Agreed, it brings the story home. What I most like about this news is that Honda has joined Blue Origin and SpaceX in demonstrating a complete "hop" (all though my all time favorite is the "ring of fire" video SpaceX did.)
But it also illustrates that I've seen in the Bay Area time and time again, which is that once you demonstrate that something is doable (as SpaceX has) It opens the way for other capital to create competitive systems.
At Google, where I worked for a few years, it was interesting to see how Google's understanding of search (publicly disclosed), and the infrastructure to host it (kept secret) kept it comfortably ahead of competitors until the design space was exhausted. At which point Google stopped moving forward and everyone else asymptotically approached their level of understanding and mastery.
I see the same thing happening to SpaceX. As other firms master the art of the reusable booster, SpaceX's grasp on the launch services market weakens. Just as Google's grasp of the search market weakens. Or Sun's grasp of the server market weakened. When it becomes possible to buy launch services from another vendor which are comparable (not necessarily cheaper, just comparable) without the baggage of the damage Elon has done, SpaceX will be in a tougher spot.
It also helps me to understand just how much SpaceX needs Starship in order to stay on top of the market.
Some folks will no doubt see this as casting shade on SpaceX, I assure you it is not. What SpaceX's engineering teams have accomplished remains amazing and they deserve their success. It is just someone who has been through a number of technology curves noting how similar the they play out over their lifetimes.
Having witnessed first hand how DEC felt that Sun's "toy computers" would never eclipse DEC in the Server business, and watched as United Launch Alliance dismissed Falcon 9 as something that would never seriously challenge their capabilities, it feels almost prophetic to watch SpaceX's competitors emerge.
gpm 16 hours ago [-]
> What I most like about this news is that Honda has joined Blue Origin and SpaceX in demonstrating a complete "hop
I literally applied to work at McDonnell Douglas when I heard about DC-X! It went against my choice to NOT work for a defense contractor, but it was a really cool project. They were amenable to hiring me but a program manager told me in confidence that the project had lost support because the Strategic Defense Initiative's cancellation meant there was no money to continue the project. The demo flights were the last deliverable in the contract and after that the project was dead. It made me sad.
pantulis 7 hours ago [-]
Can't help but recognize the level of awesomeness. For me "deliverable" means a software project, a presentation deck, whatever. These guys delivered a rocket.
Northrop Grumman Lunar Landet Challenge was before 2010. Works of e.g. Armadillo Aerospace...
perilunar 5 hours ago [-]
And the earliest rocket landings would have been the various lunar landers in the 1960s.
AnthonyMouse 12 hours ago [-]
> At Google, where I worked for a few years, it was interesting to see how Google's understanding of search (publicly disclosed), and the infrastructure to host it (kept secret) kept it comfortably ahead of competitors until the design space was exhausted. At which point Google stopped moving forward and everyone else asymptotically approached their level of understanding and mastery.
This is the "markets mature and commodify over time" thing.
What companies are supposed to do in those cases are one of two things. One, keep investing the money into the market or related ones so you keep having an advantage. Or two, if there is nothing relevant and adjacent to productively invest in, return it to shareholders as dividends or share buybacks so they can invest it in some other unrelated market.
But space seems like it would be the first one big time because of the amount of stuff that still has yet to be developed. Starlink was an obvious example of something in that nature, and then it's going to be things like "put datacenters in orbit so you can use solar without worrying about clouds or nighttime" and "build robots that can do semi-autonomous work in places far enough away for both human presence and round trip latency to be an inconvenience" etc.
We'd be living in Star Trek by the time they'd run out of something more to do.
palata 9 hours ago [-]
> We'd be living in Star Trek by the time they'd run out of something more to do.
Chances are that we will be living on the consequence of the end of fossil fuels and the rise of climate change long before that, though.
AnthonyMouse 8 hours ago [-]
The end of fossil fuels seem pretty boring. The worst case is that you replace them with nuclear, which has costs on par with fossil fuels to begin with. If we're lucky some kind of cheap scalable energy storage tech is developed and then energy costs less than it did historically.
palata 6 hours ago [-]
> The worst case is that you replace them with nuclear
Not remotely the worst case. How do you expect to power all the ships needed for globalisation with nuclear power? What about planes? Can a rocket take off with a nuclear engine?
Fossil fuels account for 80% of the energy we use, electricity merely 20%. A whole lot of those 80% come from use-cases that were built around fossil fuels (how do you make plastic and all the materials that depend on it with nuclear energy?), and we don't (yet) have a way to replace that with something else. Try to power a ship with electricity...
Hydrogen, you say? We would need a lot more energy to produce enough hydrogen to replace oil. So we're going from "we don't have a way to compensate for the lack of oil" with "our solution is to not only compensate, but actually produce more energy than what oil was giving us".
All that while currently living a mass extinction and having already missed the reasonable objectives for global warming. So we have a few decades to get there, and what we have seen in the last few decades is that all we have achieved is making the problem worse.
zizee 5 hours ago [-]
There are many nuclear powered ships. If the decision is between nuclear proliferation, or the end of the global economy, I'm betting we'll choose the former.
If you have enough electricity, you can manufacture avgas, methane and whatever other fuels you need for aerospace.
palata 5 hours ago [-]
> There are many nuclear powered ships
What's the ratio of nuclear-powered big ships vs non-nuclear-powered big ships?
> If you have enough electricity
We're talking about moving our current electricity production entirely out of fossil fuels (because we produce a lot of electricity with them), then multiplying that production by 5, and at this point we're only producing the same amount of energy as today. But of course that's not enough, because we then need to use a lot of that energy to produce what's needed to replace oil, e.g. hydrogen.
We currently need what... 10-15 years to build a nuclear power plant? We're talking about building multiple orders of magnitudes more of them in a few decades, together with the electrical network and of course everything that needs to be re-engineered now that they can't run with oil anymore. And we're currently using oil for a reason: it's super dense, there is nothing more convenient.
And what value does it add? Nothing. It's just for replacing what currently works. Who will pay for that? Where will the money come from?
And this has to be done in a context where geopolitical instability will grow every year (because it is a fact: our access to abundant fossil fuel is coming to an end; Europe has seen it since 2007). And of course in a context where we are not remotely thinking about doing it. In the last decades, we as a society have actually kept accelerating in the opposite direction.
How realistic do you think your scenario is, really?
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
> We currently need what... 10-15 years to build a nuclear power plant
Part of this is we don't build a lot of them and so are not good at it. If we set out to build hundreds of them per year we could do that, and costs would go down.
>And what value does it add? Nothing. It's just for replacing what currently works. Who will pay for that? Where will the money come from?
That is not an issue. A quick search says that ships have a lifetime to 20-30 years after which they are replaced. Sure there are a few antiques older than that, but for the vast majority of ships the owner will pay to replace it in 20-30 years anyway. Oil is not going to run out on a single day, it will be a process of years which is plenty of time for normal processes to work.
I don't favor nuclear in general, but for large ships it remains the only thing I know of that makes sense. (synthetic fuels are expensive, and solar/wind needs more space than a ship to deliver the power a ship wants).
numpad0 3 hours ago [-]
It doesn't take much time or effort to build nuclear powered anything if you were not concerned with bunch of turbojet Boeing planes circling above you. It takes centuries if you were.
It is possibly to create synthetic fuel from coal. For usecases that absolutely require fuel we would be able to synthetically create it.
palata 5 hours ago [-]
It's not a question of what use-cases theoretically require fossil fuels. The whole problem is the scale.
We have to find a replacement for oil and get it to the scale of oil in a fraction of the time we had to get where we are now with oil. And getting there with oil was easier, because oil is extremely convenient.
It's a bit like saying "we need to rewrite the Linux kernel with a new language that we are yet to invent, and it has to reach feature-parity in 5 years". Sure, theoretically we know how to create a new language and how to write a kernel, but can we do both in 5 years? Ever heard of e.g. Fuchsia? And they didn't try to invent a language for it.
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
The Germans were able to transition from oil to synthetic fuels while in the middle of WWII. South Africa used the same to provide their energy for decades when the world prevented them from getting oil. We know from those experiences that synthetic fuels scale.
We also know from experience that synthetic fuels are around 5 times more expensive than oil, and so only niches are willing to pay for it if oil is an alternative.
mensetmanusman 4 hours ago [-]
Yes. With enough energy you can make anything.
mensetmanusman 4 hours ago [-]
Population is crashing too fast for that to happen.
ChrisMarshallNY 16 hours ago [-]
Don't forget Ballmer dissing the iPad.
I also won't forget the marketing department at the camera company I worked at, dismissing the iPhone, when it first came out (it ended up eating their lunch).
josh2600 13 hours ago [-]
I always think about blackberry’s internal design teams telling the ceo that the iPhone was fake, then getting one and seeing that it was a small logic board with a giant battery.
RIM got so completely smoked with their ten year development cycles. It’s amazing if that they still have a business today to be honest.
testing22321 2 hours ago [-]
Even the CEO of United Launch Aliance said public ally the SpaceX raptor 3 was fake.
They are so far ahead even their biggest competitor can’t comprehend what they’re doing.
someuser2345 3 hours ago [-]
To be fair, a lot of the iPhone's first demo was faked.
stefanfisk 9 hours ago [-]
Where can I read more about the design team believing that the iPhone was fake?
Sooner rather than later you can buy this stuff on AliExpress.
amelius 6 hours ago [-]
A rocket has a lot in common with a pipe organ, from an aerodynamics viewpoint.
dirkc 3 hours ago [-]
Now I am imagining a future where rockets mount different pipe organs so they make distinct sounds when coming back to land
dbbr 3 hours ago [-]
Organpunk.
bigiain 12 hours ago [-]
> When it becomes possible to buy launch services from another vendor which are comparable (not necessarily cheaper, just comparable) without the baggage of the damage Elon has done, SpaceX will be in a tougher spot.
And I suspect that's doubly true for launch customers outside the US.
bbarnett 4 hours ago [-]
I hate to derail into the political, but that's already been done so I'll input an alternate viewpoint.
Most people I know in Canada, don't currently think poorly of Elon. Note the conditional, currently. They think poorly of Trump, and the entire republican party for talking about, and allowing Trump to talk about annexation. (For example, congress purposefully extending all of Trump's emergency executive orders for the rest of the year, when they'd normally need 90 days + review of congress)
However this isn't about US "team" politics, where even your news talks about "red states" and "blue states". This is simply about "Is this thing good or bad for Canada".
For example, while tariffs are seen as just plain dumb, they're not seen as hostile to Canada, just a shift in US policy. It's the speed of tariff change that's the biggest concern. Put another way, most of the world has no idea or cares for US "team" politics, and frankly we don't understand or even know what drives most US political discussion. It all seems like senseless drivel.
Now to be fair, I'm sure anyone peering in at any political argument from outside, ends up with this feeling. If you've even been visiting a friend, and their family gets into an argument, it's just embarrassing and often laden with decades of back-history, for which you have no context or understanding.
Couple that with the fact that Canada has multiple political parties, not just two, especially at the provincial level. This means we're more accustomed to people working with those they normally do not want to, in order to find a cooperative means to an end. You can see cases in the past where a minority government/party remains in power, by the support of a separatist party. Yes, sometimes people wanting to separate from the country, vote with you and work with you on key topics.
And this sort of logic is quite true for most European nations too.
So not only do those arguments the US seems to have with in its team dynamic seem super weird (only two often completely opposite viewpoints, with no compromise), we don't "get" all the historical chuff that comes along with those arguments.
So back to Elon. Was Canada upset at Elon? Yes just as Canada was, and is still upset at the entire US. But there's upset, and then there's upset. And from what I see here, that has faded against Musk.
After all, none of the US "team" arguments meant anything to Canada. We were extremely massively upset at Trump and those in Congress for not reigning him in about annexation. The rest?
Well that's internal US strife, which we don't even understand. For context, all the layoffs in your government via Musk seemed excessive, but the concept of trying to save money seemed good. Then there was all this undertone of "oh, but he's doing it for evil reasons", with reasons no foreigner could even understand without decades of thinking in terms of "team politics".
This is a bit of a blather, but I guess I'm trying to say that don't count on internal US team politics being the same viewpoint that other countries will have.
And most of this isn't a knock against the US. For example, as I've said above, does the average American understand what drives the dynamic between the Bloc Quebecois, their desire for Quebec independance, while also supporting Canada in parallel? Or the fact that we have a separatist party in our federal parliament? I assure you, no Wikipedia article or summary will get you even close to viewing this dynamic from a Canadian viewpoint.
panick21_ 7 hours ago [-]
I think you are to optimistic, what you say is true in principle, but it will take much longer. Vertical landing isn't really the technical challenge. Many small vehicles have demonstrated this over the years, including before SpaceX.
The challenge with orbital booster reuse is getting them threw the atmosphere intact and ready to land and then be reused quickly. And do that while being optimized enough to carry payload. That is the actual challenge. And that's just the first, then you need to build everything to be able to do this 5-10 times.
Only one other company then SpaceX has achieved getting a booster back at all, and that was by dropping it into an ocean. RocketLab, and they so far as I know have never reflown a complete booster. BlueOrigin has never landed a complete booster. ULA and Arianespace aren't close.
Honda in particular is not a launch competitor and is very unlikely to be one in the future. Japan already has a pet rocket that they support that has low launch rates. Honda isn't just isn't a competitor in the launch sector, and I don't think they are even planning that.
BlueOrigin might emerge as a competitor, but its nothing like Sun (sun was profitable in the first year). BlueOrigin simply has an infinite money glitch, that almost no other company in history had. The amount of money BlueOrigin spent in the last 10 year is actually unbelievable, they at times had the same amount of people as SpaceX, while having near 0 revenue. By any rational evaluation BlueOrigin is completely non-viable as a company, any they are burning billions per year.
RocketLab will likely be a real competitor eventually, but they are pretty clearly positioning themselves at being Nr.2, not aiming for flight rates nearly in SpaceX territory. And they have a lot of technical risk left to clear.
At the moment SpaceX is moving forward faster then anybody else is catching up. Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy still run loops around everybody and nobody will challenge it for another 10 years at least, and that's assuming Falcon 9 operations don't improve.
Starship isn't needed for the launch market, but for their own constellation.
djaychela 5 hours ago [-]
>nobody will challenge it for another 10 years at least, and that's assuming Falcon 9 operations don't improve.
I think the timeline is very difficult to predict here. We've seen countless companies who are leading in technologies who when others see it can be done... -know- it can be done so then can do it. Like the 4 minute mile.
I know it's not simple and no-one else is near SpaceX at the moment, but to ignore reusability has become an extinction-level event for launch providers. Some will learn from the 'break it and learn quickly' mentality that SpaceX followed for getting F9 to reliable reusability and there will be more competition.
Second-stage re-use is clearly the next phase and that's what Starship is targeting (plus massive capacity). I don't know if it scales to smaller rockets, but if it does (and we know that it's physically possible as some of the Starship second-stages have made it back kinda-alive), then it will be revolutionary.
Look at the lead that Tesla has thrown away in the EV market. I remember seeing an interview with Elon Musk talking about BYD EVs - "Yes, but look at their car, it's a joke"... to now having better tech in some ways than Tesla, and an up-to-date product line which looks way better than the staid models that Tesla is producing. Only the charging infra is keeping them ahead in terms of overall usability - and at some point that will be a solved problem for disparate third-party charging providers.
Cybertruck is a child-like anomaly which is not a mass seller. The M3 and MY are dated, and the robotaxi is merely a rehash of those stylistically (as well as completely the wrong thing to be making in terms of the market it's supposed to serve, IMO). I have read that Tesla is stuck in a rut, and their line-up looks like it. The 'highland' refresh and model y are both sticking-plaster makeovers.
When I ask my (mid 20s) kids if they'd buy a Kia EV3, a BYD Dolphin Surf or a Tesla, it's the Kia or the BYD. They look like cool cars, not something that a 50 year old (me!) would like (I prefer the EV3 if I had a choice). I know this is a bit off topic, but I'm just trying to illustrate that it's easy to think you're unassailable, and then the competition not only catches up, but overtakes. And timelines are impossible to predict to that scale, IMO.
panick21_ 2 hours ago [-]
> but to ignore reusability has become an extinction-level event for launch providers
But it hasn't, that's just a fact. Neither ULA, nor Arianespace, nor Russia have gone extinct or embraced reuse to any degree at all. Same goes for India and Japan. Because this market simply doesn't operate like typical markets.
ULA and Arianespace have lots of orders. There a complex reason for this, but its still just a reality. Neither Russia or India have made major investments in reusable rockets. China to some degree does but we have little insight.
The only competitors are all new companies that had no position in the market before.
> Like the 4 minute mile.
No amount of believe makes it just happen. You can't just work a bit harder and get there incrementally. That's not how rockets work. Its not like running at all. Runners already existed, they just needed to incrementally improve a little bit, believe can help with that.
But if you don't have the necessary rocket engine or architecture, you can't just incrementally improve to get to the goal. You need to redo the whole architecture from the ground up. No amount of testing and believe turns Ariane 5 into a Falcon 9 competitor. And that's going to cost billions even if everything goes well.
That's why non of the existing competitors have done it. Its new potential competitors coming up that work on it.
> Some will learn from the 'break it and learn quickly' mentality that SpaceX followed for getting F9 to reliable reusability and there will be more competition.
That mentality is almost 20 years old and nobody has embraced it in the same way. There are many reasons for this that I could get into. But its far more then simply a shift in mentality. If your fundamentals are wrong, no amount of mentality shift changes anything.
And even if you embrace that mentality, its still a 10 year journey, see Stoke Space for example.
And many companies that had that mentality have gone bust, see ABL and others.
> Look at the lead that Tesla has thrown away in the EV market.
