Two months later, this test seems enormously more difficult than the flights without the sideways maneuver. And it's not even a year since it left the ground for the first time.
As rocket failures go, SpaceX's have proven very boring. No booms, no light shows, nothing likely to kill a hypothetical human crew. The first one was actually kind of funny in the end. The satellite landed semi-intact in a storage shed... a few feet from its own shipping container[1]. Too bad we don't bother with parachutes on satellites, it probably would have been reusable with little or no repair.
> For years, cadets have trained falcons (the only performing mascot at NCAA division I football games). FalconSAT-2 showed its excellent homing skills in the launch failure by avoiding the sea and returning to its shipping container so it “could come home to roost.”
Actually, I think it makes a solid point, even if it is concise. Pithy is the word that comes to mind. And I appreciated the pun.
We constantly hear the mantra about iterating quickly, changing/breaking things, not worrying about initial quality, etc.
But, there's something to be said for investing in quality and striving for excellence every time out of the gate. And from the outside, it's certainly inspirational.
Ok, so guess I just signed up to absorb some of the downvotes. Whatevs.
I agree that he (and you) shouldn't be getting down voted.
But I don't think that "Move Fast and Break Things" necessarily means not striving for excellence every time. To me it or more of, since in Programming there is (usually/almost) no bad side effects of breaking the code, go ahead and try new things. Worst case, revert to your last committed version. And I have to assume that SpaceX has most definitely had ideas that didn't work, or in other words 'broke'. They just hopefully never make it to the actual rocket testing phase!
So in my opinion, you can both "Move fast and break things" and strive for excellence every time out of the gate.
And to comment on the original video, I think it's really impressive seeing a toy helicopter do stuff like this on it's own. And this is a fucking ROCKET!!
These are good points, and useful lessons for any entrepreneur.
The great thing about SpaceX is that they use advanced technology very appropriately and pragmatically. They didn't design a carbon fiber body SSTO RLV or anything like that, they built a 2 stage LOX/Kerosene expendable rocket, a design that's been around since the 1950s. They built a small vehicle and spent a few years building institutional knowledge of building and operating orbital launchers. Then they used that knowledge to build products that were competitive in the market. Now they're continuing to iterate like crazy and building a lot of exiting new things off of what they've already proven: the manned Dragon, Falcon Heavy, Falcon 9 v1.1, and Falcon 9-R.
If they continue to put a consistent amount of effort into iterative R&D they'll not only own most of the orbital launch market they'll own a lot of new markets that don't even exist yet.
They're just applying common sense and building obvious designs well to compete in a market filled with companies that aren't used to strong competition.
What is more impressive, spacex is going to do a high altitude test of this system in a few months. I don't know the details, but it sounds like they are going to try a controlled landing into the ocean.
The plan is to do a return-to-launchpad maneuver -- except that not to the actual launchpad, but to a point offshore -- followed by a controlled "landing" on the ocean. Allows them to test the entire flight profile of a Falcon 9-R (reusable) booster, using an off-the-shelf stage, absent the flight-weight landing gear (which still hasn't been tested). If this is successful, then I imagine that a series of flight-weight landing gear tests will be in order, followed by high-altitude testing at White Sands. At the rate they're going, we might see them reusing boosters on commercial missions within 18 months or so.
A coworker of mine's dad worked on the XC-142 tiltrotor in the early 60's, which has some wild control-mixing between two completely disparate modes of flight. So for example, differential prop pitch is yaw in conventional mode, but roll in "helicopter" mode, and the two modes could be mixed between.
The V-22 Osprey does this with digital computers. The XC-142 did it with analog mechanical computers.
EDIT: One thing about the XC-142 and other tiltrotors, was that they could operate like a normal aircraft but they had ridiculous amounts of power for their weight to enable lifting in vertical mode, which made them "take off like a jackrabbit" in conventional mode. So much so, a couple of pilots tried to beat the F-4 Phantom's zoom climb record in one! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadair_CL-84#Testing
the DC-X was also designed to be bottom-heavy, which helps, a lot. Certainly, once the falcon has deployed its payload, it's got a better balance situation than before, but the geometry is very different from the DC-X.
