SpaceX Grasshopper rocket hops to new heights in Texas

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

It's like a scene from a 1950s sci-fi feature: a rocket lifts off atop a searing tongue of flame, hovers and then touches down gently, kicking up billowing clouds of smoke. But this time the backdrop is not Mars - it's Texas. In a real-life demo conducted on Saturday, a hovering rocket made by commercial space-flight wunderkind SpaceX climbed 80 metres, or 24 storeys, doubling the rocket's previous reach into the sky.

The flight brought the Hawthorne, California-based company another step closer to building a reusable rocket, a feat that should one day make orbital and interplanetary travel far cheaper and less wasteful.

Last year, SpaceX founder Elon Musk told New Scientist that fuelling a Falcon 9 rocket costs a mere $200,000. But large rockets like the Falcon 9 are built in sections, called stages, which fall away as the fuel is spent. Rocket stages get jettisoned into the sea, burned up or dumped in low Earth orbit, so a new $60 million rocket has to be made for each trip to orbit. Musk's goal is to have the rocket stages fly back to the pad for reuse - boosting space-flight economics and limiting debris.

At its test site in McGregor, Texas, SpaceX has been trying out a potentially reusable rocket stage called the Grasshopper, which stands 10 storeys tall and has four hydraulically damped landing legs. Grasshopper lifts off like a regular rocket, but then a self-stabilising guidance system lets it come to a halt in mid-air and gently land on the pad.

Grasshopper has been gradually increasing in capability: last September it flew to a height of 2.5 metres before touching down, in November it reached 5.4 metres and in December 40 metres.

In addition to breaking Grasshopper's height record, the most recent flight tested out a new landing algorithm that ensured the craft touched down with uber-high accuracy on the centremost part of the launch pad. The algorithm controlled the thrust so that it continually but marginally exceeded the rocket's changing weight as fuel was burned, a feat that generated a particularly satisfying exhaust flame - a ring of fire - on touchdown. Perhaps in a nod to the famous country-western tune, the down-home dudes at SpaceX dubbed the flight the Johnny Cash Hover Slam, and gave the video an appropriate soundtrack.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/297202c7/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A130C0A30Cspacex0Egrasshopper0Erocket0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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