Tesla lead wasn't really technological. They never had battery technology better then what many other companies can produce. Except maybe their packs, were a bit better in the beginning, but that's about it and that wasn't a huge engineering lift to replicate.
What made them get a lead is the complete believe in the concept, and their ability to raise enough money to make it happen on a large scale, plus proving there is demand.
Also I think drawing parallels between car industry and space industry isn't really relevant at all.
elteto 16 minutes ago [-]
Maintaining access to space is a national security priority for states so they will always subsidize their own launch providers. Russia is not going to shut down Roscosmos and launch everything with SpaceX (and they also can’t even if they wanted to). That’s the reason those companies are still around. In the case of ULA the US government maintains two launch providers available by means of Assured Access to Space directives. That’s ULA and SpaceX share the US government’s space market.
But all national launch providers use to supplement their income with commercial launches and SpaceX has completely sucked the air out of the room in that regard. It’s now more expensive for all these countries to keep these programs operational.
kortilla 15 hours ago [-]
Is this meaningful without it being orbital?
mr_toad 2 hours ago [-]
The commercial market is almost entirely for satellites, and by definition that means putting them in orbit.
iancmceachern 14 hours ago [-]
We were sending stuff into orbit far before we could reliably, reusabley, land a rocket on its tail.
kortilla 9 hours ago [-]
It’s the combination of the two that’s challenging though. The force of a first stage boosting an upper stage to orbit is a lot different than a carnival ride style single stage apogee ride.
biscottigelato 9 hours ago [-]
Recovering and reusing something that went up and down
And something that went orbital at supersonic speed
Is not even remotely the same universe
McDonell Douglas have done up and down since 1992
SpaceX is the only entity that have recovered and reused any rocket parts after sending payloads orbital
Wake me up when someone have done even a test that resembles orbital recovery
Until then all the EDS in here has zero power over reality
joelwilliamson 2 hours ago [-]
> SpaceX is the only entity that have recovered and reused any rocket parts after sending payloads orbital
This is not true. Say what you will about the Shuttle, but they definitely recovered and reused rocket parts from both the boosters and the orbiter.
yoko888 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mbowcut2 21 hours ago [-]
It's interesting how I couldn't tell whether the rocket was 1m tall or 10m tall in this video. Turns out it's actually 6m tall per the link.
jagged-chisel 19 hours ago [-]
In the first shot on the pad, I thought “oh, it’s a slightly oversized model rocket” and then when it cut I realized it was quite a bit bigger.
gessha 21 hours ago [-]
Japan continuing their legacy of minituriazing everything they develop. \s
In Japan, full scale (aka life size) is an extreme?
ethbr1 5 hours ago [-]
No, imagining a 20.4 m robot in the first place and then animating 229+ episodes about it.
almosthere 21 hours ago [-]
They should have totally had a Civic in the background and a guy mowing the lawn near the sprinkler.
bee_rider 15 hours ago [-]
Hondas at least used to (I haven’t kept up) have that great cheap/reliable car reputation… “the Honda of rockets” has a good ring to it I think, haha.
hajhatten 7 hours ago [-]
They still are, they're still references in durability/quality for motorcycles as well (together with the other Japanese manufacturers).
zharknado 14 hours ago [-]
“Sure, your rocket’s reusable, but can it go 300k miles on the original engine?”
perilunar 5 hours ago [-]
300k miles is only about 12 low earth orbits, so easily achievable by a second stage booster (though it’s going to be coasting for most of it). Not so easy for a booster though.
bee_rider 5 hours ago [-]
Really once the rocket is in space, the joke kinda falls apart; frictionless vacuum and all that.
blt 13 hours ago [-]
Awaiting the rocket engine equivalent of the K20.
Intermernet 8 hours ago [-]
Asimo robot mowing the lawn :-)
hajhatten 7 hours ago [-]
On a self-balancing motorcycle
throwaway2037 10 hours ago [-]
And the Civic should be towing a small boat with a Honda outboard motor. :)
Great clean video link thanks, but I cant work out the scale, first it looks like a toy rocket, then from the distance shot it looks huge, like spaceX huge, and then landing it looks quite small again, especially with the lawn sprinklers.
But an impressively smooth landing regardless, and I would imagine maybe harder the smaller the rocket is.
perihelions 22 hours ago [-]
It's much smaller than other suborbital hop vehicles. If it's 6.3 meters, the smallest Starhopper was 18 meters; Blue Shepherd 19 m; China's Hyperbola-2Y 17 m; the Zhuque-3 VTVL test vehicle 18.3 m. Also the Grasshopper from 2012 was 32 m and even 1993's DC-X was 12 m.
SECProto 21 hours ago [-]
> It's much smaller than other suborbital hop vehicles.
You likely weren't being exhaustive in your listing, but I first started watching aerospace development with Armadillo Aerospace, and some of their rockets were much smaller. Their largest one was still shorter than the dc-x.
The important thing about Starhopper was that it had a Raptor engine. And the Falcon 1 had a Merlin engine. They were testing with the engines they intended to put into orbit. Blue Origin are also going with orbital class engines.
I doubt that this rocket has an engine intended for orbit? So it makes me wonder how serious this program is.
Pretty sure that, or some other hobbyist project, is going to take the prize for "smallest".
MrSkelter 19 hours ago [-]
It’s harder to land shorter vehicles. If you can land a short one the taller ones are easier.
throwaway562if1 20 hours ago [-]
Electron is an 18m orbital delivery rocket (14.5m+payload without the optional third stage).
kryptiskt 17 hours ago [-]
Japan holds the record for the smallest rocket to reach orbit with the SS-520, which put a cubesat into orbit in 2018.
Its dimensions according to Wikipedia:
Height – 31 feet (9.54 meters)
Weight – 2.9 tons (2.6 metric tons)
Diameter – 20 inches (52 centimeters)
Payload to Low-Earth Orbit – ~9 lbs (4 kg)
tw04 23 hours ago [-]
> successfully landed its 6.3-metre (20.6-foot) experimental reusable launch vehicle
From another article.
imzadi 21 hours ago [-]
About the height of a giraffe
xarope 13 hours ago [-]
there are giraffes that are 6m tall?!?
adrian_b 7 hours ago [-]
It is said that many males exceed 5.5 m in height.
A record height for a giraffe in a UK zoo was 5.8 m, but the tip of his horns was said to have reached close to 6.1 m.
So 6 m is about in this ballpark.
hbrav 21 hours ago [-]
Or in natural units: three very tall men stood on top of one another, wearing a top hat.
RattlesnakeJake 20 hours ago [-]
Are all three men wearing individual top hats, or does one cover all of them?
ryandrake 21 hours ago [-]
Oh jeez, how many football fields is that?
Someone 11 hours ago [-]
Let’s see. 2 cm of grass on top of, say, 10 cm of earth would make the height of a football field 12cm. That would make it as high as about 50 football fields.
TeMPOraL 21 hours ago [-]
It's not a rocket, but three men in a trench coat?
peterlada 12 hours ago [-]
And under the French cost is an African swallow.
lowestprimate 21 hours ago [-]
How many bananas?
hnburnsy 22 hours ago [-]
>6.3 m in length, 85 cm in diameter, 900 kg dry weight/1,312 kg wet weight
ricardobeat 20 hours ago [-]
That's just a tad longer than a north-american SUV (Escalade, Navigator) standing on it's back. Accurate to say it's a car-sized rocket.
xarope 13 hours ago [-]
I'm a bit confused, most cars aren't more than 3m in length. This rocket is 6.3m.
Or are there really SUVs which are > 6m in length?
numpad0 2 hours ago [-]
Current gen Prius is about 4.5m in length, 1.8m in width, 1.5m in height. "Slightly under 5 x 2 x 1.5m" has been the standard size of a sedan for past few decades.
la_oveja 9 hours ago [-]
the mentioned suvs are 5.7m and 5.6m long, respectively
xarope 8 hours ago [-]
wow, and I thought F350s were big
cyxxon 4 hours ago [-]
Huh? Even in Europe most cars are longer than 4m (a VW Golf is 4.28m for example).
voxic11 22 hours ago [-]
Its like half the size of a Trident missile.
gnatolf 19 hours ago [-]
Which inexplicably isn't know for soft landings
duxup 15 hours ago [-]
Such a smooth takeoff and landing all by by itself. I remember watching old sci-fi shows and the rocket would do that and I always thought "that doesn't make any sense". Now it does.
darrelld 23 hours ago [-]
I'm accustomed to seeing large plumes of chemicals coming out the other end in my minds eye when I think about rocket launches. This looks "clean" coming out the exhaust.
Why is that? Is it due to the nature of chemicals it uses?
nine_k 22 hours ago [-]
Soot means carbon-rich fuel, like RP1, and a very fuel-rich mix. Most launches I ever saw had basically zero soot, and a clean exhaust of a well-balanced fuel / oxidizer mix.
Military rockets, and solid-fuel boosters like the kind the Shuttles used to use, indeed produce very visible exhaust, because they use heavy fuels, and sometimes heavier oxidizers, like nitric acid. This is because they need to be in the fueled state for a long time, ready to launch in seconds; this excludes more efficient but finicky cryogenic fuels used by large commercial rockets.
The large plumes that you usually see the first few seconds when a rocket is blasting off a launch pad are mostly water vapor. The launch pad would be destroyed by the exhaust were it not cooled during the launch by large amounts of water, which gets evaporated instead of the concrete.
hyperbrainer 10 hours ago [-]
The water also serves the purpose of reducing reflecting acoustic energy.
ggreer 21 hours ago [-]
Several reasons. It's filmed in daylight, so any flame or exhaust will be less visible. The rocket engine is much smaller than anything that would go on an orbital booster, so there's less exhaust than what'd you see for an orbital launch. Also it's looks like it's a hydrolox rocket (using liquid hydrogen and oxygen as fuel), which has the least visible flame. The combustion product is almost entirely water vapor. Methalox (methane + liquid oxygen) is the next cleanest, which emits water, CO2, and a little bit of soot. Kerolox (RP-1 and oxygen) is the most common propellant used today, and it emits a significant amount of soot.
Solid boosters put out the most visible exhaust, as burning APCP[1] emits solid particles of metal oxides. Also some rockets (mostly Russian, Chinese, and Indian) use unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine + dinitrogen tetroxide, which emits a reddish-orange exhaust. Both compounds are toxic, as is the exhaust.
I doubt it's hydrogen, because the color looks off (blue, rather than pink), and because it'd be a poor fit for a small R&D project. They're not optimizing for performance-at-all-costs on this.
Ethanol/oxygen is my guess. Blue, and also very little soot.
lupusreal 19 hours ago [-]
Probably methalox I think. It's the trendy prop mix most reusable programs are settling on because it doesn't coke up engines like kerosene and is easier to model in computers, and doesn't cause metallurgical problems like hydrogen while being much more dense. Alcohol isn't impossible but seems unlikely to me because that's not what you'd want for the full scale rocket they're presumably working towards.
ggreer 15 hours ago [-]
Hydrogen engines aren't always pink. The exhaust color depends on the ratio of oxidizer to fuel. The Space Shuttle's main engines were hydrolox, but their exhaust had almost no pink/red.
It's hard to say for sure, but I lean towards Honda's rocket using hydrogen. Honda has experience with it. They use hydrogen in their fuel cell vehicles, and their press release from 2021 mentions using hydrogen for rockets.[1]
I'm pretty sure both fuel and oxidizer are cryogenic, because when the rocket lands it vents from several areas (most likely separate tanks). That would rule out ethanol or methanol as the fuel.
I don't see any secondary exhaust from a gas generator, and staged combustion would be something to brag about (and much higher thrust), so my guess is that it's an expander cycle. Expander cycle engines require a fuel that boils easily, so it would have to be fueled by propane, methane, or hydrogen. I don't think it's propane, as the only propane/lox rocket I've seen has orange exhaust.[2] If Honda poached some engineers from Mitsubishi, I could see them going with a hydrolox expander cycle, as that's what the H family of rockets use.
The only thing that doesn't line up with hydrogen is the low thrust given the propellant consumption. Based on the claimed wet/dry mass (1,312kg/900kg), they used at most 412kg of propellant. Flight duration was 56.6 seconds, so that's an average of 7.28kg of propellant per second. If the stated wet/dry mass is correct and the rocket used up all of its fuel, then the rocket's thrust was around 13kN at the start and around 7kN near the end. Let's say it averaged 10kN. Force equals mass flow rate times exhaust velocity. So 10kN divided by 7.28kg/sec is 1.374 km/s. Divide by standard Earth gravity and you get 140 seconds, which is pathetic for a rocket. It could be that they only used a small fraction of the available propellant, or they had a poor nozzle design, or the engine was throttled very low and was therefore less efficient. If we assume the test flight only used 40% of the available propellant, then we'd get a flow rate of 2.9kg/sec and a specific impulse of 352 seconds. But that sort of assumption can be used to come up with any Isp.
Still, I think it's using either hydrogen or methane as fuel. Nothing else fits with the video.
It could simply be pressure-fed. No turbopump at all—just a helium tank.
You have a preference for assuming sophistication, but this is a one-off inexpensive test article with trivial performance needs. My guess is that they'd made the simplest engineering choices possible at every turn.
numpad0 20 hours ago [-]
Most civilian rockets have solid strap-on boosters(actual technical term) that emit the signature thick white smokes, as well as leave contrails at high speeds. Neither would be visible for non-solid rockets at low speeds.
fogh1 23 hours ago [-]
Basically yes, other rockets might burn chemicals that create more soot. This one seemingly doesn’t.
dumdedum123 2 hours ago [-]
Aw. It didn't even do a "real" hop. The engines stayed on all the time.
For the first real hop see Xombie circa 2010.
djaychela 23 hours ago [-]
For some reason the landing of that reminded me of the Eagle from Space:1999 - there was something different in the ballistics of it compared to SpaceX and Blue Origin. Fantastic to see, thanks for the video link.
Aeolun 19 hours ago [-]
They can’t put the video first. This is Japan. First have to strongly declaim how safe they were being with a 6m rocket.
wiseowise 21 hours ago [-]
Amazing. Looks like cartoons I saw when I was a child, expect now it is in real life. Surreal.
vzaliva 9 hours ago [-]
This video is so much like in the old black and white sci-fi movies!
api_or_ipa 22 hours ago [-]
Watching the video, when the rocket lifted-off, it stood on a couple small risers. When it landed, the risers were gone. Did someone run out there and grab them?
feoren 22 hours ago [-]
Despite the other comments, the landing spot is clearly the same as where it took off. Take a screenshot at 0:09 and one at 0:48 and you can see that it's most certainly the same pad. The camera has moved slightly to the left on the landing, that's all.
Someone must have run out and grabbed the risers.
Kye 21 hours ago [-]
>> "Despite the other comments, the landing spot is clearly the same as where it took off."
Video three and four clearly show it lands a little bit away from the risers. Same pad, but only 1/2 comments--not mine--suggested it was a different pad.
close04 2 hours ago [-]
In this video [0] at the 50-51s mark you can see the rocket landing just meters away from what looks like the 4 metal standoffs it took off from.
This is Taiki site, so either within the circular pad at (42.500394123580, 143.43589082745), or maybe from the end of 08R to neighboring Interstellar Tech pad area?
I don't think they moved or were taken. It appeared that the rocket took off from the corner of the pad and landed in the center, with one camera angle for the corner launch and one camera angle for the central landing. So, I assume the risers are still exactly where they were, they're just outside of the camera frame.
If you look at the landing shot, you can see that towards the corner are some markings for previous risers which were used for previous launches (or markings for future risers for future launches). The risers it launched from this time are just in a different corner.
pavel_lishin 22 hours ago [-]
It may not have landed on the same pad it took off from.
Kye 22 hours ago [-]
I think the landing spot is different from where it took off from. The trees in the landing shot weren't there in the takeoff shot.
sprkv5 22 hours ago [-]
the lift off spot is at the edge of the launch pad, whereas the landing spot is at the center of the launch pad.
[edit] the camera angle and the camera height from the ground is different as well between the lift off and landing.
Kye 22 hours ago [-]
Taking another look, I see four little rectangles that seem to match the risers close to the camera at the landing, but far from the rocket. I think they may have actually retracted. That would be neat.
It makes more sense than someone going out and grabbing them during the short flight. Those things would need to be sturdy and attached to not melt or blow away during the launch, and they would be hot.
edit: If you open up the first image on the submission and look to the left of the crane, you can see what look like the risers. They do seem to come out of the ground. You can see the same trees as the landing shot.
edit: I didn't realize the page had more videos under the Download button. I was wrong about the rectangles, but you can definitely see it's landing in a different spot in the onboard video (#3). You can still see the risers when it lands.
redbell 20 hours ago [-]
From the second 22 to 44, I really couldn't tell if the rocket is ascending or descending :)
Also, I believe it would have been a historical moment if they filmed the entire staff watching the event from the control room.
neodypsis 21 hours ago [-]
What is the steam cloud for after landing?
420official 21 hours ago [-]
It's liquid propellant being vented, the fuel is under extreme pressure so when its released it immediately expands to a gas. I don't know that Honda has said what their propellant is, but it's probably liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
21 hours ago [-]
LargoLasskhyfv 10 hours ago [-]
Should have cleaned the lens of the first cam. Second cam cutting in at about 50 seconds in was perfect.
I wonder if that's the optimal design for VTOL rocket landers? Or is that more particular to smaller lighter rockets and eventually you need heavier duty options for bigger rockets?
Also the DC-X was eventually intended to be single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO). Do any of these reusable rockets plan on being SSTO? Whether from Space-X/Blue Origin or this or the Chinese ones? SSTO is where you're going to dramatically change the economics of rockets, as you now only have to worry about refueling when launching satellites, instead of using an expendable second stage..