I don't know enough about rocketry to know if you're correct. But if you are just saying this and you're not sure, please look at the Pendulum Rocket Fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendulum_rocket_fallacy
well, I learned something today. I just remember learning in high school that the center of force is below the center of mass, so that vector determines the direction of travel, and that always posed a challenge.
OMG, is this actually supposed to be single-stage-to-orbit?
Ah, Wikipedia says it's two-stage-to-orbit. That's still impressive, but a ship that can reach orbit in a single piece without having to jettison anything is the Holy Grail of spaceflight.
And watching that blazing titan set down on the landing pad as gently as a butterfly is awe-inspiring in any case.
The problem with single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) is mainly weight. I think using composite tanks is enough to make a SSTO rocket. X-33 was supposed to use a composite tank, but the fuel tank failed during testing in 1999. Recently, NASA has succesfully tested a composite tank[1].
You don't need composite tanks for SSTO. There have been normal rocket stages that have had high enough mass ratio and specific impulse big enough for SSTO, like in Titan, but they weren't used as SSTO.
One of the secrets is dense propellants which increases mass ratio considerably. It also makes higher thrust to weight ratio engines easier to implement (because pumps primarily pump volume rather than mass), and with identical initial acceleration, the dense propellant higher mass ratio lower impulse vehicle gets lighter faster and thus has higher acceleration towards the end of the flight, meaning less gravity losses. (Also air drag is less with a smaller vehicle, but it's not a big effect, though it is proportionally bigger for smaller vehicles.)
Hydrogen has the best specific impulse but it is non-dense. It is also hard cryogenic, meaning potential complexity in the vehicle, ground infrastructure and operations.
Also, big vehicles might be more expensive, even if their contents (the propellants) don't weigh much.
The Dragon capsule is more "payload" than "stage". The Falcon 9 will have two stages (hopefully both eventually landing themselves). The Dragon (not always used. Sometimes they may just stick a satellite or something on top) will also be able to land itself.
Sort of like how the Saturn V is considered a 3-stage rocket, even though during the later Apollo missions it had on top a service module, a command module, and a (two stage!) lunar module.
Also, if the mission is something like transport astronauts to the ISS, why eject any stages at all? Why not just make the rocket capable of flying to the ISS, let the whole thing dock to the ISS, exchange astronauts, then detach and land back on Earth?
(Of course, if there are tons of missions happening around the same time, all requiring a first stage rocket, and each mission has a period that doesn't require any rocket, then I see the point of letting the rocket go back and be used for other things.)
The video shows the lower stage and upper stage of a Falcon 9 taking off, then landing. These two stages are shown launching a Dragon spacecraft. The Dragon spacecraft is shown docking with the ISS. The pressurized half of the Dragon spacecraft is then shown landing (the unpressurized trunk section, with the solar panels attached, burns up in the atmosphere (though this is not shown in the video)).
Staging is done because not doing it ("SSTO" or "single stage to orbit") is extremely hard. In fact, it has never been done before from earth. When that second stage burns, it is only accelerating the mass of itself and the Dragon spacecraft on top. Having it accelerate the mass of the lower stage as well would be massively inefficient, requiring much more fuel to be used. So much more fuel that there most likely would no be any mass left over for the Dragon spacecraft. Without staging we wouldn't be able to put things in orbit at all (today and in the past anyway), let alone reuse rockets.
Thanks. I assumed the section with the solar panels somehow retracted the panels before re-entering the atmosphere, but they skip that part, and I now see that the part re-entering is actually a bit smaller.
It's not a complete waste though. I believe at the ISS they usually pack those sorts of parts (parts that burn up that is. Other examples being the Russian "Progress" spacecraft or the ESA's ATV) full of garbage before sending them off. Intact reentry volume/mass is valuable (currently only the Soyuz and the Dragon can do that) so they just let all of their trash burn up. Here's a neat picture of the first ATV, carrying a bunch of ISS trash, burning up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jules_Verne_Automated_Tran...
