SpaceX Grasshopper Flies High

Its likely that full-fledged Space Travel with reusable rockets will be possible in the coming years

Are that engines reusable in a short time? or must they go through a mayor refurbishment after each flight?

The pace of progress seems to have been faster than even SpaceX anticipated. Within the next year we'll see very significant tests of core components of the system and flight profile (for the first stage at least).

The very next Falcon 9 flight (out of Vandenberg) will use the performance overhead provided by the v1.1 upgrade to do a controlled reentry of the 1st stage and then after it has reached terminal velocity it will slow down to a hover out over some remote part of the ocean, then splash down. This is a good and cheap test of a huge part of the flight profile. Meanwhile, the Grasshopper 2 will be more of a full-up Falcon 9 (v1.1) first stage, with 9 engines and will include retractable landing gear. Instead of testing controlled hovering and precision landing it'll go up to supersonic speeds and potentially up to 90km altitude. Essentially testing the return to launch site flight profile in a more realistic setting with more realistic hardware.

And then if that proves fruitful they will essentially just stick that hardware into the Falcon 9 stack and do a full up orbital launch with a flyback 1st stage. Possibly within the next few years even. If that works it'll be rather amazing, since much of the cost of a launch is in the manufacture of those 9 engines on that first stage. Even if a reusable stage costs 3x as much as a regular stage and halves the payload capacity if they can get just 6 flights out of each one it'll break even, and if the numbers are more favorable they'll drop the floor out of the orbital launch market and then own it, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year in revenue (a feat they are already on their way to doing with their current lineup of rockets). Perhaps more profoundly it'll hasten the day when it will be conceivable to use kickstarter to fund an interplanetary science mission.

Yeah they're still active.

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?ne...

I can't even begin to describe how psyched I get when I see demos like this. The advances that SpaceX and their competitors are making in terms of making access to space cheaper are what will eventually lead to the human species settling on other planets.

It also reminds me that when it comes to science, and who knows, maybe other things as well, it's not just public sector vs private sector. SpaceX wouldn't be driving us forward like this if NASA hadn't put in a whole heap of groundwork first, but similarly NASA have other goals to worry about besides keeping costs down. It's that combination of NASA's huge ambition and private enterprise's drive to make efficiency savings that will eventually get us colonizing places that aren't the Earth.

I hope it happens in my life time,