ItCouldBeWorse 33 minutes ago [-]
Ah, the pioneer effect in full effect- as in - once its proven it can be done, many will do it, finding ever more surprising efficient solutions. And the irony is - sometimes, the guys who are the first - don't even know they are the first.
The other team just has some marketing guy, lying through his teeth about the "progress" they have and what they can do. And some manager falls for that- and press-gangs some real engineers to "just-do-that-thing" - and suddenly you are all standalone USP without ever planing for it.
Happened to the unreal team, who created the z-buffer reflections in the marble floor- because some other "engine" from around the world "could do that" - which ironically was a rendered non-real time image.
To sum it up nicely the real innovators, are marketing gurus, lying with "pretend proof" forcing the competition to adapt. Thank you for coming to my TED-walk
kapildev 20 hours ago [-]
First time I saw a domain named `honda`. On further research [1], I see that many companies have Top Level Domains of their name. Why did IANA/ICANN allow TLDs of company's names?
$185,000 application fee to apply for a new gTLD, plus maybe some auctions for gTLDs that multiple entities wanted, resulted in just under $60 million for ICANN.[2]
Apparently Google and Amazon were the most prolific appliers, with 101 and 76 applications respectively.[3]
60 mill is a chump change for multinational companies, but idk. people not used to type global.brand like honda did
it feels weird seeing no .com at the end of it
wodenokoto 12 hours ago [-]
I don't really think ownership of these top-level domains is about getting end-users to type .honda or .disney, it's more about ensuring end-users don't end up at porn.honda or naked.disney/characters
morkalork 12 minutes ago [-]
I can tell you there are some registrars where they sell more .xxx and .sucks domains to SMBs, defensively, than to actual porn or troll sites. I guess just flat out buying a tld is a solution to the never ending extortion racket
16 hours ago [-]
11 hours ago [-]
fastball 14 hours ago [-]
Why not? It is useful for the company, ICANN gets a bunch of money, and it is not hurting anyone else (in fact it arguably benefits everyone else by causing big players to be more likely to stick things under their TLDs rather than monopolizing more .coms and other public TLDs).
thfuran 4 hours ago [-]
If the big players decide to move their stuff to their own tld, they'll probably keep their old domains to redirect them.
fastball 3 hours ago [-]
For sure, but (very) maybe they won't buy as many new ones, e.g. when they release new products.
mkw5053 19 hours ago [-]
Years ago, I worked for Neustar [1], and they were trying to sell .<brand> domains to everyone. Looks like they finally got at least one customer.
> The name “Honda” has its roots in Japan, a country known for its rich traditions and cultural heritage. In Japanese, the name is written as 本田, which can be broken down into two characters: 本 (“hon”) meaning “origin” or “root” and 田 (“da” or “ta”) meaning “rice field” or “paddy field.” The combination of these characters conveys a sense of familial roots or origin tied to agricultural land, which was historically significant in Japan’s agrarian society.
> Traditionally, Japanese surnames like Honda were often linked to geographic locations or land ownership, reflecting the agricultural lifestyle of early Japan. Thus, the name Honda could have been used to denote a family that owned or worked on rice fields, marking them as stewards of the land.
Toyota's founder is Kiichiro Toyoda (with a 'd'), and the company was originally named Toyoda, named after the founder. It was later changed to Toyota because it looked better in Katakana script (8 brush strokes, which is a lucky number), and it had a better meaning in Japanese. Apparently Toyoda is a farmer's name, and the company did not want to be associated with farming.
Similarly, Mazda comes from it's founder's name Matsuda, but was changed to Mazda when the first wheeled vehicles were produced (Mazda-Go). The official claim from Mazda is that it was named after Ahura Mazda, a God, but it is widely speculated that the name change was done to make it more appealing for international markets. I don't speak Japanese, but I have seen several videos on social media where the Japanese still pronounce Mazda as Matsuda.
numpad0 2 hours ago [-]
English and Japanese pronunciations never line up well which complicates communications, so people tweak spelling all the time. Toyota or Mazda or muRata is all about that. Matsuda was always matsuda in Japanese but spelling it as Mazda skips whole ordeal about matt-sudah or mar-TSOO-dah. Mazda is just short and close enough. Isuzu unfortunately has the yee-zoo-zoo problem, it's more like "iszh" but it won't roll on any tongue and there isn't much that they can do about it now.
"main farm", "rich farm", "pine farm", "bell tree", "sun field", "river cape", "fifty bells", it's all just surnames. Nothing particularly more awe inspiring than any regular surnames would be.
MangoToupe 12 hours ago [-]
That name didn't pop out of nowhere. It still has meaning beyond the brand. I'm wholly unconvinced that the only possible meaning is referring to that one company.
nottorp 9 hours ago [-]
I'll raise you Procter & Gamble.
Doesn't look like it has a deep meaning does it? I'm thinking that's how the Honda name looks to a Japanese.
The one major Japanese company whose name does have a deep meaning - that I know of - is Mazda, which is explicitly derived from Ahura Mazda.
MangoToupe 7 hours ago [-]
> Doesn't look like it has a deep meaning does it?
Like, to a non-english speaker? Because it looks loaded with meaning to me. Would you think that all instances of the word "morgan" refer to the bank "jp morgan"? Do you think that people who gamble are referring to the company you brought up? Why would you just give a top level domain name to a single company? No company is that interesting by itself. Hence, my question.
But maybe I'm just weird when it comes to language.
Anyway, I'll wait for a japanese person to fill me in ig—I can google where a name comes from, but this doesn't answer how it's actually perceived by someone who speaks the language.
nottorp 6 hours ago [-]
I’m not a native speaker. But I’ve read and communicated enough in English to see Procter & Gamble as just two names.
thfuran 3 hours ago [-]
Neither are anything like common as names (at least in the US. Maybe there's loads of them running around London), and both are words in common use. Johnson & Johnson seems like a much better example for that.
> a country known for its rich traditions and cultural heritage
Are there any countries that do not have "rich traditions and cultural heritage"? (Let's ask ChatGPT to "delve" into that...)
echoangle 9 hours ago [-]
The US maybe? I wouldn’t say the US has rich traditions and cultural heritage, they are too young for that.
mensetmanusman 4 hours ago [-]
Actually, America is one of the oldest continuously operating stable political systems in the world. (UK is older)
For example, the US in its current form is older than China, which was taken over relatively recently by the CCP who are also actively destroying most vestiges of cultural heritage through forced migration and erasing of inconvenient history.
skylurk 1 hours ago [-]
Nevertheless, China has rich traditions and cultural heritage that go back millennia.
Perhaps even the only place that can top Japan in this regard.
throwaway2037 9 hours ago [-]
Native Americans?
prmoustache 7 hours ago [-]
But their traditions and cultural heritage has been mostly erased and not followed by the the colons.
voidUpdate 8 hours ago [-]
I mean, there are a lot of traditions in the US. Thanksgiving, 4th of july, groundhog day, all the random things little towns do.
prmoustache 7 hours ago [-]
I think it still pales compared to its neighbours like Mexico who have also been born through colonization.
But maybe that's because USA has a tendency to make everything a super commercial event which gives us that idea.
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
That is part of our culture heritage. People who want to claim the US doesn't have a rich culture are defining culture to exclude all culture in the US which is not fair. It isn't hard to see a lot of culture in the US if you look, but many people want to think there isn't any and so go out of their way not to see it.
prmoustache 57 minutes ago [-]
I think culture and tradition are different things. Modern pop culture is not tradition for example.
latexr 8 hours ago [-]
I agree that reads like a fluff meaningless sentence on the level of a high school student trying to reach the minimum word count, but to give it some benefit of the doubt, it does say “a country known for”, not “a country which has”. Most countries aren’t known for their traditions and cultural heritage. Ask a few random people to tell you about Japan VS, say, Estonia.
JoeAltmaier 2 hours ago [-]
In a mature space launch economy, there is room for every combination of cost and capacity and timing (launch frequency). Like scooters and taxis and truck and trains and cargo ships, each has its place.
Don't imagine because this rocket is a certain size or lift capacity, that it isn't serious. And, this was just an R&D technology test. Who knows where they'll go from here.
whatever1 1 days ago [-]
Question why is it so easy today to build reusable rockets? Is it because the onboard cpu speed of the chips can solve more granular control problems with low latency?
roshdodd 24 hours ago [-]
As someone who actively works in the field, it was a culmination of:
- Advances in rocket engine design & tech to enable deep throttling
- Control algorithms for propulsive landing maturing (Google "Lars Blackmore", "GFOLD", "Mars Landing", and work through the references)
- Forward thinking and risk-taking by SpaceX to further develop tech demonstrated by earlier efforts (DC-X, Mars Landing, etc.)
Modern simulation and sensor capabilities helped, but were not the major enabling factors.
giarc 19 hours ago [-]
>Forward thinking and risk-taking by SpaceX to further develop tech demonstrated by earlier efforts (DC-X, Mars Landing, etc.)
Is this basically a technical way of saying "people realized it could be done"? Like the 4 minute mile, once it was done once, many people accomplished the same feat soon after. The realization that it was possible changed people's perception.
madamelic 17 hours ago [-]
Could also be that SpaceX cracked it then other companies began poaching the engineers and the other companies started getting tips on how to address the hardest problems.
markdown 16 hours ago [-]
Investors. Investors finally realised that it could be done.
I'm sure engineers and science-fiction writers have known for a long time that it could be done.
17 hours ago [-]
nottorp 9 hours ago [-]
Even "Musk realized it could be done". He had a few good ideas. Or pushed for a few good ideas until they were put in practice.
Unfortunately then he stopped taking his dried frog pills and look where he is now...
voidUpdate 8 hours ago [-]
Did Musk realize it could be done, or did he pay some engineers to realise it could be done?
panick21_ 7 hours ago [-]
Musk from the beginning realize to reduce the price, he would have to solve re-usabilitly. So he and the company from the beginning was focused on re-usability. He didn't just say 'this is what we are gone do'. As the company grew and solved initial problems of launch, they slowly figured out the best way to do it. And Musk as CEO was deeply involved from the beginning and and involved in all decisions.
nottorp 7 hours ago [-]
... pay and convince people to give him money to pay ...
I still think he had some merit in the past.
bumby 24 hours ago [-]
Can you elaborate on the advances in deep throttling?
hwillis 23 hours ago [-]
Not in industry, but: rockets can be like 90% fuel by weight. All engines on 105% can lift the rocket, so if you want to land while the tanks are nearly empty you need to be able to get to less than 1/10th of your thrust. Turning off engines only gets you so far- the Space Shuttle engine could throttle between 67% and 109% of rated power but if you only have 1/3 engines on you can only get as low as 22% power.
One major reason for this is the mixing plate at the top of the combustor. Fuel and oxygen are distributed to tiny nozzles which mix together. The better the mixing, the more stable the burn. If you get unstable burning -eg momentarily better mixing in one area- it will cause a pressure disturbance which will further alter the burning power in different areas of the combustion chamber. At low throttle, this can be enough to cause the engine to turn off entirely.
Fluid simulations have made a huge difference. It's now possible to throttle engines down to 5% because mixing is much more stable (manufacturing improvements in the nozzles have also helped) and combustion is more protected from pressure variations.
The extra stability also just makes it easier to control a rocket period. Less thrust variation to confuse with drag properties, less bouncing, better sensor data.
bumby 23 hours ago [-]
So I’m assuming the simulations lead to better controls software and/or mechanical nozzle designs? Similar to how CFD leads to more efficient vehicle aerodynamics?
I guess I’m trying to connect the dots on how a simulation improves the actual vehicle dynamics.
hwillis 23 hours ago [-]
There is some improvement in vehicle control, but the biggest impact was inside the engine. Controlling the vehicle at transonic speeds benefits a lot from simulation- control inversion is an example. When grid find pass the sound barrier, the flow through the holes of the grid becomes choked off by shockwaves, and the fin starts acting like it was solid and sideways. Since it's effectively pointed 90 degrees off, it acts like its reversed. Knowing when, how intensely, and how turning affects that is important. Simulation also helps you find unexpected places where flows may unexpectedly become super/subsonic and cause torque. Experimenting at these speeds is... hard.
Simulation inside the engine can find resonances, show where shockwaves propagate, and show you how to build injectors (pressure, spray etc) so they are less affected by the path of reflections. Optimizing things like that smoothly along a range of velocities and pressures without a computer is not very feasible, and you need a minimum of computing power before you start converging to accurate results. The unpredictability of turbulence means low-resolution simulations will behave very differently.
Out_of_Characte 22 hours ago [-]
the poster above was very conservative in his metrics and throtteling requirements.
Modern pressure vessels can reach 5% empty mass, thats a factor of 20
Rockets have stages, a good approximate is to stage half your rocket to get rid of the most empty mass. This also means your first stage has to have double the thrust to lift itself and its stage. Now you're at a factor of 40 just to hover.
Now you actually have to take off, usually around 1.2 to 1.4 thrust to weight.
So a more realistic scenario means your rocket engine has to throttle down to exactly 2% power while the laval nozzle is optimised for takeoff thrust only.
briandw 23 hours ago [-]
Rocket engines struggle to throttle down to low levels due to combustion instability, injector dynamics, and turbopump limitations.
Here are some stats on minimum throttle levels:
SpaceX Merlin 1D: ~40%
Rocketdyne F-1 (Saturn V): ~70%
Space Shuttle Main Engine (RS-25): ~67%
Blue Origin BE-4: ~20–25%
Falcon 9 does the "hover slam" where they have to turn off the engine exactly at touch down, or the rocket starts to go back up again. Throttle is too high for the weight of the booster at that point in flight.
93po 23 hours ago [-]
Also didnt spacex do reuse without throttling and only having on/off?
Tuna-Fish 22 hours ago [-]
They do throttle, and quite low compared to other comparable engines, but they still cannot throttle an engine below 1 TWR when the stage is near empty. Meaning that they cannot hover a stage, either the engine is on and the stage is accelerating upwards, or it's off and it's accelerating downwards. (And you cannot rapidly turn engines on and off.)
So they need to "hoverslam", that is, arrive at the landing pad rapidly decelerating so that their altitude hits zero just as their speed hits zero. This was thought to be very hard, but I don't think SpaceX has lost a stage due to estimation failure there. It helps that there is significant throttle range and fairly rapid throttle response on the engines, so they can have some slack. (Plan to decelerate at 2.5g for the last ~20s or so, with the ability to do anything between ~1.5g to 4g, so you can adjust throttle based on measured landing speed.)
Their Superheavy has more engines, allowing them to bring the TWR below 1, enabling hovering.
@roshdodd - Is there a modern reference/book that covers the design of such systems?
softfalcon 22 hours ago [-]
> Google "Lars Blackmore", "GFOLD", "Mars Landing", and work through the references
They linked details to look into in their original post.
hinkley 22 hours ago [-]
I recall hearing SpaceX cite manufacturing improvements as well. How do you feel about materials science and the ability to source parts not made of unobtanium?
Tuna-Fish 22 hours ago [-]
Many of the hardest problems facing rocket engines are about temperature, heat and thermal density, not structural strength.
This means that 3d-printed copper (alloy) is an amazing process and material for them. You can build the kind of structurally integrated cooling channels that the people building rockets in the 60's could only dream about, and it's not a gold-plated part that required a million labor hours to build, it's something you can just print overnight.
floxy 18 hours ago [-]
I don't know how representative it is, but this photo seems impressive:
so now the main problem is building the hardware, there are a lot of solutions for the software part.
Before there were no general-purpose simulators, and barely usable computers (2 MHz computer with 2 KB of memory...), so all you could do was hardcoding the path and use rather constrained algorithms.
roshdodd 24 hours ago [-]
I don't think this was the cause. Advanced simulation capabilities have existed for many decades in the industry. Many if not most of those tools are not publicly available.
I think there is also a distinction to be made between offline (engineering) and onboard computing resources. While onboard computers have been constrained in the past, control algorithms are typically simple to implement. Most of the heavy lifting (design & optimization of algorithms) is done in the R&D phase using HPC equipment.
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
Remember "hunt for Red October" - the novel is old, but there was one scene where they were doing this type of simulation on a super computer. A basic phone can do that same calculations in under a second today.
nine_k 23 hours ago [-]
You can now buy vastly more computing power and do fancy fluid dynmaics, etc thanks to GPUs. 20 years ago it was much more expensive to procure, and much harder to find expertise. 30 years ago, I suppose, the field was even less mature, and limited to the few HPC installations and in-house bespoke software.
Mass-produced hardware drove prices down, and availability way up, in many industries: motors, analog electronics, computers, solar panels, lithium batteries, various sensors, etc. Maybe reusable rockets, enabled by all that, are going to follow a similar trajectory as air transportation.
chasil 23 hours ago [-]
If we are going to be specific, 64-bit ARM (in the form of AArch64) arrived in 2011.
It would seem to me that Intel and AMD were not friendly to custom designs at that time, and MIPS was not significantly evolving.
A fast, low-power CPU that can access more than 4gb and is friendly to customization seems to me to be a recent development.
morganherlocker 23 hours ago [-]
> so now the main problem is building the hardware, there are a lot of solutions for the software part.
