4 ms·
Don't miss seeing the animation toward the end of the video.
by wissler 14y ago
Don't miss seeing the animation toward the end of the video.
- minikomi 14y agoThe first instance of that landing would be quite something to witness!
- frankydp 14y agoI would drive any distance to see a vstol landing of an suborbital or orbital vehicle. Talk about game changing.
- mkramlich 14y agoAgreed. If you'd like to cheat and get a sneak preview of what it could be like, at least the last leg, go dig up the Armadillo Aerospace videos of their capsule VTOL launch/land successes. As a thumbnail argument, if we've seen Armadillo do just the VTOL launch/land part, and we've seen SpaceX do the rocket launch & parachute splashdown part, it's not hard to imagine the engineering equivalent of smooshing those two solution spaces together into a single entity which can accomplish both. I will be as giddy as a lunch table of teen girls at recess when I see SpaceX pull this off.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoArmadillo, Blue Origin, and Masten (and the DC-XA before them) have all been working on rocket powered VTVL flights and have done sub-scale test flights. It's a technology that just plain makes sense, especially now that computers are so cheap and so fast. Perhaps in 20 or 30 years it will be so common and routine that a lot of people will think it's a natural part of spaceflight and wonder how it could possibly be done any other way.
- dantheman 14y agoAgreed - the 6 minute mark is great. You can see the engine return to earth.
- jordanthoms 14y agoYeah, it'll be incredible to see that kind of precision with just retro rockets, imagine travelling down in that with no wings and no parachute!