Several folks have answered already, but here's another attempt: getting stuff into orbit takes so much fuel that any launch vehicle must devote something like 90%+ of its mass to fuel tanks. Once a fuel tank is empty, it's worthless, dead weight. If you tried to carry all that dead weight into orbit, you would never make it; it would pull you down. So you drop the empty tanks as you go, until the part that finally reaches orbit is only a small fraction of the original launch vehicle.
An SSTO--single stage to orbit--vehicle would be safer, more reliable, and above all cheaper to operate than a multi-stage vehicle, but every attempt to make something light enough that it can reach orbit with all its fuel tanks still aboard has failed. A two-stage rocket where the stages return to the pad under their own power is still a big improvement over the traditional model, with three or more stages that are simply dropped into the ocean to be recovered later.
> Also, if the mission is something like transport astronauts to the ISS, why eject any stages at all? Why not just make the rocket capable of flying to the ISS, let the whole thing dock to the ISS
Essentially, Physics. To a lesser extent, practicality and cost.
See The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation[1] or the "Model Rocketry" entry of xkcd What-If[2]
The delta-v the first, more massive, stage has to deal with is much smaller than the one the second-stage has to deal with. The second stage is more or less on LEO when the Dragon is released and uses atmospheric braking just like most returning spacecraft do. Braking a single stage like that would require lots of structural reinforcements that would increase vehicle weight.
Also, the lower stage engines are optimized for working in the low atmosphere while the second stage only needs to operate in a vacuum and therefore, has a different design.
I feel like a lot of good technology was lost with the cancellation of the X-33/VentureStar. They were very close, and a few test failures caused the entire program to be shut down. It's really a shame.
Well... even more bad technology was lost with the cancellation of the X-33. It was a horrifically over-complicated design which had everything including the kitchen sink thrown into it, strictly to maximise its potential for congressional pork. I'm serious. I was actually at a Lockheed-Martin briefing prior to the X-33 competition, wherein they presented a slide which looked like this:
TECHNICAL FEATURES
* Linear aerospike engine [first ever tried]
* Conformal composite LH2 tank [first ever tried]
* Integrated advanced metallic thermal protection [first ever tried]
* Subcontractors in 38 states and 122 congressional districts
The level of complexity in the Venturestar design meant that it could never have achieved the lightweight mass fractions needed for an SSTO. If there is ever to be an SSTO, it will be simple and elegant. But "simple" and "infinitely divisible into a large number of congressional districts" are mutually incompatible, which is why the US government chose the Lockheed Martin design over the vastly more realistic Macdonald Douglas DC-Y: http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/dcy.htm
A leap too far. You could test and mature those technologies further independently (in the lab, at test stands, flying tests with existing vehicles) at much lower cost before trying to integrate them into a design that costs billions.
I believe, particularly, one of the major reasons for developing the systems in these tests is to create a system where there the first stage can land itself after being jettisoned, to be reused.
If you drop stage 1 in Earth's gravity well instead of Mars's.. yes it does :)
Edit: as mikeash points out in the reply, I'm plain wrong. You could use multi-stages to accomodate different gravities when launching Earth-Mars-Earth (2 stage E->M, reusable as standalone second-stage, so single stage M->E).
A stage built to launch from Earth will surely be severely suboptimal for launching from Mars and vice versa. You'd want to use a first stage that returns to Earth to launch a separate Mars stage if you're planning a return mission.
yeah, for musk's platform, realistically for the first [N] launches he's only going to be using the first launch for humans and subsequent reuses for non-human launches, where [N] is some number sufficient to get good statistics on reliability.
This is incredible. Yes, it would be insanely cool to live in 2500s with all that privately affordable faster-than-light travel and everything but still... it's very exciting to see the progress being made by private/commercial space programs. I wish them all luck. It must be an amazing feeling to be a part of all this.
This is actually the only thing that's giving me hope that man could really step a foot on Mars or mine valuable resources on asteroids in a (hopefully) not too distant future.
Glad to see that Space is going to be a commercial business instead of private governments doing everything. This gives me hope that Space will be a place that consumers can enjoy.
That said I think that Elon Musk is doing a lot to make things like Space and Electric cars more accessible to the average person. Even though the costs of Tesla cars are high now for the average Joe to afford, they will hopefully be down in the near future. I hope that the same will happen with Space-X.
