Posted on 07/14/2013 6:11:02 PM PDT by Hojczyk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1QGMOX_NfA
California-based spacecraft company SpaceX has released a video of the June 14 test of its Grasshopper rocket. The company said it soared over 1,000 feet during its latest trial run in June and it made a remarkably precise landing. In detail, the rocket flew 325 m, or 1066 feet, after liftoff in McGregor Texas, a rocket development facility. This breaks its previous record height of 840 feet
.The test also drew praise for precision in landing. The precision is attributed to new navigation sensors that measure distance between the ground and the vessel. "Most rockets are equipped with sensors to determine position, but these sensors are generally not accurate enough to accomplish the type of precision landing necessary with Grasshopper," according to the statement released with the video.
The Grasshopper is a 10-story Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing (VTVL) vehicle, which SpaceX was directly controlling based on the sensor readings. "Grasshopper consists of a Falcon 9 rocket parts and a Merlin engine, four steel and aluminum landing legs with hydraulic dampers, and a steel support structure," according to the video statement.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
A VTOL rocket! Cool.
Like the Delta Clipper before it, a solution in search of a problem.
Thanks for posting this!!
My son is majoring in software engineering — he just ended his freshman year. Last spring, he entered an inter-collegiate programming competition (specifically for the type of programming used in gaming) — and took Most Creative, Best Space Game and 2nd in the overall competition.
His prize for Best Space Game was a tour of the Space X facilities in Hawthorne, California. You cannot imagine how much it meant to me that he invited ME (his mother) and his dad and uncle to go on the tour with him.
It was awesome inside Space X and an incredible experience. I only wish my dad were still alive to see what his grandson had accomplished — dad worked on the space program in the 60s.
We were told at Space X that the grasshopper landed within a FOOT of where it was launched — we got to see a video of it.
It’s just not natural, a rocket going backwards.
It has a problem. The problem is how to recover the lower stage for re-use. SpaceX plans on adding enough extra fuel to land the suborbital stages back on earth for re-use on subsequent missions. The cost of the extra fuel is small in comparison to the cost of the hardware.
The problem is trying to drag the entire stage into orbit, along with enough fuel to execute the subsequent landing, and still have enough capacity left over to put a useful payload into orbit.
Look at the Space Shuttle. It took the entire External Tank and two solid rocket boosters just to get the orbiter into orbit. Now imagine how much larger the entire stack would have to be just to be able to drag enough fuel into orbit to allow a tail standing landing afterwards.
It’s not the cost of the fuel, its the impossibility of the physics. SpaceX’s efforts are most likely aimed at gaining experience for a future Lunar or Mars lander.
Alright, so even just recovering the first stage in this manner is going to be a challenge to the overall performance of the stack. I’ll be interested to see where this leads.
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