SpaceX Grasshopper Performs Impressive Divert Test
SpaceX Grasshopper Performs Divert Test [Watch], SpaceRef Business
“SpaceX completed what appears to be a successful divert test yesterday of its Falcon 9 Test Rig, code named Grasshopper.
According to SpaceX the Grasshopper flew to a height of 250 meters with a 100 meter lateral maneuver before returning to the center of the pad. Grasshopper is is taller than a ten story building.”
Really good stuff. I can remember when someone in Rayburn told me SpaceX was “cooky” and Grasshopper would “never fly”.
Ok. 🙂 – might want to reconsider what your staffer is feeding you – Ma’am.
Too bad there isn’t a wider angle view to better show the lateral movement. Zoomed in as it is you mainly just see the blue sky
Still, AWESOME!! Can’t wait to see Grasshopper 2 fly out of SSA.
So soon????? Look its out of control!!!! What luck it just happened to land on its launch pad. JUST A STUNT! 🙂
This can’t be done ..NASA and old space said this was impossible.
Please refer to DC-x video link below
Impressive and Kudos to the team… but lateral transition and landing was done 20 years ago, tomorrow, on the first flight of DC-X.
There any video of that? That would becool to compare.
Swan dive test DC-X
http://www.google.com/url?s…
Wow! long flight very cool. And all that work was canned by some politcal crap???? Dam shame! And how much was spent before that program got axed?
Pete Conrad seems to have kept a pretty tight lid on this program: “The DC-X was completed in 21 months by a team of 100 people, at a cost of around 60 million in 1991 dollars,” according to Wikipedia.
Lots of us were very disappointed when there was no follow-on after the crash.
Thanks I Know so little about it. I would guess as much it hurts to have been hurt by the public space system that it must be hearting to see this kind of work being done in an environment where it has a better chance to bare fruit????
Why the crash such a big deal? Wasn’t it a test flight????
It was the DC-XA that suffered the landing leg malfunction (due to human error). By this time (mid-1990s), SDIO had turned the program over to NASA, and as always, money was tight. The government decided to cease work on the Delta Clipper and focus on Venture Star–a pity, IMHO, perhaps with a little NIH thrown in. Who knows?
Your point about the DC’s success rate is a good one; it was better than 90% successful, not bad for a test program, and proved techniques like one-day turnaround, small support staff, and autonomous abort (which saved the vehicle on at least one occasion).
We also should remember that there is a school of thought in the aerospace community which holds that the way to develop good hardware is to “fly ’em, bend ’em, redesign, and fly again.” NASA decided to dispense with the last two steps in this case.
There’s a fairly decent resume of the DC-X, -XA, and -Y effort here:
http://www.astronautix.com/…
Wikipedia also has a review of the effort that is pretty well footnoted; following the footnotes can lead you farther.
Hey, Venturestar was a complete success! It resulted in one billion dollars being transferred to Lockheed Martin on schedule, which is all it was ever really intended to do.
And of there was the 2009 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X Challenge, but none of those rockets came anywhere near Grasshopper in scale.
It was done even earlier with the lunar lander.
However, the breakthrough with Grasshopper isn’t that it’s Yet Another bespoke VTOL test vehicle. It’s the feedback between Grasshopper and Falcon 9.
Unlike DC-X and every other VTOL demonstrator, Grasshopper is just a modified first stage from a working commercial launch system. But what Grasshopper teaches SpaceX is being fed back into the actual first stages.
And during actual launches, those first stages have been trying controlled reentry. Now based on what SpaceX has learned from that, they’ve updated the engines and design of the launcher, and fed those upgrades back into the next version of Grasshopper.
Falcon 9 is testing from the top down, Grasshopper from the bottom up. At some point they will meet in the middle and we will have the first truly reusable VTOL commercial launch stage.
That’s what’s new. That iterative feedback is what no one has ever done before.
I so wonder if we will see a falcon 9 booster make wet soft landing before 2014?
Time will tell, but on the downside, NASA just moved the ISS resupply mission formerly flagged for December into 2014 because of a scheduling conflict with Orbital.
On the up side they have commercial flights scheduled
a true hover-just-over-the-water landing -before-2014? probably very unlikely. during 2014? very likely. i would guess they will have a couple of “powered splashdowns” first. those will make for a pretty awesome explosion videos.
even so, i’d anticipate SpaceX attempting a return to the launch pad in late 2014 if all goes extremely well (including their Grasshopper 2 testing at Spaceport America), or sometime in 2015 if they have a crash or two to learn from.
Paul…. DC-X demonstrated atmospheric landing… something the Lunar Module (or as I prefer LEM) didn’t have to deal with. SpaceX is learning the lessons of atmospheric VTOL but the other issues of multiple engine restarts and aerodynamic control are to come.
You seem to have missed my entire point.
Ok, how about the LLTV that the astronauts trained on and Neil Armstrong famously bailed out of in 1968.
I also believe this is quite different as Paul does.
Expanding the envelope one launch at a time.
Heh, the order the comments are displaying, the very next comment under yours was “but [this] was done 20 years ago”.
HEY NOW! Robert .. how can you say that .. why just the other day NASA tested a boiler plate capsule to see if it floated. See, only nine years and they are already doing water tests of a desposable capsule.
SpaceX continues to show they can solve hard technical problems. But I want to see if they can solve their production problems. They need to get at least two F9’s off this year, rather than continue with their current average of a flight every 10 months. Orbital and Sierra Nevada have spacecraft bagged up and sitting in their high bays waiting fo their turn. Right now customers are willing to give SpaceX the benefit of the doubt due to their low prices. But the likes of SES and ORBCOMM cannot wait forever.
Don’t stress. Well, not too much anyway. 🙂
They’re building hardware like crazy at the moment and their next flight is currently being integrated at the launch pad for a 5th Sept launch but I’d say more likely NET October. That’s the small Cassiope from Vandenberg. 1st launch from there for SpaceX. This is also supposed to be the first attempt to bring the F9R 1st stage back to a ‘soft’ water landing. After that, SES-8 supposed to be after that but no date as yet, then Thiacom 6 from the Cape which does have a prelim’ date. Might mean SES-8 is slipping out. 🙁
I’d expect to see another 2 flights for the year making 3 total since CRS-3 has moved to NET Jan14.
FH and F9R for 2014 will sure make it an interesting year.
They’ve got a lot of operational work in the next couple of years without even considering their R&D stuff. Without doubt, busiest launch company in the world.
Totally off-topic (please forgive Keith) but heading to Sydney for a week’s holiday and to view a Tesla S. Now just gotta talk my wife into getting one. Think it’ll sell itself actually.
Cheers from DownUnder.
I have heard (unconfirmed) that SpaceX’s next ISS resupply mission will be scheduled approx. February. Apparently the SpaceX and Orbital windows late this year were too close together and NASA asked SpaceX to delay. Keith might be able to confirm this.
I wonder how far into the solar system we could have gotten if we had just diverted the NASA PowerPoint funds to HSF back in, say, the early 1990s…
Mark you remember what Robert G O said? Since its deleted now I’m interested.
Curious. George?
Add Robert may have be lazard Beamed to dust!! 🙁
Sorry, I don’t remember.
does anyone know what the wind speed was for this (or any other) Grasshopper test?