Nissan has to continue to slash the price to move them, while people will pay top dollar for Tesla vehicles (and, I argue, will continue to do so, not only for the high end but also the lower priced models when they're announced/produced).
Wikipedia: "The Leaf has received awards from multiple organizations. Notable awards include the inclusion by Time magazine as one of the 50 best inventions of 2009.[386] At the 2010 Washington Auto Show, the Leaf was given the 2010 Green Car Vision Award by the Green Car Journal (GCJ), who noted that the Leaf "will provide the features, the styling, and the driving experience that will meet the needs of a sophisticated and demanding market, while producing zero localized emissions and requiring no petroleum fuels."[387] Popular Mechanics, upon awarding the Leaf its 2010 Breakthrough Award, explained that the Nissan Leaf is "not the first pure EV, but [...] hits the mainstream like none of its predecessors." Popular Mechanics also alluded to the Leaf's 160 kilometres (100 mi) range, which is said to be "enough for most commuters for the price of an average vehicle – and with a much lower operating cost than gasoline-powered vehicles."[388]
Other awards received by the Leaf include the 2011 European Car of the Year,[389] EV.com’s 2011 EV of the Year,[390] 2011 Eco-Friendly Car of the Year by Cars.com,[391] 2011 Green Fleet Electric Vehicle of the Year,[392] it was listed among the 2011 Greenest Vehicles of the Year by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy,[393][394] also listed by Mother Earth News among its "Best Green Cars" of 2011,[395] and also was ranked first in Kelley Blue Book Top 10 Green Cars for 2011.[396] The Leaf won the 2011 World Car of the Year,[397] and was a finalist for the 2011 World Green Car.[398] Ward's Auto listed the Leaf's 80 kW electric motor in Ward's 10 Best Engines for 2011.[399] Until October 2011 the Leaf was ranked as the most efficient EPA certified vehicle for all fuels ever.[400][401] In December 2011 the Leaf was awarded with the 2011-2012 Car of the Year Japan at the Tokyo Motor Show.[402]"
>Nissan has to continue to slash the price to move them,
Nissan Leaf is the best selling electric car in history.
>The Leaf is a superb vehicle in every aspect, except for range and price.
It's the most affordable electric car out there.
>Given a little time the tech will come close to Tesla's.
What tech?
>They could license Tesla's battery technology
Why would they? My understanding is that there's nothing special about Tesla's battery technology. Leaf just has less batteries (in kg) in them, so the range is lower.
There's a lot more to the Tesla battery management than a bunch of laptop batteries wired together. Cooling, wear leveling, charge management, LiOn combustion containment.
So, "this car is great except for getting places or being able to afford it?" You can't ignore arguably two of the most important aspects of a commercially available vehicle and say it's great besides those.
This computer is great, except for the storage space and processor speed.
I submit that a major, if not the primary reason for the Leaf's disappointing sales is its atrocious, shameful, ugly design. It honestly makes me wonder if Nissan wanted it to fail so they can say "we tried" and have a scapegoat for backing away from electric tech.
The Nissan Leaf still has that Hybrid/Electric car look and feel to it. The Tesla looks like a normal luxury car that I would like to own. I dislike how many Hybrid/Electric cars look different than the normal 4 door sedan.
Few questions. Is Grasshopper intended to be a vehicle that ships a payload into a low earth orbit and return itself back to the launch pad?
With that, a question of descent, once it's reached orbit and released its payload, would it re-enter with a short burn towards its earthly destination, decelerate with, say, parachutes, and then do its final descent onto the pad with the rocket? I can't see it doing its entire descent with a rocket, that would use so much fuel, and require so much extra weight.
To understand this project you have to remember that Elon Musk's goal is Mars colonization.
The goal is a rapidly reusable launch system that can be deployed anywhere in the solar system. A parachute system would work well here on Earth, but the martian air is too thin for it to work there. Therefore they are aiming to make it work straight off of rockets.
As for the fuel issue, if I remember Elon's figures right, SpaceX currently takes a $100 million rocket, fills it with $100k of fuel, launches it, and throws away the rocket. Hence the desire to reuse the rocket.
