Private Space Race Heats Up With Some Key Breakthroughs

Even as Elon Musk got everyone’s attention with the Hyperloop, his wild idea to remake mass transit, his engineers at SpaceX did something far cooler: They proved their reusable rocket can go sideways.

Almost immediately after Tuesday’s lift off, the 10-story-tall Grasshopper rocket made a “hard lateral deviation,” as Musk put it, of 100 meters during its ascent to 250 meters. It then returned to the center of the launch pad at touchdown.

That is rocket science. Literally. The really cool kind of rocket science.

Grasshopper already has made a few short hops and a few higher-altitude flights, and the flight, announced Wednesday, greatly expands the maneuvering envelope of the vertical take-off/vertical landing vehicle. It’s a major milestone in Musk’s plan to reboot the space sector. And it was but one milestone we’ve hit this week in the private space race. Sierra Nevada completed important — if pedestrian — testing of its new lifting body spacecraft, and Virgin Galactic signed up still more customers for flights it plans next year.

For all the debate among pseudo rocket scientists arguing whether carrying the fuel needed to return to Earth is a worthwhile proposition, those signing the checks still need to develop the technology to make it work. Musk is doing just that. He’s made it clear that reusing the first stage of a rocket will greatly improve the economics of delivering payloads to space, and his engineers continue making some impressive flights even as his critics continue piling on doubt.

The Grasshopper test is a big deal because there aren’t, at the moment, any rockets in use capable of the kind of lateral maneuvers SpaceX showed off Tuesday. Some smaller rockets have done it, but none of them even approaches Grasshopper’s size. The ability to make significant corrections to the trajectory is a key part of developing a reusable rocket, as the first stage will return to Earth at hypersonic speed. The only way to decrease its lateral speed, and guide it to a landing site, is through such moves.

“The test demonstrated the vehicle’s ability to perform more aggressive steering maneuvers than have been attempted in previous flights,” the company said in announcing the news. “Grasshopper is taller than a 10-story building, which makes the control problem particularly challenging.”

More: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/08/spacex-private-space-race-breakthroughs/

Private Space Race Heats Up With Some Key Breakthroughs

Private Space Race Heats Up With Some Key Breakthroughs

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