While cool and all, this type of sim is a tiny, tiny slice of the software stack, and not the most difficult by a long shot. For one, you need software to control the actual hardware, that runs on said hardware's specific CPU(s) stack AND in sim (making an off the shelf sim a lot less useful). Orbital/newtonian physics are not trivial to implement, but they are relatively simple compared to the software that handles integration with physical components, telemetry, command, alerting, path optimization, etc. etc. The phrase "reality has a surprising amount of detail" applies here - it takes a lot of software to model complex hardware correctly, and even more to control it safely.
rvnx 23 hours ago [-]
Certainly not a trivial problem I totally agree, but still significantly easier than Von Braun with his paper calculations.
xeromal 1 days ago [-]
SpaceX showed it was possible and also a crappy place to work means those knowledgeable people go work elsewhere for less work and more money.
inb4 blue origin / DC-X did it first
bryanlarsen 1 days ago [-]
Actually, the DC-X did it first, in 1993. The DC-X was the first vertical rocket landing, Blue Origin was the first vertical landing of a rocket that went to space, and SpaceX was the first vertical landing of an orbital rocket.
This Honda landing neither went to space nor was orbital, so it was a similar test to the DC-X test.
LorenDB 1 days ago [-]
Actually, retropeopulsive landing was demonstrated during the Apollo program, both on the moon with the LM and with LM trainers on the earth. Those systems were human controlled, of course.
mensetmanusman 23 hours ago [-]
Crappy for 10% amazing for 90%, somewhat better than the 80/20 70/30 seen by most F500s.
MattRix 20 hours ago [-]
I imagine they mean crappy as in really poor work life balance.
didibus 23 hours ago [-]
Someone proved that there is market demand which could make it profitable.
In the past, there was not much reasons to go into space, commercially, so who would have paid for it? But today there are many more use-cases for sending things to space that are willing to pay for the service.
kurthr 1 days ago [-]
Proof of concept. It's a lot easier to do something, if you know it can be done.
benjiro 1 days ago [-]
Its more about money.
If you know that something can be done, and there is a potential market for such a project, it then becomes easier to get the funding. Chicken or the egg...
One thing we also need to point out, is that SpaceX uses like 80% of their yearly launches, for their own communication / sat service. This gave a incentive for that investment.
Is the same reason why, despite SpaceX throwing those things up constantly, there really is a big lag of competitors with reusable rockets. Its not that they where / not able to quickly get the same tech going. They simply have less market, vs what SpaceX does non-stop. So the investments are less, what in time means less fast development.
SpaceX is a bit of a strange company, partially because they used a lot of the public funds to just throw shit at the wall, and see what sticks. This resulted in them caring less if a few rockets blew up, as long as they got the data for the next one with less flaws. It becomes harder when there is more oversight of that money, or risk averse investors. Then you really want to be sure that thing goes up and come back down into one piece from the first go.
A lot of projects funding are heavily based upon the first or second try of something, and then (sometimes unwisely) funding is pulled if it was not a perfect success story.
PaulHoule 1 days ago [-]
Even before SpaceX started launching their own satellites in huge numbers they had a business model where they were selling the launch, not the rocket, and selling it at a fixed price, so if some small refinement saved them 5% on launch costs it went to their pockets so they had an incentive to make those small refinements.
Dragon 9 was based on conservative and boring technology but it was cost optimized before it was reusable, then reusability crushed the competition.
For that matter, Starship is boring. "Throw at the wall and see what sticks" isn't "trying a bunch of crazy stuff" but trying a bunch of low and medium risk things. For instance, development of the Space Shuttle thermal tiles was outrageously expensive and resulted in a system that was outrageously expensive to maintain. They couldn't change it because lives were at stake. With Starship they can build a thermal protection system which is 90% adequate and make little changes that get it up to 100% adequate and then look at optimizing weight, speed of reuse and all that. If some of them burn up it is just money since there won't be astronauts riding it until it is perfected.
imtringued 11 hours ago [-]
Starship has exactly the opposite development strategy to what made the Falcon 9 so successful. Calling a complete change in process and philosophy "boring" appears to be hubris.
Falcon 9 didn't have three versions of which two were obsolete. Falcon 9 didn't put optional goals on the critical path, which are now delaying and preventing commercial launches.
kurthr 1 days ago [-]
I agree, a lot is about money, but it's not like Honda is raising external funds. Getting management to agree to do anything pretty much requires guaranteed success in large organizations.
panick21_ 6 hours ago [-]
Honda is not running this as a commercial rocket. This seems more like a test platform. Or a way to train engineers.
SpaceX invested in reusability long before they had any idea about their own launch services.
> Its not that they where / not able to quickly get the same tech going. They simply have less market
BlueOrigin has been trying for nearly as long as SpaceX and have infinite money and don't care about market. Apparently having lots of money doesn't make you able to 'quickly get the same tech'.
RocketLab was to small and had to first grow the company in other ways. And the CEO initially didn't believe in large rockets. And their own efforts of re-usability, despite excellent engeeners didn't pan out to 'quickly get the same tech'.
Arianespace had enough market in theory, they just didn't want to invest money. And now that they do, they are completely failing at at 'quickly getting the same tech' despite them getting lots and lots of money. More money in fact then SpaceX used to develop the Falcon 9 initially. And at best they get some demonstrators out of it.
ULA has invested many billions in their next generation rockets, and they were absolutely not confident that they could 'quickly get the same tech'.
Tons of money flowed into the rocket business, specially if you include Blue. Japan, India, Europe, China and US market have all ramped up investment. And nobody has replicated what SpaceX did more then 10 years ago.
So as far as I can tell, there is exactly 0 evidence that people who can invest money can replicate the technology and the operations.
> partially because they used a lot of the public funds to just throw shit at the wall
The used all their costumers rockets to do tests after they had performed the service. Some of those rockets were bought by 'the public'. And the first reflown rockets didn't carry public payloads. Other companies could have done the same with not that much investment, they just didn't care to.
What result SpaceX caring less, is because they were already so good at building rockets that even their non-reusable rockets were cheaper then anybody else, even with reusable tech like legs attached. Falcon 9 was so much better then anything else that even without re-usabiltiy they were profitable.
Their business didn't depend on re-usability. I don't think the other rocket companies could even imagine something like that to be possible.
IncreasePosts 24 hours ago [-]
Bezos wants to do satellite internet just like spaceX, owns a rocket company, but is still going to buy rides on 3rd party non-reusable rockets
bumby 24 hours ago [-]
>they used a lot of the public funds to just throw shit at the wall, and see what sticks.
This is where I think the business acumen came into play. Because the govt is self-insured, it allowed SpaceX to pass the high risk off to the taxpayer. Once the tech matured, the risk was low enough to be palatable for private industry use.
And FWIW, I don’t mean that as disparaging to SpaceX, just an acknowledgment of the risk dynamics.
bumby 2 hours ago [-]
It would be nice to hear the contrary perspectives that lead to downvotes. From my perspective, the advice dynamic is very clear. There was relatively little investment and private customer engagement with SpaceX until large government contracts were secured. The risk was just too high for any org except the government to bear, until the tech matured.
PaulHoule 1 days ago [-]
Also psychology and politics kept people from following the easy path.
The Space Shuttle was wrong in so many ways, not least that it was a "pickup truck" as opposed to a dedicated manned vehicle (with appropriate safety features) or a dedicated cargo vehicle. Because they couldn't do unmanned tests they were stuck with the barely reusable thermal tiles and couldn't replace them with something easier to reuse (or safer!)
Attempts at second generation reusable vehicles failed because rather than "solving reuse" they were all about single-stage to orbit (SSTO) [2] and aerospike engines and exotic composite materials that burned up the money/complexity/risk/technology budgets.
There was a report that came out towards the end of the SDI [3] phase that pointed out the path that SpaceX followed with Dragon 9 where you could make rather ordinary rockets and reuse the first stage but expend the second because the first stage is most of the expense. They thought psychology and politics would preclude that and that people would be seduced by SSTO, aerospikes, composites, etc.
Funny though out of all the design studies NASA did for the Shuttle and for heavy lift vehicles inspired by the O'Neill colony idea, there was a sketch of a "fly back booster" based on the Saturn V that would have basically been "Super Heavy" that was considered in 1979 that, retrospectively, could have given us Starship by 1990 or so. But no, we were committed to the Space Shuttle because boy the Soviet Union was intimidated by our willingness and ability to spend on senseless boondoggles!
[1] The first few times the shuttle went up they were afraid the tiles would get damaged and something like the Columbia accident would happen, they made some minor changes to get them to stick better and stopped worrying, at least in public. It took 100 launches for a failure mode than affects 1% of launches to actually happen.
Amazing (and kind of frustrating) how many decades it took for the industry to circle back to those more pragmatic ideas
bluGill 2 hours ago [-]
Politicians don't like boring pragmatic ideas, they like cutting edge new things. You see it all over. Building a fancy building when a boring box would do. Building expensive trains when a cheap bus would do as well. Investing in cutting edge tech of all types when the existing technology already works perfectly and we have no reason to think the new will be better. Don't get me wrong, there is a time and place for fancy buildings, trains, and cutting edge technology, but politics often invests in the above when there is no reason to think they have a place just because it looks good.
EvanAnderson 1 days ago [-]
> The Space Shuttle was wrong in so many ways, not least that it was a "pickup truck" as opposed to a dedicated manned vehicle (with appropriate safety features) or a dedicated cargo vehicle.
I wonder what the STS system would have been like if the DoD's cross-range requirement hadn't been imposed.
PaulHoule 1 days ago [-]
That too... And the whole boondoggle about launching from Vandenberg that never happened. That bit about it being "dual use" though helped in the "intimidate the Soviet Union" department.
EvanAnderson 24 hours ago [-]
I enjoy the theory that the Space Shuttle fulfilled its mission as an economic weapon w/ respect to Buran.
PaulHoule 23 hours ago [-]
Well it did, but if you look at health care or infrastructure you'll see that the U.S. can intimidate anybody except maybe the Chinese when it comes to spending money.
ambicapter 14 hours ago [-]
> Because they couldn't do unmanned tests
Why not? Certainly not for technical reasons, the shuttle had automatic landing capability (which was never used, purely from the pilot's preference).
bookofjoe 23 hours ago [-]
See, for example: 4-minute mile
LeifCarrotson 4 hours ago [-]
I don't know how relevant that is. That's something that can be done by an individual, training for something slightly slower than 4 minutes and pushing through to achieve a time that onlookers might not have expected.
The real friction in building a reusable rocket isn't the engineering, it's setting "let's build a reusable rocket" as a design goal, and getting a whole bunch of engineers and a whole bunch of dollars to start on that goal.
You have to start with a whiteboard sketch and board-room presentation that shows it's achievable, and then send the engineers out to refine the sketch into something worth funding, and then work for months or years to build a rocket that would be a disaster if it's not achievable.
bookofjoe 4 hours ago [-]
>Proof of concept. It's a lot easier to do something, if you know it can be done.
This.
What I wanted to emphasize was how, after Bannister finally broke through the 4-minute barrier, many others did it soon after: 3 more in 1954; 4 in 1955; 3 in 1956; 5 in 1957; 4 in 1958.
I mean, SpaceX also knew it could be done since reusable rocket tests happened in the 90s.
hwillis 23 hours ago [-]
The DC-X was 9.1 tonnes empty and 19 tonnes full- meaning landing thrust was ~half of takeoff thrust. The Falcon 9 was 400 tonnes full and 26 tonnes empty, so takeoff thrust was >20x higher than landing thrust.
That's a huge engineering difference, roughly like the difference between a car and a helicopter. The Falcon 9 was also 4x taller, meaning 16x more force to correct a lean. A little burp would send the rocket right back up in the air.
kurthr 1 days ago [-]
Don't you mean the SpaceShuttle in the 80s? or Delta Clipper which didn't reach orbit?
Really, what SpaceX did was radically different from the tests in the 90s from the rockets, to the controls, to the reusability goals. Otherwise they wouldn't have built Grasshopper.
Now NewGlen is kinda a knockoff of Delta Clipper, but that's a different beast.
mensetmanusman 23 hours ago [-]
And physics, nothing prevents the goal beyond execution.
advisedwang 1 days ago [-]
I don't know the answer, but some possibilities beyond CPU capabilities include:
* Better motors for gimballing
* Launch-thrust engines that throttle down low enough and preciesly enough for landing
* Better materials to handle stress for flip over manover etc without added weight
* More accurate position sensors
* Better understanding and simulation of aerodynamics to develop body shape and write control algorithms.
hwillis 23 hours ago [-]
Electrical engineer: motors and sensors are not really any better- motors have gotten more efficient and sensors have gotten cheaper, but gold standard sensors like ring laser gyroscopes have existed since the 60s.
> Launch-thrust engines that throttle down low enough and preciesly enough for landing
Experimentation was also a large factor- pintle injectors have been around for a long time, but were not used in production rockets until SpaceX (who moved from a single pintle to an annular ring). Pintle injectors are very good for throttling.
> Better materials to handle stress for flip over manover etc without added weight
We're still using the same materials- good ol inconel and aluminum. However 3d printing has made a pretty big difference in engines.
More rockets use carbon fiber, but that isn't new exactly and the main parts are still the same variety of aluminum etc. Titanium has become more common, but is still pretty specialized- the increased availability was probably the biggest factor but improved cutting toolings (alloys and coatings) and tools (bigger, faster, less vibration) have also made a big difference.
jessriedel 23 hours ago [-]
The premise of this question is wrong, and it's super disappointing that everyone is giving answers as if it's correct. The Honda test rocket only went to an altitude of 300 meters. It's been possible to propulsively land rockets from such low altitudes for decades, e.g., McDonnell Douglas DC-X test in 1996. (And ofc, if you're just talking about re-use for any landing method, the space shuttle first reused the solid rockets and the orbiter in 1981.)
Reusable, propulsively landed stages for rockets capable of putting payloads into Earth orbit is stupendously harder. The speeds involved are like 10-100x higher than these little hops. The first stages of Falcon 9 and Starship are still the only rockets that have achieved that. Electron has only re-used a single engine.
RataNova 6 hours ago [-]
I think it's not easy per se, but way more achievable for a well-funded team than it was 20 years ago
carabiner 10 hours ago [-]
It is not easy. ESA and China are still working to catch up to Grasshopper. Other US companies like ULA, Astra, RocketLab are still struggling.
FuriouslyAdrift 1 days ago [-]
They've been working on this (in cooperation with JAXA (Japan's NASA)) since 2021.
odo1242 1 days ago [-]
I mean, it's mostly that we've decided to try to do it nowadays. Problems tend to get easier when we put hundreds of thousands of hours of work into them. It wasn't in the scope of the original rocket projects because if it was, we probably would never have launched them.
rsynnott 1 days ago [-]
I mean, it's been around as a concept since at least the 50s, but there was quite a lot of scepticism that it was worth the cost (this would only have been reinforced by the Shuttle, whose 'reusable' engines were a bit of a disaster)
starik36 24 hours ago [-]
I don't know about easy. Today we have exactly 1 proven reusable orbital class family of rockets: Falcon. And even at that Falcon 9 only recovers 1st stage and the fairings. And Falcon Heavy has never recovered the center stage.
There might be more in a year or two (New Glenn, Neutron, Starship, a Chinese one), but for now, I would call it extremely difficult, not easy.
yieldcrv 1 days ago [-]
Because there’s a bigger market for space cargo
I wouldn’t say anything has fundamentally changed in the rocket coordination tech itself, just the private sector being able to rationalize the cost of the trials with ROI
Avshalom 23 hours ago [-]
It's always been easy. People just didn't think it made much sense. The thing about reusability is that it seriously cuts down on your payload.
I mean for/example the Apollo lander was a tail landing rocket and lunar landing is way fucking harder because a thick atmosphere gives you some room for error.
treis 1 days ago [-]
This doesn't feel like that much of an accomplishment relatively speaking. It's a smallish rocket that went up and down. Very far away from landing something 100 times heavier from orbit.
lupusreal 1 days ago [-]
Nobody is propulsively landing anything from orbit yet. (Dragon is supposedly capable of it, as a backup if the chutes fail, but has never done so.)
xixixao 23 hours ago [-]
Starship is already pretty much there (almost-orbit and water splash)
lupusreal 23 hours ago [-]
They've had three failures since those earlier successes, and while I expect they'll get it eventually I wouldn't count them as doing it yet.
Besides SpaceX, its also being worked on by Rocket Lab, Stoke, maybe Blue Origin, and too many Chinese companies to count.
15 hours ago [-]
numpad0 22 hours ago [-]
It's not hard-hard to build recoverable rockets, but it's hard to make money launching reusable rockets that goes to space. This one is not going to space, not making money, and not clear if it's reusable.
Most launch suppliers just make rockets single-use and write it off because it's not like you're launching weekly. Who knows how much it costs in labor and parts to refurbish landed rockets, it's probably cheaper to just keep making new ones.
^ you know what to say in response to this; we're all in the process of finding out which one is more correct.
SoftTalker 22 hours ago [-]
What is the point of making a recoverable rocket if not to reuse it (or at least reuse substantial components)?
numpad0 21 hours ago [-]
Exactly why the rest of the world isn't jumping into it. $THEY are still skeptical of airplane style rapid reuse, so much so that vehicles with zero reusability like Mitsubishi H3 are still being designed from clean sheet.
robszumski 1 days ago [-]
For reference, Rocket Lab's Electron has a wet mass of 13,000 kg. This rocket is much smaller at 1,312 kg wet mass.
delichon 24 hours ago [-]
Falcon 9 433k kg
Atlas V 547k kg
Starship 1,200k kg
Starship Booster 3,600k kg
Certhas 24 hours ago [-]
k kg is a funny unit... Much more readable than Mg of course. Tonnes would also work...
overfeed 23 hours ago [-]
Tonne is unfortunately overloaded, the US and the UK have their own versions, but for the rest of the world is on metric, and a tonne is 1000 kg. The Falcon 9 weighing "433 t" reads way more elegantly to me.
softfalcon 22 hours ago [-]
Here in Canada (where the mixup of metric vs imperial tonnes is common) we just say "metric tonnes" and move on. Everyone here knows that means 1000 kg.
