Posted on 04/24/2013 8:12:01 PM PDT by rocky50
Grasshopper is a 10-story Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing (VTVL) vehicle that SpaceX has designed to test the technologies needed to return a rocket back to Earth intact. While most rockets are designed to burn up in the atmosphere during reentry, SpaceX's rockets are being designed to return to the launch pad for a vertical landing.
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Bert Rutan is a genius!
Hugo Gernsback would be very pleased.
Way cool!!
Can I have one? Pretty please??
Amazing!
unbelievable......
Weird song that is more acclaimed than it deserves, very cool rocket.
Total non-sequitur here.
So rocket ship goes up about 1100 feet and then rocket ship comes back down. I guess I don’t get it. What is the big deal about that?
Color me impressed! That was incredible.
Cool but it probably burned all it’s onboard fuel performing that little demo. Chemical rockets are a losing proposition. They will never power us into deep space or beyond.
Looks like using twice as much fuel as would make sense.
Wind power is the only viable way!
Reminds me of how rocket ships were portrayed in 1950s sci-fi flicks.
Impressive but it has to carry fuel to land into orbit, the first stage or all of them?
I forgot what the proportion was but for every pound of weight in the Saturn V, X pounds of fuel were required.
It seems parachutes would make more sense.
Is this an animation?
The shadows of the rocket and the water tower are not parallel.
Neat stuff.
I’ll be heading to Waco in a few weeks. Anyone have connections with SpaceX that I can talk to about getting a tour? Used to work for a NASA contractor (avionics software), grew up across the street from JSC and my father was Mission Control from Apollo to Shuttle... so it’s a big interest to me personally.
Uh......maybe because......it’s never been done before?
It is a test. It is a prototype first stage of the Falcon 9 vehicle. If things go well, this reusable first stage will be propelling upper stages into the atmosphere, separating, and landing back at the launch pad.
The importance of this is that if SpaceX can do this, it will drop launch costs lower than any other company or country. They will bring all the launch business that can fit onto a Falcon 9 here, because no one will be able to compete with them.
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