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Why I love me some DC-X footage, and bemoan what we lost when NASA killed the project for their own boondoggle that failed, talk about missing the point. • 45,
by valuearb 6y ago
Why I love me some DC-X footage, and bemoan what we lost when NASA killed the project for their own boondoggle that failed, talk about missing the point.
• 45,000 feet is a lot farther that 450 feet.
• Falling and using movable aerodynamic surfaces to descend in reentry position, then rotating into landing position is kind of hard.
• Running rocket engines for over four minutes straight is hard, BO has barely run their engines more than 4 minutes total in years of ground tests, without the realism of actual flight and its associated vibrations and accelerations.
• Restarting rocket engines is hard.
Lastly DC-X cracked up its last landing too.
- seg_lol 6y agoRetractable leg failed to extend and it tipped over when the engines were throttled down. The real issue is why did it have retractable legs in the first place, esp on a test vehicle. Sounds like a great to start writing a post mortem is in the design phase.
- valuearb 6y agoIt was a super cheap program as well. The post mortem should have been let’s build a bigger, better version with a similar budget, but instead NASA killed it to go all in on the 10X+ more expensive X-33 and killed that well before first flight.