DC-X Flight 8

What Hacker News said

Cites Gravityloss · 2012-12 · on “SpaceX Grasshopper Takes Off and Lands Vertically [video]”

As far as I know, this is only the second turbopump fed liquid rocket to land vertically, after DC-X (that became DC-XA). [this video] This is important, as in practice only turbopump rockets have enough performance for orbital uses. If it can routinely and safely land vertically, then it's very easy to build a reusable first stage out of this. If everything works out, a reusable Falcon could fly every few days: Ideally you'd just refuel and go again, like an airplane. In this first generation though I expect a lot of maintenance and handwork by lots of people every flight. This will require a whole ecosystem too: low maintenance satellites that can be slapped on the rocket and launched at any ti

Cites ChuckMcM · 2013-03 · on “SpaceX’s Autonomous ‘Grasshopper’ Rocket Makes Milestone Flight”

Nicely done, nicely done. Reminds me a bit of the early DC-X flights, this link: [this video] is DC-X flight #8 which I expect GrassHopper to do at some point as well (this was 1995 btw, imagine the computers they had on DC-X vs what they have on Grasshopper!) Blue Origin is a bit ahead here in terms of take off and landing. But it has the challenge of not benefiting from a paid launch contract like SpaceX currently has. What I find particularly interesting is that either the Dragon or the Blue Origin craft already have the delta-V to land an return to orbit from the moon, if they can get there. The thing that will break that wide open is on-orbit refueling. The game changes in a particularly com

Cites rplnt · 2013-04 · on “SpaceX Grasshopper Flies High”

No, I'm referring to on-earth tests, such as this [this video] However I can't find the exact one I had in mind, or perhaps I was off with the date.

Cites Gravityloss · 2014-08 · on “SpaceX rocket explodes during testing over Texas”

Yes. If you read interviews, they had stuff like Elon having complaints that they aren't pushing the envelope hard enough since they don't get any crashes. Maybe they tested the control system's abilities by pushing it over very quickly. I bet there's people at SpaceX who were involved on the DC-X that did a successful translation to horizontal and back in 1995. [this video] Hope SpaceX has enough spare hardware that they can get quickly back up to testing again. I don't see any reason they wouldn't since they have produced quite many leg sets already - maybe they were planning to moving to newer hardware iterations anyway and the vehicle was "expendable", or at least the risk with dangerous test

Cites akhatri_aus · 2017-11 · on “Tesla Semi”

There was already a working program that had their funding axed: Here's a video from 1995: [this video] . There were others too.

Cites api · 2021-03 · on “Tesla's “full self driving” beta is potentially dangerous”

I love SpaceX, but I don't find them quite as miraculously impressive as some people. SpaceX is "just" doing what NASA did in their glory days: rapidly iterating, innovating, and then carrying those innovations all the way through to real world flight. That last part is key. In industry we call that "shipping." NASA didn't stop innovating per se. In the 1980s and 1990s they worked out their own version of vertical take-off and landing and actually test flew it: [this video] Linear aerospike engines are pretty neat too: [LINK] Problem is absolutely none of this stuff ever got close to operational. It kept getting cancelled in the prototype stage. If the DC-X had been developed into a fully reusabl

Cites ruph123 · 2021-03 · on “NASA mission to Venus in 1978 may have detected phosphine, a gas related to life”

> But I think the point I was making stands. There are certainly innovations that sounds illogical but turn out to be very successful. Just because something sounds like a bad idea doesn't mean it is, it just means it hasn't worked yet. No because your point was about horses being replaced by cars, which is what people (and probably horses) were skeptical about at that time. In the same way IBM was saying that computers will never appear in homes, etc. But these devices were already there. The misconceptions were about predicting demand and miniaturization. This is completely different from terraforming. You are comparing "oh these devices sure never will be popular enough to make this other

Cites eesmith · 2022-10 · on “An Israeli F-15 landed without a wing (2020)”

[LINK] > You may well be forgiven for thinking that rockets which take off vertically and then land again vertically were a recent development by the likes of Blue Origin and SpaceX but a quick look back the history of rocketry and you’ll see that this technique is far from new and was first used nearly 60 years ago ... > The image of rockets landing vertically on their tail fins has been popularised in Science fiction since buck Rodgers in the early 1930’s, though it took nearly 30 years to bring the technology to a point where it could be used practically ... > The first instance of a rocket-powered vertical take off and vertical landing was shown in 1961 with the Bell Rocket belt. ... > B