European colleagues regularly go, "what other kind of tonnes are there?" and we get to share the joke of how silly Americans are for still using imperial tonnes.
robocat 20 hours ago [-]
I've often seen mt written as the units for metric tons.
There's some ODD behavior where people in the US want to fuck up metric units (MB being the obvious in my lifetime non-engineer renaming of the meaning of a unit). I find the MM of finance confusing (not sure of origin). Calling tonnes, metric "tons", seems to be a US confusing thing. Or spelling metres vs meters.
Or creating units that depend on something country specific like football field (is that FIFA (EU), US, Canadian, Aussie).
FTR no-one I know (other than in old school industry about 20 years ago) used the UK 'Ton' any more. One place of work made this clear by having different pronuncication ('Tonn-ey') as they were an old-school foundry. And the spelling is different from wherever I've seen it.
The nuclear industry was using metric weights fully when I did my apprenticeship in it in the late 1980s. Good job really as I think a conversion error could be catastrophic.
Same goes for gallons though, US gallon is smaller than a UK one.
My understanding was that "ton" is the US / imperial and "tonne" is the metric one, but I see people using them interchangeably here, so I guess whether that's technically true or not is a bit moot!
schiffern 5 hours ago [-]
The spelling "tonne" is only used in countries where there might be ambiguity with the short ton. For the rest of the world, "ton" (abbreviation: t) is the metric ton. Technically it's classified as a "Non-SI unit that is accepted for use with SI," like litres or degrees Celsius.
Unless https://www.math.net/pounds-to-tons is severely wrong, a US ton is 2200lbs, UK 2240lbs, metric 2204lbs. Put a different way, US to metric is a <0.2% difference (the smallest), US to UK is a <2% difference (the biggest).
At a scale of 433 tons, it doesn’t really matter much which kind of tons (unless you’re actually doing the rocket science, of course).
nneonneo 21 hours ago [-]
US ton is 2000 lb, not 2200. I spent some time in the US and had never heard of a ton meaning 2200 lb. Unfortunately, that's a 10% error off of a metric ton.
jjj_throw 21 hours ago [-]
US short ton is 2000lbs, long ton is ~2200.
dguest 21 hours ago [-]
Starship is 1.2 kilotons, but I feel like quoting rockets in kilotons might cause some confusion.
noobermin 10 hours ago [-]
I thought people in astro already use Mg, why would it be confused with milligrams?
carabiner 22 hours ago [-]
I like kilodollars for salaries and kilofeet for elevation though.
littlestymaar 23 hours ago [-]
“Mg” wouldn't even be valid since the SI unit is the kilogram. But yeah, using tons is the sensible choice.
The table at right is based on the kilogram (kg), the base unit of mass in the International System of Units (SI). The kilogram is the only standard unit to include an SI prefix (kilo-) as part of its name. The gram (10−3 kg) is an SI derived unit of mass. However, the names of all SI mass units are based on gram, rather than on kilogram; thus 103 kg is a megagram (106 g), not a kilokilogram.
The tonne (t) is an SI-compatible unit of mass equal to a megagram (Mg), or 10^3 kg. The unit is in common use for masses above about 10^3 kg and is often used with SI prefixes. For example, a gigagram (Gg) or 10^9 g is 10^3 tonnes, commonly called a kilotonne.
One context where I have seen this used is carbon stocks, e.g. petagram of carbon (PgC):
Of course Gigatonne of Co2 is also found very frequently.
littlestymaar 21 hours ago [-]
TIL, thanks.
Ekaros 23 hours ago [-]
As valid as milligram, microgram or nanogram. All widely used.
glimshe 24 hours ago [-]
Saturn V: 2.9M kg
23 hours ago [-]
stingrae 23 hours ago [-]
Blue Origin New Shepard 75k kg
somedude895 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't the Electron already considered a small rocket? What could a rocket that's half the weight of my car even carry?
azernik 3 hours ago [-]
It's considered a really small orbital rocket. This demo vehicle is preparation for a suborbital vehicle, those can be much smaller.
Daisywh 13 hours ago [-]
I never thought I’d mention Honda and reusable rockets in the same sentence. But that’s exactly what makes tech exciting. When a company you didn’t expect does something bold and impressive, it changes how you see the whole field. Honda’s long history of quiet, precise engineering might be just what space exploration needs more of right now.
RataNova 6 hours ago [-]
Sometimes it's the unexpected players who bring fresh perspectives
Using a Class N rocket motor, the High Steaks rocket reached about 8500m, earlier this year. I think Joe abandoned the thrust vector control for control surfaces within the fins to stabilise rotation.
Pretty certain he didn't land that one as well though :)
romain_batlle 6 hours ago [-]
They might be able to replace their F1 electric engine part for 2026 with a jet engine. it will prevent it from not working in the middle of the straight.
methuselah_in 12 hours ago [-]
I guess its healthy for the competition to exist. There will be more innovation moving forward. For Japanese it was long due.
RataNova 6 hours ago [-]
More players = more ideas, more pressure to improve
leesec 23 hours ago [-]
This is a tiny rocket going up 300ms and coming back down. Happy for them but they're a long way from any utility ( and a decade+ behind other companies )
throaway920181 23 hours ago [-]
Which companies have this capability besides SpaceX and Blue Origin? More competition is always welcome.
perihelions 23 hours ago [-]
Rocket Labs, Stoke Space, Deep Blue, Landspace, Space Pioneer, iSpace, Galactic. (The last five are Chinese startups).
Rocket Labs has recovered (not reflown) several orbital boosters, and the rest are within 1-2 years of orbital booster recovery attempts.
bpodgursky 19 hours ago [-]
So the correct answer is "nobody else has the capability"
I'll be thrilled when someone does! Competition is great! But let's do it via technological progress, not through abuse of the english language.
dmix 12 hours ago [-]
He did say “orbital booster recovery” which is 160,000 meters. Honda reached 300 meters which is about the height of a tall skyscraper
Rebelgecko 23 hours ago [-]
I think the DC-X program did this first in the 90s. It ran into funding issues and it turns out there isn't a ton of value in reusable rockets that only go a few hundred feet (although more advanced applications are potentially worthwhile)
Starting small, gradually scaling up. What a concept!
markhahn 21 hours ago [-]
maybe that's the hard part, and scaling isn't.
21 hours ago [-]
alexathrowawa9 21 hours ago [-]
This right here is the quintessential hackernews comment
Pure HN distilled
hluska 21 hours ago [-]
Congratulations, you found the most obvious negative thing to say. Good for you?
amelius 23 hours ago [-]
It's not a difficult problem. It's just Newtonian mechanics plus control theory. You only need a lot of funding and then just do it (of course build a simulator first).
EvanAnderson 1 days ago [-]
I often described my wife's old Honda Civic, which we finally sold (still running and able to be driven) w/ just north of 340,000 miles, as having been to the moon and on its way back. I like the idea that someday Honda hardware could, in fact, send something to the moon.
CobrastanJorji 24 hours ago [-]
The real fun is the equivalent spaceship. "This here Honda Bucolic has so many miles on from its Earth-Moon runs that it's basically been to Neptune and back."
GeneralMayhem 23 hours ago [-]
That'd be a very impressive service record - Neptune is right around ten thousand times as far as the moon.
littlestymaar 23 hours ago [-]
That's just short of 20 years worth of use if earth-moon is your work-home commute, that's a pretty good analogy actually.
jamesgill 24 hours ago [-]
Perhaps Honda should launch an old Civic into space, like Musk's Tesla.
EvanAnderson 23 hours ago [-]
A Civic would be on-brand, but an S2000 convertible with an ASIMO waving from the driver's seat would be much more fun.
caycep 23 hours ago [-]
S2000 is worth too much, in SoCal, their going rate is probably equal or above that of an equivalent Porsche Boxster/Cayman of the same era...
rconti 22 hours ago [-]
Not just SoCal; watch the auction sites. I really only wanted an AP2 in Rio Yellow Pearl, and their values are perilously close to $30k. In fact, a 70k mile example I bid on last year on BaT or C&B (in San Jose) went for over $30k.
Ultimately I "gave up" and just bought a 981 Boxster S (a 2013) for $42k. A 986 Boxster from the same era as an S2000 would absolutely be S2k prices.
I owned a Miata and wanted to own an S2k before moving up to the Boxster, but for today's asking prices, it just didn't make sense.
wmeredith 21 hours ago [-]
I'm fairly certain that an S2000's current worth is a rounding error in rocket-science economics.
I'd still send the Civic. Sending another convertible is imitation, but sending a Civic, a people's car, especially an older model, would by quite humorous.
nick486 23 hours ago [-]
find an old one, connect the odometer to count the distance flown in addition to the x00k miles it already has, stream the video as it flies around the moon and back.
would be a fun publicity stunt.
agumonkey 21 hours ago [-]
perhaps they could launch Elon into space, that would be civic
le-mark 24 hours ago [-]
A lady backed into my 99 civic in 2008, totaled it. The body work was more than the value of the car. I’d still be driving it if that hadn’t happened :sad-face.
pjmorris 23 hours ago [-]
An inattentive person rear-ended my 82 Civiv in 87. I probably wouldn't still be driving it, but it has led to a long association with Honda/Acura products.
If rockets became as common as cars, what kind of accidents would we see? And would insurers insure them?
t-3 19 hours ago [-]
My yearly car insurance bill is more than I paid for my Civic.
jancsika 23 hours ago [-]
If you'd still be driving it then how was the resale value relevant?
nsriv 22 hours ago [-]
I think he means that the cost to repair exceeded the market value of the car. As a recent victim of something similar with an 09 Accord, I feel the pain. Was the perfect car.
jancsika 20 hours ago [-]
I'm supposing he meant that the body damage was the only damage, and that the known cost to repair the body exceeded the market value.
But OP states that, body aside, the car's condition was suitable to deliver at least two more decades of driving time. Buying a different used Civic at market value would introduce an unknown, unbound cost of repairs to reach that goal. Unless you're a mechanic it's essentially gambling. Or* it's a new vehicle-- in which case it will cost vastly more than the cost of the body repairs.
I suppose I understand why the market is relevant-- if it were $1 then it would be worth the gamble. But given OP's goals and foreknowledge of the car's condition, I don't understand why market value would create a hard limit against paying for the repairs. That foreknowledge is worth at least a few hundred dollars, probably way more if you factor in time to find another car and risk of it being in ill-repair. Edit: (Not to mention the depth of knowledge since OP had been driving it for nearly a decade already!)
Edit: Plus the fact that OP would have run this car into the ground. So while market value still plays some role, resale value does not.
nsriv 18 hours ago [-]
It comes down to insurance and salvage titles mostly. In PA, the vehicle I have experience with was valued by insurance at $11.5k, minus a $500 deductible, so $11k. That value determination was made by the insurance company by market factors, which is why market value comes into play. Looking around at comparable used vehicles of same make, model, year, mileage, I found that to be fair price.
The cost to repair from multiple shops within transportable distance (important consideration as I'm sure someone somewhere could have done it for less) was $16k. To get it to an ugly but functional state was about $10k, which would have to be paid out of pocket.
Even if repaired to "roadworthy" condition, it would need to be reinspected and if deemed to be roadworthy would hold a salvage title, meaning insurance would go through the roof, my liability coverage would be dropped, and the car could not be resold. If not deemed roadworthy, more cost.
Needless to say, I considered the car totaled and used the $11k for a down payment towards another Honda.
Finnucane 22 hours ago [-]
Insurance won't pay for it. But it's probably still cheaper to fix than buy a new car (I had a '99 CRV that I drove for 17 years).
lampiaio 22 hours ago [-]
You should watch Pontiac Moon! (Or maybe not, it's not that great of a movie)
Agreed, same experience with my wife's current Honda Fit. And I like the thought experiment of Tesla Model S (or whatever) is to Falcon 9 as '98 Honda Civic is to... Wait they do they say the name if this rocket anywhere?
EvanAnderson 1 days ago [-]
The Honda rocket won't be as "fancy" as the SpaceX but it'll have vastly better parts availability.
SEJeff 23 hours ago [-]
I can't wait to see the GIANT spoiler on the engine cowling that does nothing more than help them push it if it breaks down.
randmeerkat 1 days ago [-]
And JDM badges.
tersers 24 hours ago [-]
VTEC decal on the side
robertlagrant 1 days ago [-]
And magic seats
redwall_hp 23 hours ago [-]
Hopefully anime wraps will be available as well.
spacecadet 1 days ago [-]
US Taxpayers ain't wrong, voted most reliable rocket 10 years in a row.
HeWhoLurksLate 23 hours ago [-]
I just want to know who will get the J.D. Power Initial Quality Award and then subsequently fall apart five minutes after it gets judged (lookin at you, Stellantis)
SoftTalker 23 hours ago [-]
My experience with Honda has not been great. Both Hondas I have owned had complete transmission failures. Full disclosure, I bought them used (as I do all my cars) with unknown maintenance history and I did get a few years out of each of them so it still worked out "ok" in an economic sense. The engines do seem pretty bulletproof. But I would not buy another, at least not one with an automatic transmission.
officeplant 23 hours ago [-]
I find the common problem with automatics is their service time scale. Bad car owners often forget to do oil changes often enough and those are only 3.5-10k miles apart depending on climate/oil type/etc. Which means services that happen every 50-75k miles or greater get left to people that actually maintain service histories and timely maintenance.
Personal example buying a used car with 60k miles that had some idle/start issues at times but generally ran well. Everything seemed to be serviced in a timely manner but the spark plugs were still the originals. Those spark plugs have a generous "100,000 mile" service interval. I pulled the originals and sure enough they weren't in the greatest shape. $40 later I never had start/idle issues again for the remaining time I owned the car.
caycep 23 hours ago [-]
That was a known thing from the '00s decade cars. But good excuse for a manual transmission swap!
legitster 24 hours ago [-]
Make sure you do a valve adjustment on the Fit engine every 100k or so. Easy job to do with some basic tools and a few hours on a Saturday afternoon.
mofunnyman 23 hours ago [-]
0.711 of the way to the moon and back. It has been to the moon though.
cududa 1 days ago [-]
Initially wanted to say I’m impressed they got it on the first launch
But, couldn’t specifically tell if this was indeed the first launch or not, and perhaps there were some private failures before - anyone know?
walterbell 1 days ago [-]
One small step for Japan, one big step for space industry competition.
echelon 1 days ago [-]
Please! We need lots of competition in this space. I hope Japan develops a burgeoning private space industry.
mbowcut2 21 hours ago [-]
I read this as "pirate space industry" and got real excited.
RataNova 6 hours ago [-]
I guess when you have decades of combustion, control, and automation know-how, this isn't such a stretch. Curious to see if they'll seriously push toward suborbital launches by 2029
ghxst 23 hours ago [-]
Big congratulations to the engineers! Also had no idea that .honda is a TLD that's really cool.
throaway920181 23 hours ago [-]
For anyone else that's curious, it turns out there are a TON of company-specific TLDs.
How do you visit just the domain though? e.g., I try to visit ".ferrari" and it doesn't work in Chrome
guicen 13 hours ago [-]
It's impressive that Honda pulled this off without much fanfare. While most headlines are about Tesla or SpaceX, Honda is quietly proving that serious engineering can come from unexpected places. I’m curious if they’re planning to go beyond demos and into actual launch services.
vucetica 13 hours ago [-]
I understand that your comment is related to publicity that this event got, but I chuckled when I read that Honda is an unexpected source of serious engineering :)
perihelions 24 hours ago [-]
I think there's about 5 or 6 private startups on the brink of attempting orbital booster landings within the next few months. This... is at least a decade behind that, if they're serious.
Note that they don't appear to have an orbital engine yet—this thing's far too small, it has to be some kind of one-off for this demo flight. Most of the competition leaped directly to testing an engine they were developing for orbital launches, in their suborbital hops.
nine_k 24 hours ago [-]
I assume this rocket is not a part of some orbital program. It's more like the SpaceX's Hopper [1], intended to test the control algorithms and such.
A booster / orbital vehicle, when it appears, should have very different characteristics. I can even imagine that some kind of compatibility standard may arise, allowing to stack custom orbital vehicles to reusable boosters, much like the standardized buses for smaller satellites that exist today.
> "competition leaped directly to testing an engine they were developing for orbital launches"
SpaceX' Starhopper was an orbital Raptor engine. The *test vehicle* wasn't orbital, but, it's testing the in-development orbital engine and associated plumbing under flight conditions (which is useful, because... well you can see the various ways Starhopper failed at the start). Likewise, Grasshopper before that, in 2012-3, was a single Merlin engine (the Falcon 9 has, eponymously, 9).
SpaceX never flew a suborbital hop with anything other than an engine intended for orbital flight.
I think if Honda had an orbital-class reusable engine at the hardware stage, that'd be flying that to test it as much as possible. I'm not aware of any of the competitors doing otherwise. This is signalling they don't (yet?) have one.
edit: Or LandSpace, whose 10 km suborbital hop last year flew one of the methane engines their orbital vehicle has nine of.
nine_k 23 hours ago [-]
From the press release: «Honda rocket research is still in the fundamental research phase, and no decisions have been made regarding commercialization of these rocket technologies». It also has no mention of the engine used. Honda indeed appear to not have an engine worth noticing yet.
wood_spirit 24 hours ago [-]
It’s not clear that they need to take so long to catch up.
