Vertical Landing Rockets Before SpaceX
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it as evidence that vertical rocket landing was demonstrated long before SpaceX, with the DC-X as the main example.
What it is
Curious Droid surveys vertical take-off and landing rockets that predate SpaceX and Blue Origin, including the McDonnell Douglas DC-X of the 1990s. It shows that propulsive landing has about 60 years of history.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2019 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Cites computerex · 2019-05 · on “Tesla is raising up to $1.5B through convertible note and share sale”
You are making some really silly assumptions that are common amongst laymen in spaceflight. > They are utterly crushing all competition in terms of price and launch cadence. Launch market is not the entirety of the spaceflight industry. "The share of launch vehicles is as small as 4 percent of the overall market of space services." - Dmitry Rogozin And Blue Origin can do propulsive landing like SpaceX: [LINK] Propulsive landing has been around for a while: [this video] Whilst it seems (and is!) very cool to see the boosters land, it seems to impress the laymen a lot more than the true technical worth of the feat. Here's an addon to the Orbiter spaceflight simulator with recoverable falcon 9 stage
Cites api · 2022-05 · on “Delhi suffers at 49°C as heatwave sweeps India”
> If it were that easy, it would have happened. This idea of automatic progress is one of the great fallacies of our time. Things don't get done unless action is taken. Progress is volitional and requires effort whether it's at the scale of a single individual or an entire global economy. If action is not taken the status quo prevails by inertia. It might be cliche but I have to cite SpaceX and their reusable rocket cores as a classic example. Here is a video of a VTVL rocket called the DC-X created and flown in the early-mid 1990s: [this video] We could have had reusable rockets by 2000, but unfortunately the project was cancelled. Instead we endured another 10 years of paper studies supposedly
Critical kisstheblade · 2022-02 · on “SpaceX’s monstrous, dirt-cheap Starship may transform space travel”
What have these two people actually done, except lying all the time? And abusing their workers? Also, these "magical" landings have been made 60 YEARS AGO! Go Musk! Hyperloop! FSD! Robotaxis! Semi! VTOL with pressurized air! Tesla robot! Pedo guy! [this video]