He's far from the first to try this. But the potential failure mode that others encountered is along the lines of what you indicate. You wind up with a reusable rocket that gets to altitude and back, but which is unable to lift a useful payload on top of that. He thinks that he can avoid this, but has not proven it yet. However even if he needs 10x as much fuel per pound lifted into orbit, he's still saving money. (His actual goal is, I think, 10% of his current launch cost.)
Grasshopper is a test vechicle, they plan on doing this with the F9R. My understanding is that the F9R will burn once to de-orbit (well, the first stage will be suborbital to begin with), aerobrake without a parachute for a short period, and then burn again for the final landing. I may be wrong about the aerobraking step, but they aren't planning on using a parachute regardless.
IIRC they are expecting a 10% drop in total cargo to LEO when the F9 is used in the reusable configuration. It takes far less fuel to get down than it does to get up since they only have to decelerate the lower stage (not the upper, or the cargo) and since the lower stage will be mostly empty at that point (much lighter). Furthermore the initial decent burn will be at a much lower outside atmospheric pressure (near vacuum?) resulting in a higher efficiency.
Also, the rocket will be falling at its terminal velocity, having lost the rest of its speed to air drag. Even without parachutes (and they don't intend to carry any), that's only ~120 m/s - the upper stage and payload are gone, the 1st stage has big tanks but only a little fuel left, so its density is low. The final burn for propulsive landing only has to cancel that last little bit.
Yup, air resistance works with you on the way down, not against you, and it is courteous enough to start small and work itself up when you are on the way down.
There will be heat; even the suborbital Mercury-Redstone missions needed heat shields.
I don't know how SpaceX is planning on handling that. Maybe the trajectory they put themselves on is going to be slow enough to survive reentry using just the main engine nozzles as make-shift heat shields?
Can't speak to the plan for the second stage (which will do a once-around and de-orbit if I understand correctly), but the first stage will not be following a ballistic trajectory and re-entry like a normal suborbital launch. Its goal is to return to the pad a few minutes after launch.
I suspect they will still do a single burn somewhere around apogee of the first stage; if I understand correctly they are well into their gravity turn by the time it separates so they'll have some horizontal velocity they will need to get rid of.
Maybe they are going to push the gravity turn later into the flight so that the first stage doesn't participate in that as much?
Fuel is cheap/rockets are expensive, descent doesn't burn much fuel.
This should allow mass to orbit at 1-10% of current cost.
The big problem to be solve here is firing a rocket while traveling backward at high speed. If they can pull off the Phase 3 test (high speed descent burn), space access is revolutionized (a space business boom):
* "transhab" space hotels (closer than you think, Bigelow already has two test stations in orbit),
* lower cost human trips to mars,
* massive increase in number, size, and speed of exploratory probes,
* communications satellites for everything (Google in the sky).
Not true considering you need to bring that extra fuel up in the first place, so you need a lot more fuel just to carry the weight of the descent fuel into space. It is a really tricky cost/benefit equation, but Musk seems to have figured that out.
The material cost of the fuel is something like $200k, which is peanuts for what launches as a whole usually cost. They cut into their payload to orbit budget to bring more fuel along to return with, but doing so allows them to reuse all the hardware which is the actually expensive part.
Once you are able to re-use the hardware then the cost to orbit can be lowered, which means that the 10% payload cut you took earlier actually isn't all that expensive in the first place.
That does assume that the hardware can be reused without significant refurbishing. The extensive maintenance needed due to damage incurred each flight was one reason the reusable shuttle ended up with a much higher per-launch cost than the expendable Soyuz. One can surely do much better than the shuttle, but cheap expendable systems are not that easy to beat with a reusable vehicle.
The Shuttle was a political football that had extreme requirements placed on it that were never used as part of its subsequently-shelved military mission. The Shuttle also pushed the envelope extremely hard. Finally, its funding was cut severely during development. All of this made it much less reusable than it might have been.
The SpaceX project suffers from none of these problems. A relatively conventional rocket with medium-performance engines, no crazy DoD requirements, and a sane budgeting process should do a whole lot better when it comes down to being actually reusable.