It’s like a four minute mile. Now we’ve seen reusable rockets work, everybody builds them and nobody says it won’t work?
adikulkarni11 1 days ago [-]
The most reliable rocket
IgorPartola 18 hours ago [-]
I might as well ask here though this is probably a bit off topic: for smaller rockets why are catapults not used? Seems like it could save a bit on fuel and maybe even a stage.
generalizations 17 hours ago [-]
Short answer: you still need a complex vehicle to finish the orbit insertion after getting thrown, and now you have the added complexity of designing your (smaller) rocket to a) survive a massive g-force while being thrown and b) fit into the catapult sling. So far the tradeoffs haven't been worth it.
Basically the only things we know of that can survive our spin launch systems is stuff like 'very crushable food supplies' or 'a giant lump of steel'.
So you save a bit of fuel but you need to invest 10-100s of millions into a ground infrastructure. And then you are limited to one launch site and limited in orbits you can reach.
Then you still need to design a rocket. You still need a rocket engine and all the other parts of the rocket. So even best case, you only eliminate like 60% of the cost. Now you have to completely different engineering teams with little overlap in skills.
You can only build tiny rockets. In order for your accelerator not to be just completely absurd in size and cost, your gone build a rocket in the 100-200kg range. For that you can maybe ask for like 5 million $. But SpaceX is already doing that at far lower cost. And you don't even have the same flexibility of costume orbital insertions as other small launchers do.
Small launchers are a bad business, of the 100s of small launch companies, the only one that has had any success is RocketLab, other then them its a graveyard.
It will be hard to impossible for your rocket to be reusable. So you need to build the rocket for sub-1million $ including the launch to compete.
But then ... you need specifically designed sats that can handle the acceleration. So you need costumers to specifically design their sats to a complete different standard then for your competitors. And why would any costumers do this if you significantly cheaper then your competitor. Spinlaunch has started to develop its own rocket components that they hope to get other people to use.
But there are many other potentially things on a sat that could break, so for most costumers its simply not an option.
The industry has been moving to larger sats, the old idea of cubesats has gone and even small sats are regularly 200kg or more. So the market for anything below is pretty tiny, and the market for sats of less then 200kg that can handle 10000g is even smaller. And the market for 200kg sats that can handle 10000g and want to go into the specific orbit that you built your catapult for, is even smaller.
If there were many 100s of launches available, just desperately looking a way to get sats to a specific orbit, it might be worth a discussion. But there just isn't.
This kind of technology might make sense on the moon, if you want to bulk export something like ice.
1 days ago [-]
jonplackett 23 hours ago [-]
No-one thought to make a video of this momentous occasion?
JAXA is pretty well set up with expendable launchers already, built by Mitsubishi. The "geopolitical" state of affairs isn't threatening their ability to put stuff into orbit, Japan doesn't rely on America/Russia/China/etc for that.
mrguyorama 1 days ago [-]
Any reusable rocket is also an expendable rocket with slightly better payload.
pmdulaney 24 hours ago [-]
Congratulations to our friends in Japan!
24 hours ago [-]
brianbreslin 1 days ago [-]
Is this a precursor to a viable alternative to any of SpaceX products?
stego-tech 1 days ago [-]
Not at this stage. Looks like they used a smaller rocket to test the core concepts involved, rather than build a huge, production-ready platform like SpaceX. Good to see Japanese industry still improving their self-reliance.
Honda has historically invested heavily in R&D. They are robotics pioneers, have made jet skis, power tools, sell a commercial jet [1], and are responsible for the engine powering the winner (RB) of the last four F1 championships,
I'd really like to see them scale this up commercially quicker than they did with the humanoid robot they built well ahead of many others.
insane_dreamer 22 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't have expected Honda to enter this space.
Why the huge release of steam from the top of the rocket at the end? Release of heat that builds up during the descent? (Though it's not depending that fast, so it wouldn't be heat from atmospheric friction.)
xarope 13 hours ago [-]
someone mentioned it was the liquid propellant being vented:
its not really high in the atmosphere but its a good start
finally SpaceX got competition
artursapek 23 hours ago [-]
Honda has a TLD????
smeeger 15 hours ago [-]
first time ive seen a large corporation do something that indicated they were trying to enter the market that spacex created. i imagine honda entering the race is as big a deal for space exploration as when the first starship touched down
tzury 1 days ago [-]
so now any company can get its own TLD?
that's cool.
kube-system 1 days ago [-]
Brand TLDs became a thing in 2012 under ICANNs New gTLD Program
1970-01-01 23 hours ago [-]
I've only seen it used by companies that cannot get out of their own way.
Instead of news.honda.com (their actual domain) or hondanews.com (actual domain, redirect from before, all owned by them, also has news) or honda.global (makes sense, but nothing there) or honda.com/news (makes sense, but nothing there) they go waste money on a new gTLD. So we have global.honda/en/newsroom/. .
I use dns.google pretty often, very useful when implemented correctly.
hinkley 22 hours ago [-]
Ford, Mercedes and Apple all own /8 address blocks. I thought IBM used to own one as well but they must have given it up.
acheron 22 hours ago [-]
On one hand, it ruins DNS, but on the other hand, it makes ICANN a lot of money.
criddell 21 hours ago [-]
How does it ruin DNS?
selfselfgo 1 days ago [-]
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be87581d 12 hours ago [-]
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financypants 24 hours ago [-]
Those japanese rockets are much smaller compared to our big american sized rockets
tzs 4 hours ago [-]
On the outside. Based on my experiences with Japanese vs American cars I'd not be surprised if they are bigger on the inside. :-)
Seriously, when I bought a Civic in 1989, I looked at both the smaller Japanese cars (Civic, Sentra, Corolla) and bigger American cars. I'm tall and big and had trouble fitting comfortably in the American cars. No problem in the Japanese cars.
Next time I was car shopping, sometime around 1999, I decided to take a look at SUVs which had become pretty popular by then. Again I tried the American ones. They were very large--and very cramped inside. Then I tried a Honda CR-V. It was way smaller than the American SUVs but just as with the Civic there was plenty of room.
It struck me as absurd. How the heck are car companies of Japan, a country whose people average over 2" (5 cm) shorter than Americans and weigh about 2/3 what Americans weigh, so much better than American car companies at making cars that can fit tall fat Americans?
pmdulaney 24 hours ago [-]
Even the longest journey begins with a single step.
https://global.honda/content/dam/site/global-en/topics-new/c...
But it also illustrates that I've seen in the Bay Area time and time again, which is that once you demonstrate that something is doable (as SpaceX has) It opens the way for other capital to create competitive systems.
At Google, where I worked for a few years, it was interesting to see how Google's understanding of search (publicly disclosed), and the infrastructure to host it (kept secret) kept it comfortably ahead of competitors until the design space was exhausted. At which point Google stopped moving forward and everyone else asymptotically approached their level of understanding and mastery.
I see the same thing happening to SpaceX. As other firms master the art of the reusable booster, SpaceX's grasp on the launch services market weakens. Just as Google's grasp of the search market weakens. Or Sun's grasp of the server market weakened. When it becomes possible to buy launch services from another vendor which are comparable (not necessarily cheaper, just comparable) without the baggage of the damage Elon has done, SpaceX will be in a tougher spot.
It also helps me to understand just how much SpaceX needs Starship in order to stay on top of the market.
Some folks will no doubt see this as casting shade on SpaceX, I assure you it is not. What SpaceX's engineering teams have accomplished remains amazing and they deserve their success. It is just someone who has been through a number of technology curves noting how similar the they play out over their lifetimes.
Having witnessed first hand how DEC felt that Sun's "toy computers" would never eclipse DEC in the Server business, and watched as United Launch Alliance dismissed Falcon 9 as something that would never seriously challenge their capabilities, it feels almost prophetic to watch SpaceX's competitors emerge.
The list is longer than that! The earliest hop was probably by McDonnell Douglas in 1993 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_QQDY7PYc8
Deep Blue, several km, hard landing — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-g26Zt15lo
iSpace, 0.3 km — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKCH9ElmmZA
CASC, 12 km — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55iVjGuf_sE (their 75 km attempt in January failed, and doesn't have a public video)
Space Epoch, 2.5 km, hard landing — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTQK1kDpbw4
This is the "markets mature and commodify over time" thing.
What companies are supposed to do in those cases are one of two things. One, keep investing the money into the market or related ones so you keep having an advantage. Or two, if there is nothing relevant and adjacent to productively invest in, return it to shareholders as dividends or share buybacks so they can invest it in some other unrelated market.
But space seems like it would be the first one big time because of the amount of stuff that still has yet to be developed. Starlink was an obvious example of something in that nature, and then it's going to be things like "put datacenters in orbit so you can use solar without worrying about clouds or nighttime" and "build robots that can do semi-autonomous work in places far enough away for both human presence and round trip latency to be an inconvenience" etc.
We'd be living in Star Trek by the time they'd run out of something more to do.
Chances are that we will be living on the consequence of the end of fossil fuels and the rise of climate change long before that, though.
Not remotely the worst case. How do you expect to power all the ships needed for globalisation with nuclear power? What about planes? Can a rocket take off with a nuclear engine?
Fossil fuels account for 80% of the energy we use, electricity merely 20%. A whole lot of those 80% come from use-cases that were built around fossil fuels (how do you make plastic and all the materials that depend on it with nuclear energy?), and we don't (yet) have a way to replace that with something else. Try to power a ship with electricity...
Hydrogen, you say? We would need a lot more energy to produce enough hydrogen to replace oil. So we're going from "we don't have a way to compensate for the lack of oil" with "our solution is to not only compensate, but actually produce more energy than what oil was giving us".
All that while currently living a mass extinction and having already missed the reasonable objectives for global warming. So we have a few decades to get there, and what we have seen in the last few decades is that all we have achieved is making the problem worse.
If you have enough electricity, you can manufacture avgas, methane and whatever other fuels you need for aerospace.
What's the ratio of nuclear-powered big ships vs non-nuclear-powered big ships?
> If you have enough electricity
We're talking about moving our current electricity production entirely out of fossil fuels (because we produce a lot of electricity with them), then multiplying that production by 5, and at this point we're only producing the same amount of energy as today. But of course that's not enough, because we then need to use a lot of that energy to produce what's needed to replace oil, e.g. hydrogen.
We currently need what... 10-15 years to build a nuclear power plant? We're talking about building multiple orders of magnitudes more of them in a few decades, together with the electrical network and of course everything that needs to be re-engineered now that they can't run with oil anymore. And we're currently using oil for a reason: it's super dense, there is nothing more convenient.
And what value does it add? Nothing. It's just for replacing what currently works. Who will pay for that? Where will the money come from?
And this has to be done in a context where geopolitical instability will grow every year (because it is a fact: our access to abundant fossil fuel is coming to an end; Europe has seen it since 2007). And of course in a context where we are not remotely thinking about doing it. In the last decades, we as a society have actually kept accelerating in the opposite direction.
How realistic do you think your scenario is, really?
Part of this is we don't build a lot of them and so are not good at it. If we set out to build hundreds of them per year we could do that, and costs would go down.
>And what value does it add? Nothing. It's just for replacing what currently works. Who will pay for that? Where will the money come from?
That is not an issue. A quick search says that ships have a lifetime to 20-30 years after which they are replaced. Sure there are a few antiques older than that, but for the vast majority of ships the owner will pay to replace it in 20-30 years anyway. Oil is not going to run out on a single day, it will be a process of years which is plenty of time for normal processes to work.
I don't favor nuclear in general, but for large ships it remains the only thing I know of that makes sense. (synthetic fuels are expensive, and solar/wind needs more space than a ship to deliver the power a ship wants).
We have to find a replacement for oil and get it to the scale of oil in a fraction of the time we had to get where we are now with oil. And getting there with oil was easier, because oil is extremely convenient.
It's a bit like saying "we need to rewrite the Linux kernel with a new language that we are yet to invent, and it has to reach feature-parity in 5 years". Sure, theoretically we know how to create a new language and how to write a kernel, but can we do both in 5 years? Ever heard of e.g. Fuchsia? And they didn't try to invent a language for it.
We also know from experience that synthetic fuels are around 5 times more expensive than oil, and so only niches are willing to pay for it if oil is an alternative.
I also won't forget the marketing department at the camera company I worked at, dismissing the iPhone, when it first came out (it ended up eating their lunch).
RIM got so completely smoked with their ten year development cycles. It’s amazing if that they still have a business today to be honest.
They are so far ahead even their biggest competitor can’t comprehend what they’re doing.
There's also an entertaining movie based on this book, a rare business film that is more about failure than success.
BPS.space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH3lR2GLgT0
And I suspect that's doubly true for launch customers outside the US.
Most people I know in Canada, don't currently think poorly of Elon. Note the conditional, currently. They think poorly of Trump, and the entire republican party for talking about, and allowing Trump to talk about annexation. (For example, congress purposefully extending all of Trump's emergency executive orders for the rest of the year, when they'd normally need 90 days + review of congress)
However this isn't about US "team" politics, where even your news talks about "red states" and "blue states". This is simply about "Is this thing good or bad for Canada".
For example, while tariffs are seen as just plain dumb, they're not seen as hostile to Canada, just a shift in US policy. It's the speed of tariff change that's the biggest concern. Put another way, most of the world has no idea or cares for US "team" politics, and frankly we don't understand or even know what drives most US political discussion. It all seems like senseless drivel.
Now to be fair, I'm sure anyone peering in at any political argument from outside, ends up with this feeling. If you've even been visiting a friend, and their family gets into an argument, it's just embarrassing and often laden with decades of back-history, for which you have no context or understanding.
Couple that with the fact that Canada has multiple political parties, not just two, especially at the provincial level. This means we're more accustomed to people working with those they normally do not want to, in order to find a cooperative means to an end. You can see cases in the past where a minority government/party remains in power, by the support of a separatist party. Yes, sometimes people wanting to separate from the country, vote with you and work with you on key topics.
And this sort of logic is quite true for most European nations too.
So not only do those arguments the US seems to have with in its team dynamic seem super weird (only two often completely opposite viewpoints, with no compromise), we don't "get" all the historical chuff that comes along with those arguments.
So back to Elon. Was Canada upset at Elon? Yes just as Canada was, and is still upset at the entire US. But there's upset, and then there's upset. And from what I see here, that has faded against Musk.
After all, none of the US "team" arguments meant anything to Canada. We were extremely massively upset at Trump and those in Congress for not reigning him in about annexation. The rest?
Well that's internal US strife, which we don't even understand. For context, all the layoffs in your government via Musk seemed excessive, but the concept of trying to save money seemed good. Then there was all this undertone of "oh, but he's doing it for evil reasons", with reasons no foreigner could even understand without decades of thinking in terms of "team politics".
This is a bit of a blather, but I guess I'm trying to say that don't count on internal US team politics being the same viewpoint that other countries will have.
And most of this isn't a knock against the US. For example, as I've said above, does the average American understand what drives the dynamic between the Bloc Quebecois, their desire for Quebec independance, while also supporting Canada in parallel? Or the fact that we have a separatist party in our federal parliament? I assure you, no Wikipedia article or summary will get you even close to viewing this dynamic from a Canadian viewpoint.
The challenge with orbital booster reuse is getting them threw the atmosphere intact and ready to land and then be reused quickly. And do that while being optimized enough to carry payload. That is the actual challenge. And that's just the first, then you need to build everything to be able to do this 5-10 times.
Only one other company then SpaceX has achieved getting a booster back at all, and that was by dropping it into an ocean. RocketLab, and they so far as I know have never reflown a complete booster. BlueOrigin has never landed a complete booster. ULA and Arianespace aren't close.
Honda in particular is not a launch competitor and is very unlikely to be one in the future. Japan already has a pet rocket that they support that has low launch rates. Honda isn't just isn't a competitor in the launch sector, and I don't think they are even planning that.
BlueOrigin might emerge as a competitor, but its nothing like Sun (sun was profitable in the first year). BlueOrigin simply has an infinite money glitch, that almost no other company in history had. The amount of money BlueOrigin spent in the last 10 year is actually unbelievable, they at times had the same amount of people as SpaceX, while having near 0 revenue. By any rational evaluation BlueOrigin is completely non-viable as a company, any they are burning billions per year.
RocketLab will likely be a real competitor eventually, but they are pretty clearly positioning themselves at being Nr.2, not aiming for flight rates nearly in SpaceX territory. And they have a lot of technical risk left to clear.
At the moment SpaceX is moving forward faster then anybody else is catching up. Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy still run loops around everybody and nobody will challenge it for another 10 years at least, and that's assuming Falcon 9 operations don't improve.
Starship isn't needed for the launch market, but for their own constellation.
I think the timeline is very difficult to predict here. We've seen countless companies who are leading in technologies who when others see it can be done... -know- it can be done so then can do it. Like the 4 minute mile.
I know it's not simple and no-one else is near SpaceX at the moment, but to ignore reusability has become an extinction-level event for launch providers. Some will learn from the 'break it and learn quickly' mentality that SpaceX followed for getting F9 to reliable reusability and there will be more competition.
Second-stage re-use is clearly the next phase and that's what Starship is targeting (plus massive capacity). I don't know if it scales to smaller rockets, but if it does (and we know that it's physically possible as some of the Starship second-stages have made it back kinda-alive), then it will be revolutionary.
Look at the lead that Tesla has thrown away in the EV market. I remember seeing an interview with Elon Musk talking about BYD EVs - "Yes, but look at their car, it's a joke"... to now having better tech in some ways than Tesla, and an up-to-date product line which looks way better than the staid models that Tesla is producing. Only the charging infra is keeping them ahead in terms of overall usability - and at some point that will be a solved problem for disparate third-party charging providers.
Cybertruck is a child-like anomaly which is not a mass seller. The M3 and MY are dated, and the robotaxi is merely a rehash of those stylistically (as well as completely the wrong thing to be making in terms of the market it's supposed to serve, IMO). I have read that Tesla is stuck in a rut, and their line-up looks like it. The 'highland' refresh and model y are both sticking-plaster makeovers.
