SpaceX's Grasshopper VTVL Finally Jumps Its Own Height

cylonlover writes "The SpaceX Grasshopper vertical takeoff vertical landing (VTVL) testbed has successfully flown to a height of 40 meters (131 ft), hovered for a bit and subsequently landed in a picture perfect test on December 17, 2012. The Grasshopper had previously taken two hops to less than 6 m (20 ft) in height, but the latest test was the first that saw it reach an altitude taller than the rocket itself, which is a modified Falcon 9 orbital launch vehicle. The flight lasted 29 seconds from launch to landing, and carried a 1.8 m (6 ft) cowboy dummy to give an indication of scale."

Comments

Re:YAY !! 1952 ALL OVER AGAIN !!

[BitZtream]

Its really not that hard. For small scale things, the controller hardware costs you about $400. You don't even need to actually know what you're doing, theres software to do the hard work for you. If you wanted to be really cheap you could put a minor amount of effort into modding something like the Ardupilot for rocket engines, though I don't know where you'd fine a controllable rocket engine on the cheap.