Re-using without massive refurbish costs is their ultimate goal, hence the assumption. If things go according to their plan, they are going to have turn-around of single-digit hours. Avoiding massive refurb is one of the reasons why they are not keen on dropping their rockets into salt-water for several hours. The Shuttle SRBs were really only nominally reusable. SpaceX is going for actually reusable.
A Falcon 9 lower stage also isn't a spaceplane covered in very expensive and fragile tiles, sitting next to a rocket. That helps.
Just using the first-stage without significant refurbishing will bring costs down like 50%. SpaceX has already tested their rocket engines for multiple (long) firings, but I don't know how much they refurbished them.
Yep. Once it's 'just' fuel, it's like flying a 747 across the ocean (maybe not in steerage, but chartering one), rather than building a vehicle and throwing it away. It's a 2+ order of magnitude difference, which should change things significantly.
If I remember correctly, they carry more fuel than they need in the first stage as a safety reserve, and the plan is to use that reserve fuel to land the stage. So they actually don't pay an extra weight cost, they simply make use of margin they were including anyway. If they end up having to use their safety margin, then the rocket can't land, but in the majority of flights where things run smoothly, they get to land it.
Love how this video completely skips the most difficult aspects of the flight for the components. Going from inverted/horizontal entry flight to the vertical landing position.
If you look at the Falcon 9 renders on the spacex website, you'll see that the centermost engine sticks very slightly further out than the rest (also that video shows the old engine configuration, future Falcon 9's are going to have their engines arranged in a circle with one in the center.) That engine may be on a gimbal that allows a descent that would look something like the LEM's descent. Initial re-orientation in vacuum could be done with cold gas thrusters similar to what grasshopper currently has.
Grasshopper is a test vehicle with the aim of making the first stage of the Falcon 9 reusable. Grasshopper, for example, has one motor, while an F9 first stage will have nine. (Thus the name.) The landing gear is also obviously not streamlined for rocket use. But the tankage and avionics and propulsion and such are all from an F9 first stage. So it's pretty close to what will really fly, but not quite.
Though it may go into "space", a Falcon 9 first stage will not go to orbit; it is decidedly suborbital. This makes it much easier to recover, as it is not going that fast (for a rocket) at engine cut-off. (The second stage takes the payload the other 2/3 of the way to orbit. While they imagine recovering the second stage, that's a lot harder.)
Being suborbital, the first stage probably will not do a retro-burn, as it will come back to Earth naturally. Entering the thicker part of the atmosphere it will reach its terminal velocity, possibly falling on its side to make that slower. They might use drogue chutes for this, or might not.
Once it has fallen to some frighteningly small distance from the ground, it will right itself and use a small fraction of its launched fuel (probably close to what current F9 stages keep in reserve) to slow down to landing velocity from terminal, steering along the way to land exactly where it needs to go.
I once did some rough numbers to guess that the landing propulsion will take 10-20s with 1-2 of the motors, using 5-10% of the fuel. (With only 5% fuel, a rocket stage is actually crazy light, which makes this work.) Hair-raising, but well within the capabilities of today's sensors, actuators, and computers.
No one's actually done this yet, but it seems plausible. I worry mostly about the stage surviving the initial re-entry, because reports are that earlier F9 first stages, which were supposed to water-land on parachutes, were totally trashed, possibly during that event. SpaceX actually has that data, though, so that's either not the case or they have some plan to make it work.
The F9R is planned to stage at a lower height to combat the problem you talked about of the first stage being trashed on their earlier attempts to recover it I do believe.
If I remember correctly, if they used a maximum burn right before impact they would only need about 1 tonne of fuel to take the first stage from orbit to the ground. Of course, that would require some crazy control systems, but it's a useful lower bound.
Parachutes are really hard to get right. John Carmack knows a lot more about rocketry than (almost?) anyone on this board (definitely more than me), and he has had them fail multiple times.
I believe it's a technology demonstrator for the eventual version of the Dragon capsule that has powered landing at a spaceport rather than the current water splashdown.