When I ask my (mid 20s) kids if they'd buy a Kia EV3, a BYD Dolphin Surf or a Tesla, it's the Kia or the BYD. They look like cool cars, not something that a 50 year old (me!) would like (I prefer the EV3 if I had a choice). I know this is a bit off topic, but I'm just trying to illustrate that it's easy to think you're unassailable, and then the competition not only catches up, but overtakes. And timelines are impossible to predict to that scale, IMO.
But it hasn't, that's just a fact. Neither ULA, nor Arianespace, nor Russia have gone extinct or embraced reuse to any degree at all. Same goes for India and Japan. Because this market simply doesn't operate like typical markets.
ULA and Arianespace have lots of orders. There a complex reason for this, but its still just a reality. Neither Russia or India have made major investments in reusable rockets. China to some degree does but we have little insight.
The only competitors are all new companies that had no position in the market before.
> Like the 4 minute mile.
No amount of believe makes it just happen. You can't just work a bit harder and get there incrementally. That's not how rockets work. Its not like running at all. Runners already existed, they just needed to incrementally improve a little bit, believe can help with that.
But if you don't have the necessary rocket engine or architecture, you can't just incrementally improve to get to the goal. You need to redo the whole architecture from the ground up. No amount of testing and believe turns Ariane 5 into a Falcon 9 competitor. And that's going to cost billions even if everything goes well.
That's why non of the existing competitors have done it. Its new potential competitors coming up that work on it.
> Some will learn from the 'break it and learn quickly' mentality that SpaceX followed for getting F9 to reliable reusability and there will be more competition.
That mentality is almost 20 years old and nobody has embraced it in the same way. There are many reasons for this that I could get into. But its far more then simply a shift in mentality. If your fundamentals are wrong, no amount of mentality shift changes anything.
And even if you embrace that mentality, its still a 10 year journey, see Stoke Space for example.
And many companies that had that mentality have gone bust, see ABL and others.
> Look at the lead that Tesla has thrown away in the EV market.
Tesla lead wasn't really technological. They never had battery technology better then what many other companies can produce. Except maybe their packs, were a bit better in the beginning, but that's about it and that wasn't a huge engineering lift to replicate.
What made them get a lead is the complete believe in the concept, and their ability to raise enough money to make it happen on a large scale, plus proving there is demand.
Also I think drawing parallels between car industry and space industry isn't really relevant at all.
But all national launch providers use to supplement their income with commercial launches and SpaceX has completely sucked the air out of the room in that regard. It’s now more expensive for all these countries to keep these programs operational.
And something that went orbital at supersonic speed
Is not even remotely the same universe
McDonell Douglas have done up and down since 1992
SpaceX is the only entity that have recovered and reused any rocket parts after sending payloads orbital
Wake me up when someone have done even a test that resembles orbital recovery
Until then all the EDS in here has zero power over reality
This is not true. Say what you will about the Shuttle, but they definitely recovered and reused rocket parts from both the boosters and the orbiter.
https://thegaijinghost.com/blog/japan-life-sized-gundam-thro...
But an impressively smooth landing regardless, and I would imagine maybe harder the smaller the rocket is.
You likely weren't being exhaustive in your listing, but I first started watching aerospace development with Armadillo Aerospace, and some of their rockets were much smaller. Their largest one was still shorter than the dc-x.
http://www.astronautix.com/q/quad.html
I doubt that this rocket has an engine intended for orbit? So it makes me wonder how serious this program is.
Pretty sure that, or some other hobbyist project, is going to take the prize for "smallest".
Its dimensions according to Wikipedia:
Height – 31 feet (9.54 meters)
Weight – 2.9 tons (2.6 metric tons)
Diameter – 20 inches (52 centimeters)
Payload to Low-Earth Orbit – ~9 lbs (4 kg)
From another article.
A record height for a giraffe in a UK zoo was 5.8 m, but the tip of his horns was said to have reached close to 6.1 m.
So 6 m is about in this ballpark.
Or are there really SUVs which are > 6m in length?
Why is that? Is it due to the nature of chemicals it uses?
Military rockets, and solid-fuel boosters like the kind the Shuttles used to use, indeed produce very visible exhaust, because they use heavy fuels, and sometimes heavier oxidizers, like nitric acid. This is because they need to be in the fueled state for a long time, ready to launch in seconds; this excludes more efficient but finicky cryogenic fuels used by large commercial rockets.
The large plumes that you usually see the first few seconds when a rocket is blasting off a launch pad are mostly water vapor. The launch pad would be destroyed by the exhaust were it not cooled during the launch by large amounts of water, which gets evaporated instead of the concrete.
Solid boosters put out the most visible exhaust, as burning APCP[1] emits solid particles of metal oxides. Also some rockets (mostly Russian, Chinese, and Indian) use unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine + dinitrogen tetroxide, which emits a reddish-orange exhaust. Both compounds are toxic, as is the exhaust.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_perchlorate_composite...
Ethanol/oxygen is my guess. Blue, and also very little soot.
It's hard to say for sure, but I lean towards Honda's rocket using hydrogen. Honda has experience with it. They use hydrogen in their fuel cell vehicles, and their press release from 2021 mentions using hydrogen for rockets.[1]
I'm pretty sure both fuel and oxidizer are cryogenic, because when the rocket lands it vents from several areas (most likely separate tanks). That would rule out ethanol or methanol as the fuel.
I don't see any secondary exhaust from a gas generator, and staged combustion would be something to brag about (and much higher thrust), so my guess is that it's an expander cycle. Expander cycle engines require a fuel that boils easily, so it would have to be fueled by propane, methane, or hydrogen. I don't think it's propane, as the only propane/lox rocket I've seen has orange exhaust.[2] If Honda poached some engineers from Mitsubishi, I could see them going with a hydrolox expander cycle, as that's what the H family of rockets use.
The only thing that doesn't line up with hydrogen is the low thrust given the propellant consumption. Based on the claimed wet/dry mass (1,312kg/900kg), they used at most 412kg of propellant. Flight duration was 56.6 seconds, so that's an average of 7.28kg of propellant per second. If the stated wet/dry mass is correct and the rocket used up all of its fuel, then the rocket's thrust was around 13kN at the start and around 7kN near the end. Let's say it averaged 10kN. Force equals mass flow rate times exhaust velocity. So 10kN divided by 7.28kg/sec is 1.374 km/s. Divide by standard Earth gravity and you get 140 seconds, which is pathetic for a rocket. It could be that they only used a small fraction of the available propellant, or they had a poor nozzle design, or the engine was throttled very low and was therefore less efficient. If we assume the test flight only used 40% of the available propellant, then we'd get a flow rate of 2.9kg/sec and a specific impulse of 352 seconds. But that sort of assumption can be used to come up with any Isp.
Still, I think it's using either hydrogen or methane as fuel. Nothing else fits with the video.
1. https://global.honda/en/newsroom/news/2021/c210930beng.html
2. Here's a video of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket, which uses propane/lox: https://x.com/isaraerospace/status/1906418985173758236
It could simply be pressure-fed. No turbopump at all—just a helium tank.
You have a preference for assuming sophistication, but this is a one-off inexpensive test article with trivial performance needs. My guess is that they'd made the simplest engineering choices possible at every turn.
For the first real hop see Xombie circa 2010.
Someone must have run out and grabbed the risers.
Nope.
https://global.honda/en/topics/2025/c_2025-06-17ceng/image_d...
Video three and four clearly show it lands a little bit away from the risers. Same pad, but only 1/2 comments--not mine--suggested it was a different pad.
[0] https://www.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:73...
1: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BhfWBSBWgPQaa64g7
The surrounding features are a match.
> Honda専用 再使用型ロケット実験設備
> Honda dedicated reusable rocket experiment facility
yup
If you look at the landing shot, you can see that towards the corner are some markings for previous risers which were used for previous launches (or markings for future risers for future launches). The risers it launched from this time are just in a different corner.
[edit] the camera angle and the camera height from the ground is different as well between the lift off and landing.
It makes more sense than someone going out and grabbing them during the short flight. Those things would need to be sturdy and attached to not melt or blow away during the launch, and they would be hot.
edit: If you open up the first image on the submission and look to the left of the crane, you can see what look like the risers. They do seem to come out of the ground. You can see the same trees as the landing shot.
edit: I didn't realize the page had more videos under the Download button. I was wrong about the rectangles, but you can definitely see it's landing in a different spot in the onboard video (#3). You can still see the risers when it lands.
Also, I believe it would have been a historical moment if they filmed the entire staff watching the event from the control room.
I wonder if that's the optimal design for VTOL rocket landers? Or is that more particular to smaller lighter rockets and eventually you need heavier duty options for bigger rockets?
Also the DC-X was eventually intended to be single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO). Do any of these reusable rockets plan on being SSTO? Whether from Space-X/Blue Origin or this or the Chinese ones? SSTO is where you're going to dramatically change the economics of rockets, as you now only have to worry about refueling when launching satellites, instead of using an expendable second stage..
Happened to the unreal team, who created the z-buffer reflections in the marble floor- because some other "engine" from around the world "could do that" - which ironically was a rendered non-real time image.
To sum it up nicely the real innovators, are marketing gurus, lying with "pretend proof" forcing the competition to adapt. Thank you for coming to my TED-walk
[1]: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
$185,000 application fee to apply for a new gTLD, plus maybe some auctions for gTLDs that multiple entities wanted, resulted in just under $60 million for ICANN.[2]
Apparently Google and Amazon were the most prolific appliers, with 101 and 76 applications respectively.[3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN#TLD_expansion_and_concer...
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2015/04/17/icann_gltd_auction_mo...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#Expan...
it feels weird seeing no .com at the end of it
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neustar
Notably:
> The name “Honda” has its roots in Japan, a country known for its rich traditions and cultural heritage. In Japanese, the name is written as 本田, which can be broken down into two characters: 本 (“hon”) meaning “origin” or “root” and 田 (“da” or “ta”) meaning “rice field” or “paddy field.” The combination of these characters conveys a sense of familial roots or origin tied to agricultural land, which was historically significant in Japan’s agrarian society.
> Traditionally, Japanese surnames like Honda were often linked to geographic locations or land ownership, reflecting the agricultural lifestyle of early Japan. Thus, the name Honda could have been used to denote a family that owned or worked on rice fields, marking them as stewards of the land.
Toyota's founder is Kiichiro Toyoda (with a 'd'), and the company was originally named Toyoda, named after the founder. It was later changed to Toyota because it looked better in Katakana script (8 brush strokes, which is a lucky number), and it had a better meaning in Japanese. Apparently Toyoda is a farmer's name, and the company did not want to be associated with farming.
Similarly, Mazda comes from it's founder's name Matsuda, but was changed to Mazda when the first wheeled vehicles were produced (Mazda-Go). The official claim from Mazda is that it was named after Ahura Mazda, a God, but it is widely speculated that the name change was done to make it more appealing for international markets. I don't speak Japanese, but I have seen several videos on social media where the Japanese still pronounce Mazda as Matsuda.
"main farm", "rich farm", "pine farm", "bell tree", "sun field", "river cape", "fifty bells", it's all just surnames. Nothing particularly more awe inspiring than any regular surnames would be.
Doesn't look like it has a deep meaning does it? I'm thinking that's how the Honda name looks to a Japanese.
The one major Japanese company whose name does have a deep meaning - that I know of - is Mazda, which is explicitly derived from Ahura Mazda.
Like, to a non-english speaker? Because it looks loaded with meaning to me. Would you think that all instances of the word "morgan" refer to the bank "jp morgan"? Do you think that people who gamble are referring to the company you brought up? Why would you just give a top level domain name to a single company? No company is that interesting by itself. Hence, my question.
But maybe I'm just weird when it comes to language.
Anyway, I'll wait for a japanese person to fill me in ig—I can google where a name comes from, but this doesn't answer how it's actually perceived by someone who speaks the language.
For example, the US in its current form is older than China, which was taken over relatively recently by the CCP who are also actively destroying most vestiges of cultural heritage through forced migration and erasing of inconvenient history.
Perhaps even the only place that can top Japan in this regard.
But maybe that's because USA has a tendency to make everything a super commercial event which gives us that idea.
Don't imagine because this rocket is a certain size or lift capacity, that it isn't serious. And, this was just an R&D technology test. Who knows where they'll go from here.
- Advances in rocket engine design & tech to enable deep throttling
- Control algorithms for propulsive landing maturing (Google "Lars Blackmore", "GFOLD", "Mars Landing", and work through the references)
- Forward thinking and risk-taking by SpaceX to further develop tech demonstrated by earlier efforts (DC-X, Mars Landing, etc.)
Modern simulation and sensor capabilities helped, but were not the major enabling factors.
Is this basically a technical way of saying "people realized it could be done"? Like the 4 minute mile, once it was done once, many people accomplished the same feat soon after. The realization that it was possible changed people's perception.
I'm sure engineers and science-fiction writers have known for a long time that it could be done.
Unfortunately then he stopped taking his dried frog pills and look where he is now...
I still think he had some merit in the past.
One major reason for this is the mixing plate at the top of the combustor. Fuel and oxygen are distributed to tiny nozzles which mix together. The better the mixing, the more stable the burn. If you get unstable burning -eg momentarily better mixing in one area- it will cause a pressure disturbance which will further alter the burning power in different areas of the combustion chamber. At low throttle, this can be enough to cause the engine to turn off entirely.
Fluid simulations have made a huge difference. It's now possible to throttle engines down to 5% because mixing is much more stable (manufacturing improvements in the nozzles have also helped) and combustion is more protected from pressure variations.
The extra stability also just makes it easier to control a rocket period. Less thrust variation to confuse with drag properties, less bouncing, better sensor data.
I guess I’m trying to connect the dots on how a simulation improves the actual vehicle dynamics.
Simulation inside the engine can find resonances, show where shockwaves propagate, and show you how to build injectors (pressure, spray etc) so they are less affected by the path of reflections. Optimizing things like that smoothly along a range of velocities and pressures without a computer is not very feasible, and you need a minimum of computing power before you start converging to accurate results. The unpredictability of turbulence means low-resolution simulations will behave very differently.
Modern pressure vessels can reach 5% empty mass, thats a factor of 20
Rockets have stages, a good approximate is to stage half your rocket to get rid of the most empty mass. This also means your first stage has to have double the thrust to lift itself and its stage. Now you're at a factor of 40 just to hover.
Now you actually have to take off, usually around 1.2 to 1.4 thrust to weight.
So a more realistic scenario means your rocket engine has to throttle down to exactly 2% power while the laval nozzle is optimised for takeoff thrust only.
SpaceX Merlin 1D: ~40% Rocketdyne F-1 (Saturn V): ~70% Space Shuttle Main Engine (RS-25): ~67% Blue Origin BE-4: ~20–25%
Falcon 9 does the "hover slam" where they have to turn off the engine exactly at touch down, or the rocket starts to go back up again. Throttle is too high for the weight of the booster at that point in flight.
So they need to "hoverslam", that is, arrive at the landing pad rapidly decelerating so that their altitude hits zero just as their speed hits zero. This was thought to be very hard, but I don't think SpaceX has lost a stage due to estimation failure there. It helps that there is significant throttle range and fairly rapid throttle response on the engines, so they can have some slack. (Plan to decelerate at 2.5g for the last ~20s or so, with the ability to do anything between ~1.5g to 4g, so you can adjust throttle based on measured landing speed.)
Their Superheavy has more engines, allowing them to bring the TWR below 1, enabling hovering.
They linked details to look into in their original post.
This means that 3d-printed copper (alloy) is an amazing process and material for them. You can build the kind of structurally integrated cooling channels that the people building rockets in the 60's could only dream about, and it's not a gold-plated part that required a million labor hours to build, it's something you can just print overnight.
https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Spac...
so now the main problem is building the hardware, there are a lot of solutions for the software part.
Before there were no general-purpose simulators, and barely usable computers (2 MHz computer with 2 KB of memory...), so all you could do was hardcoding the path and use rather constrained algorithms.
I think there is also a distinction to be made between offline (engineering) and onboard computing resources. While onboard computers have been constrained in the past, control algorithms are typically simple to implement. Most of the heavy lifting (design & optimization of algorithms) is done in the R&D phase using HPC equipment.
Mass-produced hardware drove prices down, and availability way up, in many industries: motors, analog electronics, computers, solar panels, lithium batteries, various sensors, etc. Maybe reusable rockets, enabled by all that, are going to follow a similar trajectory as air transportation.
It would seem to me that Intel and AMD were not friendly to custom designs at that time, and MIPS was not significantly evolving.
A fast, low-power CPU that can access more than 4gb and is friendly to customization seems to me to be a recent development.
While cool and all, this type of sim is a tiny, tiny slice of the software stack, and not the most difficult by a long shot. For one, you need software to control the actual hardware, that runs on said hardware's specific CPU(s) stack AND in sim (making an off the shelf sim a lot less useful). Orbital/newtonian physics are not trivial to implement, but they are relatively simple compared to the software that handles integration with physical components, telemetry, command, alerting, path optimization, etc. etc. The phrase "reality has a surprising amount of detail" applies here - it takes a lot of software to model complex hardware correctly, and even more to control it safely.
inb4 blue origin / DC-X did it first
This Honda landing neither went to space nor was orbital, so it was a similar test to the DC-X test.
In the past, there was not much reasons to go into space, commercially, so who would have paid for it? But today there are many more use-cases for sending things to space that are willing to pay for the service.
If you know that something can be done, and there is a potential market for such a project, it then becomes easier to get the funding. Chicken or the egg...
One thing we also need to point out, is that SpaceX uses like 80% of their yearly launches, for their own communication / sat service. This gave a incentive for that investment.
