Successful Test Flight and Landing for Xombie Rocket Lander and GENIE 65
An anonymous reader sends word that Masten Space Systems' Xombie rocket has successfully demonstrated vertical takeoff and landing for NASA's Flight Opportunities Program. It was guided autonomously by the GENIE system from Draper Laboratory. "The rocket rose 164 feet, moved laterally 164 feet, and then landed on another pad after a 67-second flight. The flight represents the first step in developing a test bed capability that will allow for landing demonstrations that start at much higher altitudes-several miles above the ground." This navigation technology is laying the groundwork for future exploration of planets, moons, and asteroids.
164 feet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just 1.28 cm more and it would have been 50 meters exactly. What a coincidence. You might almost think they had gone metric.
I see they'll be missing planets again in the future.
DC/X (Delta Clipper) did that first 20 years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
The Delta Clipper (DC/X) performed the very same stunt back in the 90s: Take off and land on its rocket. That was 20 years ago.
The DC/X was a demonstrator of a single-stage-to-orbit project. It promised to bring down the cost of space flight by an order of magnitude and make the Space Shuttle obsolete.
It flew several times, achieving perfect flights, then was given to NASA. They "acccidentally" forgot to connect the hydraulic line that deployed on of the landing struts and the DC/X crashed at its first NASA landing. And oh darn, they couldn't find the couple of millions needed to fix it.
This dangerous competitor to the shuttle was thus killed. The Shuttle program was safe. Whew.
Now that the Shuttle is no more, revolutionary concepts such as DC/X or its Xombie imitation might safely crawl out of the hole in which NASA had thrown them. Maybe.
The first rule of a bureaucracy is self-perpetuation. The fact that a bureaucracy is building space shuttles doesn't change its bureaucratic nature.