You’ve probably seen the SpaceX Grasshopper blast off, hover and land vertically before. You’ve probably seen it fly higher than the Chrysler building. Now you can see this innovative little rocket zooms 250 meters into the air and fly 100 meters sideways. You know what it does next? It lands vertically. Just like rockets from old 1950s sci-fi movies!
The Grasshopper is taller than a ten story building, which makes the control problem particularly challenging. Sideways flying like this is an important part of the trajectory in order to land the rocket precisely back at the launch site after reentering from space at hypersonic velocity.
Maybe this is the direction NASA should have taken in the 1970s instead of ploughing funds into developing a space truck (Shuttle) that had a badly thought out heatshield and didn’t take people any further than 200 or 300km from Earth. And wasn’t fully reusable as it was originally supposed to be. And didn’t fly 52 missions a year as it was supposed to do.
Wonder where we’d be now if all the expertise in building Saturn V class rockets hadn’t been lost and rocket technology (for manned missions) had been further developed in the last 40 years.
Filed under: Manned Space Flight
