitously shut down. Apollo 14 had docking trouble, had to have its computer reprogrammed by the crew in flight to work around a faulty switch, and finally had a radar failure, all of which threatened the mission's success if not the astronauts' lives. Apollo 15's first stage didn't shut off when it was supposed to, nearly requiring a launch abort. Apollo 16 looks to be the first one that didn't encounter major problems.
I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX didn't have a lot of similar failures, which are big deals to them but don't look like anything other than "success" to outside observers.
Re: SpaceX's Grasshopper Successfully Flew 325 Metres
#14Armadillo did this, and cooler already :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u0qlIoSSkQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_Xiq3dYJlM#ws
I haven't seen the flight where they cut the engine and restart it. Very impressive!
Re: SpaceX's Grasshopper Successfully Flew 325 Metres
#15Elon and the SpaceX team are kicking ass! 2 months ago they hovered at 250m: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUvbh-Z8Abk 6 months ago they hovered at the height of a 12-story (40m) building: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz-NYeH-CEY These guys are on a very fast learning curve. These near-ground tests are the hardest. Elon said that they will be using a fully reusable first stage in 2015, only 18 months away: http://…
Not sure I would call them the hardest. Stabilizing while traveling thousands of miles per hour in atmosphere to get to the point you can land like this seems much harder.
Isn't that more or less a solved problem, at least? Maybe there are aspects of it that I'm unfamiliar with which make it much harder for a rocket than for a capsule, but it seems similar, and SpaceX already has that down for Dragon.
Re: SpaceX's Grasshopper Successfully Flew 325 Metres
#16I am really routing for SpaceX, I would love to see the commercial possibilities (and scientific) if we could reduce the cost of getting to space. Luckily it looks like they're already making some pretty impressive steps if you consider that only 6 months ago they were hovering at 40m.
Re: SpaceX's Grasshopper Successfully Flew 325 Metres
#17Elon and the SpaceX team are kicking ass! 2 months ago they hovered at 250m: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUvbh-Z8Abk 6 months ago they hovered at the height of a 12-story (40m) building: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz-NYeH-CEY These guys are on a very fast learning curve. These near-ground tests are the hardest. Elon said that they will be using a fully reusable first stage in 2015, only 18 months away: http://…
Not sure I would call them the hardest. Stabilizing while traveling thousands of miles per hour in atmosphere to get to the point you can land like this seems much harder.
ICBMs already do this, and we've been precisely deorbiting satellites for decades. Landing safely is the really tricky part.
During the Corona spy satellite days, they used to catch the parachuting pods with a plane+hook. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Keyhole_c...
Re: SpaceX's Grasshopper Successfully Flew 325 Metres
#18Armadillo did this, and cooler already :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u0qlIoSSkQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_Xiq3dYJlM#ws
SpaceX is orbital. Armadillo is suborbital (at least Super Mod).
It's like the difference between an ultralight and a 747. Both are impressive, but on completely different scales.
Re: SpaceX's Grasshopper Successfully Flew 325 Metres
#19DUCK DODGERS: Whoops! Had the silly thing in reverse.
Re: SpaceX's Grasshopper Successfully Flew 325 Metres
#20Armadillo did this, and cooler already :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u0qlIoSSkQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_Xiq3dYJlM#ws
in addition to all previous replies: they are also missing the camera from above (ie: hexacopter at ~325m), which was very nice to see