Two Stage to Orbit, with vertical rocket-thrust tail-landing for both stages, eschewing carbon fiber for aerospace aluminum and using friction stir welding, rejecting exotic engine designs for proven ones, and financing from dot-com tycoons:
I'm not affiliated, and the end is kinda corny, especially if you are a typical skeptic/rationalist Silicon Valley type. It's not exactly how it happened with SpaceX, but there are quite a few parallels:
The book was originally released online in parts, and I read it. The parts were then taken offline when the book appeared. I remember they used jet engines for thrust assist in the first stage.
Does SpaceX document all their tests publicly? Or are we just seeing the successful ones? (If they've all been successful ones, will we see unsuccessful ones if they come in the future?)
Ahh, yes. A little digging shows that these tests are done at their McGregor, TX test site, and McGregor is well within hearing and visual range of the tests.
A launch is completely different from a private short-range test on a closed site.
You could watch a launch live, and they are very public about the timing, purpose, and location of launches before they happen.
The Grasshopper tests (to my knowledge) are not open for public observation, and I haven't seen any media coverage prior to tests, so if there was an unsuccessful test it wouldn't be as obvious as an unsuccessful launch attempt.
My question was whether this is by design, and if there was an unsuccessful test whether they would showcase that as well, in the manner that unsuccessful launches are well documented public 'learning experiences'.
Pretty sure there is no company in the world that would publicly showcase their R&D failures. I think I understand where you're coming from, that you don't want to be misled about the safety and reliability, but it is still in an early testing stage.
I think posting a video of a rocket crashing would be way beyond any reasonable expectation. That's not contributing to any public learning. That's just doing significant damage to your brand with extremely small upside (gaining "honesty" cred with some small subset).
I wonder how useful the Lunar Lander Challenge was in being a trailblazer. Here's one of Masten Space's 2009 flights. Rock solid transfer from one pad to another, with a 90 second hover. They had hired a guy from Draper Labs to do the control code and won, snatching the big price from Armadillo. Impressive control. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaXW5TaFwAE
This is also using a fairly new engine, the Merlin 1-D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_1D#Merlin_1D. It is designed for mass production, using nearly 50% fewer components than the 1-C, and it seems to be flying great! Can't wait for the next launch!
I don't mean to stir controversy but I am curious how many countries are thinking 'I want one of these for my military'.
Hear me out, wouldn't this technology allow for more advanced ballistic flight across Earth and perhaps even become more efficient than anti-ballistic missiles, evading any 'danger'?.
I don't know anything about military strategy or missile technology but I'm having a hard time seeing how a missile making a turn that slow would really be effective at evading any kind of supersonic defensive weapon.
Also, missiles have to explode to be useful; a safe relaunch would be a bit worthless.
Just to add a pedantic remark, if the missile is guiding itself then it's not a ballistic missile anymore.
Yes, it's a guided missile not ballistic so those anti-ballistic things would be useless anyway. The best defense against guided missiles would be to disrupt the guidance system. However, there is technology being developed with the accuracy to allow a missile to use inertial navigation systems in the absence of gps.
My understanding is that the main improvement here is that the rocket is sophisticated enough to land itself gently and intact. Why would a missile ever want to do that?
I don't see any interesting military uses for this technology, beyond military applications for spaceflight in general.
This technology allows a rocket to maneuver while slow and close to the ground. The military terms for an object that is slow and close to the ground is "target".
Exactly. For that matter, the "Mercury 7" and the "New Nine" agree too; the Redstone/Atlas/Titan II's used for the Mercury and Gemini missions were ICBMs (edit: actually, was the Redstone technically an ICBM? I think as weapons they were short-range actually), originally meant to deliver nuclear bombs to Russia. (They were modified in several ways before being used for human flight of course, mostly for reliability). The Redstone in particular was a direct descendant of the V-2.
Re-entry vehicles on ICBMs are moving extremely fast, and aren't really maneuverable in the sense you're thinking. They're not designed to dodge ABMs so much as hit multiple targets from a single ICBM.
Even if you could somehow add high maneuverability to a MIRV, it wouldn't be close to matching how well an ABM can maneuver.
June 14, 2013: Grasshopper flies 325m straight up and down (http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/06/14/grasshopper-completes-...), which was hellishly impressive
Two months later, this test seems enormously more difficult than the flights without the sideways maneuver. And it's not even a year since it left the ground for the first time.