Is the same reason why, despite SpaceX throwing those things up constantly, there really is a big lag of competitors with reusable rockets. Its not that they where / not able to quickly get the same tech going. They simply have less market, vs what SpaceX does non-stop. So the investments are less, what in time means less fast development.
SpaceX is a bit of a strange company, partially because they used a lot of the public funds to just throw shit at the wall, and see what sticks. This resulted in them caring less if a few rockets blew up, as long as they got the data for the next one with less flaws. It becomes harder when there is more oversight of that money, or risk averse investors. Then you really want to be sure that thing goes up and come back down into one piece from the first go.
A lot of projects funding are heavily based upon the first or second try of something, and then (sometimes unwisely) funding is pulled if it was not a perfect success story.
Dragon 9 was based on conservative and boring technology but it was cost optimized before it was reusable, then reusability crushed the competition.
For that matter, Starship is boring. "Throw at the wall and see what sticks" isn't "trying a bunch of crazy stuff" but trying a bunch of low and medium risk things. For instance, development of the Space Shuttle thermal tiles was outrageously expensive and resulted in a system that was outrageously expensive to maintain. They couldn't change it because lives were at stake. With Starship they can build a thermal protection system which is 90% adequate and make little changes that get it up to 100% adequate and then look at optimizing weight, speed of reuse and all that. If some of them burn up it is just money since there won't be astronauts riding it until it is perfected.
Falcon 9 didn't have three versions of which two were obsolete. Falcon 9 didn't put optional goals on the critical path, which are now delaying and preventing commercial launches.
SpaceX invested in reusability long before they had any idea about their own launch services.
> Its not that they where / not able to quickly get the same tech going. They simply have less market
BlueOrigin has been trying for nearly as long as SpaceX and have infinite money and don't care about market. Apparently having lots of money doesn't make you able to 'quickly get the same tech'.
RocketLab was to small and had to first grow the company in other ways. And the CEO initially didn't believe in large rockets. And their own efforts of re-usability, despite excellent engeeners didn't pan out to 'quickly get the same tech'.
Arianespace had enough market in theory, they just didn't want to invest money. And now that they do, they are completely failing at at 'quickly getting the same tech' despite them getting lots and lots of money. More money in fact then SpaceX used to develop the Falcon 9 initially. And at best they get some demonstrators out of it.
ULA has invested many billions in their next generation rockets, and they were absolutely not confident that they could 'quickly get the same tech'.
Tons of money flowed into the rocket business, specially if you include Blue. Japan, India, Europe, China and US market have all ramped up investment. And nobody has replicated what SpaceX did more then 10 years ago.
So as far as I can tell, there is exactly 0 evidence that people who can invest money can replicate the technology and the operations.
> partially because they used a lot of the public funds to just throw shit at the wall
The used all their costumers rockets to do tests after they had performed the service. Some of those rockets were bought by 'the public'. And the first reflown rockets didn't carry public payloads. Other companies could have done the same with not that much investment, they just didn't care to.
What result SpaceX caring less, is because they were already so good at building rockets that even their non-reusable rockets were cheaper then anybody else, even with reusable tech like legs attached. Falcon 9 was so much better then anything else that even without re-usabiltiy they were profitable.
Their business didn't depend on re-usability. I don't think the other rocket companies could even imagine something like that to be possible.
This is where I think the business acumen came into play. Because the govt is self-insured, it allowed SpaceX to pass the high risk off to the taxpayer. Once the tech matured, the risk was low enough to be palatable for private industry use.
And FWIW, I don’t mean that as disparaging to SpaceX, just an acknowledgment of the risk dynamics.
The Space Shuttle was wrong in so many ways, not least that it was a "pickup truck" as opposed to a dedicated manned vehicle (with appropriate safety features) or a dedicated cargo vehicle. Because they couldn't do unmanned tests they were stuck with the barely reusable thermal tiles and couldn't replace them with something easier to reuse (or safer!)
Attempts at second generation reusable vehicles failed because rather than "solving reuse" they were all about single-stage to orbit (SSTO) [2] and aerospike engines and exotic composite materials that burned up the money/complexity/risk/technology budgets.
There was a report that came out towards the end of the SDI [3] phase that pointed out the path that SpaceX followed with Dragon 9 where you could make rather ordinary rockets and reuse the first stage but expend the second because the first stage is most of the expense. They thought psychology and politics would preclude that and that people would be seduced by SSTO, aerospikes, composites, etc.
Funny though out of all the design studies NASA did for the Shuttle and for heavy lift vehicles inspired by the O'Neill colony idea, there was a sketch of a "fly back booster" based on the Saturn V that would have basically been "Super Heavy" that was considered in 1979 that, retrospectively, could have given us Starship by 1990 or so. But no, we were committed to the Space Shuttle because boy the Soviet Union was intimidated by our willingness and ability to spend on senseless boondoggles!
[1] The first few times the shuttle went up they were afraid the tiles would get damaged and something like the Columbia accident would happen, they made some minor changes to get them to stick better and stopped worrying, at least in public. It took 100 launches for a failure mode than affects 1% of launches to actually happen.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative (which would have required much cheaper launch)
I wonder what the STS system would have been like if the DoD's cross-range requirement hadn't been imposed.
Why not? Certainly not for technical reasons, the shuttle had automatic landing capability (which was never used, purely from the pilot's preference).
The real friction in building a reusable rocket isn't the engineering, it's setting "let's build a reusable rocket" as a design goal, and getting a whole bunch of engineers and a whole bunch of dollars to start on that goal.
You have to start with a whiteboard sketch and board-room presentation that shows it's achievable, and then send the engineers out to refine the sketch into something worth funding, and then work for months or years to build a rocket that would be a disaster if it's not achievable.
This.
What I wanted to emphasize was how, after Bannister finally broke through the 4-minute barrier, many others did it soon after: 3 more in 1954; 4 in 1955; 3 in 1956; 5 in 1957; 4 in 1958.
List: https://imgur.com/a/UadE3xa
That's a huge engineering difference, roughly like the difference between a car and a helicopter. The Falcon 9 was also 4x taller, meaning 16x more force to correct a lean. A little burp would send the rocket right back up in the air.
Really, what SpaceX did was radically different from the tests in the 90s from the rockets, to the controls, to the reusability goals. Otherwise they wouldn't have built Grasshopper.
Now NewGlen is kinda a knockoff of Delta Clipper, but that's a different beast.
* Better motors for gimballing
* Launch-thrust engines that throttle down low enough and preciesly enough for landing
* Better materials to handle stress for flip over manover etc without added weight
* More accurate position sensors
* Better understanding and simulation of aerodynamics to develop body shape and write control algorithms.
> Launch-thrust engines that throttle down low enough and preciesly enough for landing
In large part this is due to improved simulation- spaceX made their own software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozrvfRHvYHA&t=119s
Experimentation was also a large factor- pintle injectors have been around for a long time, but were not used in production rockets until SpaceX (who moved from a single pintle to an annular ring). Pintle injectors are very good for throttling.
> Better materials to handle stress for flip over manover etc without added weight
We're still using the same materials- good ol inconel and aluminum. However 3d printing has made a pretty big difference in engines.
More rockets use carbon fiber, but that isn't new exactly and the main parts are still the same variety of aluminum etc. Titanium has become more common, but is still pretty specialized- the increased availability was probably the biggest factor but improved cutting toolings (alloys and coatings) and tools (bigger, faster, less vibration) have also made a big difference.
Reusable, propulsively landed stages for rockets capable of putting payloads into Earth orbit is stupendously harder. The speeds involved are like 10-100x higher than these little hops. The first stages of Falcon 9 and Starship are still the only rockets that have achieved that. Electron has only re-used a single engine.
There might be more in a year or two (New Glenn, Neutron, Starship, a Chinese one), but for now, I would call it extremely difficult, not easy.
I wouldn’t say anything has fundamentally changed in the rocket coordination tech itself, just the private sector being able to rationalize the cost of the trials with ROI
I mean for/example the Apollo lander was a tail landing rocket and lunar landing is way fucking harder because a thick atmosphere gives you some room for error.
Besides SpaceX, its also being worked on by Rocket Lab, Stoke, maybe Blue Origin, and too many Chinese companies to count.
Most launch suppliers just make rockets single-use and write it off because it's not like you're launching weekly. Who knows how much it costs in labor and parts to refurbish landed rockets, it's probably cheaper to just keep making new ones.
^ you know what to say in response to this; we're all in the process of finding out which one is more correct.
European colleagues regularly go, "what other kind of tonnes are there?" and we get to share the joke of how silly Americans are for still using imperial tonnes.
There's some ODD behavior where people in the US want to fuck up metric units (MB being the obvious in my lifetime non-engineer renaming of the meaning of a unit). I find the MM of finance confusing (not sure of origin). Calling tonnes, metric "tons", seems to be a US confusing thing. Or spelling metres vs meters.
Or creating units that depend on something country specific like football field (is that FIFA (EU), US, Canadian, Aussie).
Actually it seems common to desire to create industry units: https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...
Sort of a NIH at the county level.
The nuclear industry was using metric weights fully when I did my apprenticeship in it in the late 1980s. Good job really as I think a conversion error could be catastrophic.
Same goes for gallons though, US gallon is smaller than a UK one.
Source is the official SI brochure: https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/
At a scale of 433 tons, it doesn’t really matter much which kind of tons (unless you’re actually doing the rocket science, of course).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(mass)
The table at right is based on the kilogram (kg), the base unit of mass in the International System of Units (SI). The kilogram is the only standard unit to include an SI prefix (kilo-) as part of its name. The gram (10−3 kg) is an SI derived unit of mass. However, the names of all SI mass units are based on gram, rather than on kilogram; thus 103 kg is a megagram (106 g), not a kilokilogram.
The tonne (t) is an SI-compatible unit of mass equal to a megagram (Mg), or 10^3 kg. The unit is in common use for masses above about 10^3 kg and is often used with SI prefixes. For example, a gigagram (Gg) or 10^9 g is 10^3 tonnes, commonly called a kilotonne.
One context where I have seen this used is carbon stocks, e.g. petagram of carbon (PgC):
https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Carbon+Cycle
Of course Gigatonne of Co2 is also found very frequently.
I wonder if BPS .pace got further with his solid fuel thrust vectoring? Mustn't be far off that if not. https://bps.space/products/signal-r2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UX7NJLYyb4
Rocket Labs has recovered (not reflown) several orbital boosters, and the rest are within 1-2 years of orbital booster recovery attempts.
I'll be thrilled when someone does! Competition is great! But let's do it via technological progress, not through abuse of the english language.
Pure HN distilled
Ultimately I "gave up" and just bought a 981 Boxster S (a 2013) for $42k. A 986 Boxster from the same era as an S2000 would absolutely be S2k prices.
I owned a Miata and wanted to own an S2k before moving up to the Boxster, but for today's asking prices, it just didn't make sense.
would be a fun publicity stunt.
If rockets became as common as cars, what kind of accidents would we see? And would insurers insure them?
But OP states that, body aside, the car's condition was suitable to deliver at least two more decades of driving time. Buying a different used Civic at market value would introduce an unknown, unbound cost of repairs to reach that goal. Unless you're a mechanic it's essentially gambling. Or* it's a new vehicle-- in which case it will cost vastly more than the cost of the body repairs.
I suppose I understand why the market is relevant-- if it were $1 then it would be worth the gamble. But given OP's goals and foreknowledge of the car's condition, I don't understand why market value would create a hard limit against paying for the repairs. That foreknowledge is worth at least a few hundred dollars, probably way more if you factor in time to find another car and risk of it being in ill-repair. Edit: (Not to mention the depth of knowledge since OP had been driving it for nearly a decade already!)
Edit: Plus the fact that OP would have run this car into the ground. So while market value still plays some role, resale value does not.
The cost to repair from multiple shops within transportable distance (important consideration as I'm sure someone somewhere could have done it for less) was $16k. To get it to an ugly but functional state was about $10k, which would have to be paid out of pocket.
Even if repaired to "roadworthy" condition, it would need to be reinspected and if deemed to be roadworthy would hold a salvage title, meaning insurance would go through the roof, my liability coverage would be dropped, and the car could not be resold. If not deemed roadworthy, more cost.
Needless to say, I considered the car totaled and used the $11k for a down payment towards another Honda.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110867/
Personal example buying a used car with 60k miles that had some idle/start issues at times but generally ran well. Everything seemed to be serviced in a timely manner but the spark plugs were still the originals. Those spark plugs have a generous "100,000 mile" service interval. I pulled the originals and sure enough they weren't in the greatest shape. $40 later I never had start/idle issues again for the remaining time I owned the car.
But, couldn’t specifically tell if this was indeed the first launch or not, and perhaps there were some private failures before - anyone know?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
Note that they don't appear to have an orbital engine yet—this thing's far too small, it has to be some kind of one-off for this demo flight. Most of the competition leaped directly to testing an engine they were developing for orbital launches, in their suborbital hops.
A booster / orbital vehicle, when it appears, should have very different characteristics. I can even imagine that some kind of compatibility standard may arise, allowing to stack custom orbital vehicles to reusable boosters, much like the standardized buses for smaller satellites that exist today.
[1]: https://starship-spacex.fandom.com/wiki/Starhopper
SpaceX' Starhopper was an orbital Raptor engine. The *test vehicle* wasn't orbital, but, it's testing the in-development orbital engine and associated plumbing under flight conditions (which is useful, because... well you can see the various ways Starhopper failed at the start). Likewise, Grasshopper before that, in 2012-3, was a single Merlin engine (the Falcon 9 has, eponymously, 9).
SpaceX never flew a suborbital hop with anything other than an engine intended for orbital flight.
I think if Honda had an orbital-class reusable engine at the hardware stage, that'd be flying that to test it as much as possible. I'm not aware of any of the competitors doing otherwise. This is signalling they don't (yet?) have one.
edit: Or LandSpace, whose 10 km suborbital hop last year flew one of the methane engines their orbital vehicle has nine of.
It’s like a four minute mile. Now we’ve seen reusable rockets work, everybody builds them and nobody says it won’t work?
Basically the only things we know of that can survive our spin launch systems is stuff like 'very crushable food supplies' or 'a giant lump of steel'.
https://www.spinlaunch.com/
Then you still need to design a rocket. You still need a rocket engine and all the other parts of the rocket. So even best case, you only eliminate like 60% of the cost. Now you have to completely different engineering teams with little overlap in skills.
You can only build tiny rockets. In order for your accelerator not to be just completely absurd in size and cost, your gone build a rocket in the 100-200kg range. For that you can maybe ask for like 5 million $. But SpaceX is already doing that at far lower cost. And you don't even have the same flexibility of costume orbital insertions as other small launchers do.
Small launchers are a bad business, of the 100s of small launch companies, the only one that has had any success is RocketLab, other then them its a graveyard.
It will be hard to impossible for your rocket to be reusable. So you need to build the rocket for sub-1million $ including the launch to compete.
But then ... you need specifically designed sats that can handle the acceleration. So you need costumers to specifically design their sats to a complete different standard then for your competitors. And why would any costumers do this if you significantly cheaper then your competitor. Spinlaunch has started to develop its own rocket components that they hope to get other people to use.
But there are many other potentially things on a sat that could break, so for most costumers its simply not an option.
The industry has been moving to larger sats, the old idea of cubesats has gone and even small sats are regularly 200kg or more. So the market for anything below is pretty tiny, and the market for sats of less then 200kg that can handle 10000g is even smaller. And the market for 200kg sats that can handle 10000g and want to go into the specific orbit that you built your catapult for, is even smaller.
If there were many 100s of launches available, just desperately looking a way to get sats to a specific orbit, it might be worth a discussion. But there just isn't.
This kind of technology might make sense on the moon, if you want to bulk export something like ice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgaGUb1GAEo
reaching an altitude of 300 meters
...but this isn't one of them, yet
"you meet the nicest people on a Honda" <https://www.vintag.es/2017/09/you-meet-nicest-people-on-hond...>
I don't know what kind of people you meet on that other, better-known, reusable rocket company.
I want the NSX edition.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/v00pN4FyfuM
For example "Honda Discovers Gene Which Improves Regeneration Ability in Rice" [1].
[1] https://global.honda/en/newsroom/news/2005/c050809a-eng.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_HA-420_HondaJet
I'd really like to see them scale this up commercially quicker than they did with the humanoid robot they built well ahead of many others.
Why the huge release of steam from the top of the rocket at the end? Release of heat that builds up during the descent? (Though it's not depending that fast, so it wouldn't be heat from atmospheric friction.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44303132
finally SpaceX got competition
Instead of news.honda.com (their actual domain) or hondanews.com (actual domain, redirect from before, all owned by them, also has news) or honda.global (makes sense, but nothing there) or honda.com/news (makes sense, but nothing there) they go waste money on a new gTLD. So we have global.honda/en/newsroom/. .
At least they're using it: https://domainmetadata.com/list-of-all-honda-domains
https://icannwiki.org/New_gTLD_Brand_Applications
Seriously, when I bought a Civic in 1989, I looked at both the smaller Japanese cars (Civic, Sentra, Corolla) and bigger American cars. I'm tall and big and had trouble fitting comfortably in the American cars. No problem in the Japanese cars.
Next time I was car shopping, sometime around 1999, I decided to take a look at SUVs which had become pretty popular by then. Again I tried the American ones. They were very large--and very cramped inside. Then I tried a Honda CR-V. It was way smaller than the American SUVs but just as with the Civic there was plenty of room.
It struck me as absurd. How the heck are car companies of Japan, a country whose people average over 2" (5 cm) shorter than Americans and weigh about 2/3 what Americans weigh, so much better than American car companies at making cars that can fit tall fat Americans?