Blue Origin Building DC-X Lookalike

rrohbeck writes "The New York Times is running an article on what Blue Origin (Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' space company) is up to after his Texas land grab. A couple of Flash videos show a short successful test hop of the 'Goddard' test vehicle. From the article: 'The Goddard has a science-fiction sleekness. Videos show the craft taking off and landing again with a loud whooshing sound. In one view, one of the nine rocket nozzles jitters as it maintains the ship's attitude. Goddard resembles the DC-X, another vertical-takeoff-and-landing craft under development in the 1990s by McDonnell Douglas for the Defense Department and NASA until the government pulled the plug.' And in case you're an aerospace engineer, they're hiring."

that's better

[macadamia_harold]

Videos show the craft taking off and landing again with a loud whooshing sound.

I suppose that's better than taking off and landing again with a crashing sound.

Re:

[Thansal]

very true.

The device just does not look like it should work the way it does. Sure, the take off looks normal, put at the apex it looks like it should flip over and come down nose first!

I don't have any sound on this computer so I have a hard time telling, are they ussing some sortta propulssion in the entire flight (something to keep them stable?).

Re:

[fifedrum]

the thrust is applied throughout the flight, the sound is pretty interesting, wooshing like too much air coming out of a too small nozzle. They don't coast during this test flight at all, it seems, if the sound indicates relative thrust, it's pretty constant, with maybe a few % reduction throughout the flight and a small increase at the end.

the nozzles adjust during the flight to maintain attitude, I believe the DCx did the same thing. IIRC the DCx also had a series of manuvering thrusters spaced around the

Re:

[reklusband]

Well, even a crash landing would be better than...Take off BOOM, or coming in for a landing BOOM... So no matter what they do they've got a 50% chance of being better off than NASA.

Re:

[Rei]

You know what? Every time I get out of bed, I don't explode. I guess this makes me 100% better than NASA.

What's that? I'm comparing apples and oranges by comparing "getting out of bed" with "getting many tonnes of payload to a low-earth orbit"? You don't say...

Re:

[Rei]

My mistake. All rockets are the same. Silly me. So, given that I'm almost always successful when launching bottle rockets...

It made me think of...

[d3m0nCr4t]

Douglas Adams: "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." :D

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeff Bezos finally gave the world a peek at his rocket.

Bezos sex tape?

slow on the uptake

[neurostar]

Wow, slashdot is kinda slow on the uptake. I read about this a few days ago [pythom.com].

Re:

[Bucc5062]

Actually, slashdot is true toform and dup'ing the news. This http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/0 3/2344241 [slashdot.org] was posted on Jan 3. Even repeated it is a cool story.

Re:slow on the uptake

[Thansal]

well, it is a dupe (and hey, the /. story is actualy earlier then the pythom one):
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/0 3/2344241 [slashdot.org]

Quick, somebody call Mork;

[The_REAL_DZA]

I think we've found his egg!

Makes sense

[tsotha]

DC-X was a very successful program. It had many successful flights until the Air Force turned it over to NASA and NASA crashed it on the first flight. Then they cancelled it.

Re:Makes sense

[Richard_at_work]

NASA flew the DC-X four times, with it being lost on the fourth flight. The US Airforce programme damanged the DC-X on its last flight with them and refused to spend funds on repairs, which was why NASA stepped in - they offered the funding to repair the vehicle and resume testing.

Dang, what am I still doing QA work for?

[StefanJ]

I AM a rocket [comcast.net] scientist [comcast.net]!

Well, actually, seriously, I'd hate to get a job at one of these places and then end up finding it tedious and hating it, the way I end up hating everything once I get into Type-A workaholic mode.

A little optomistic

[Silver Sloth]

From TFA

That craft, as the site says, will be "designed to take a small number of astronauts on a suborbital journey into space." The pace is deliberate, with commercial trips starting as early as 2010

285 ft today, commercial sub orbital space in three years time. That doesn't sound like a deliberate pace, it sounds a bit rushed to me.

Re:

[mianne]

285 ft today, commercial sub orbital space in three years time. That doesn't sound like a deliberate pace, it sounds a bit rushed to me.

Three years was once a considerable amount of time when it came to rocket science [wikipedia.org].

Re:A little optomistic

[camperdave]

Taking off and landing safely are the two biggest obstacles to suborbital flight. They seem to be doing those two well enough. The only remaining obstacle seems to be altitude, which is simply a matter of working out the payload/fuel constraints. The Scaled Composites team took only three years from start of development to taking the X-Prize. 2010 is not an unreasonable goal for going from fully functional testbed to production vehicle.

Would $100billion help?

[cheekyboy]

Look if these guys can do this under say $1billion, then why is nasa wasting 10s of billions or why is the navy/govt wasting 100s of billions in iraq!!!

Seams like even 5% of the military spending could yield close to star trek technology, ie. 100 space ships with crews of 1000s, and 5 space stations.

Re:

[FleaPlus]

285 ft today, commercial sub orbital space in three years time. That doesn't sound like a deliberate pace, it sounds a bit rushed to me.

As another commenter mentioned, taking off and landing (which they've just demonstrated) are the most difficult parts of a launch. Additionally, SpaceShipOne went from starting full development in 2001, to their first test flight in 2003, to their first suborbital flight in 2004.

They're hiring?

[Overzeetop]

That looks like fun. Too bad I'm on the wrong coast and don't want to move. 9 years with NASA designing and building flight hardware, 6 in industry, MS in structures plus courses in Space Veh Prop, Guidance and Nav, and have owned my own 4 person SE firm for 4 years. GD&T and Pro/E is probably a hair on the rusty side, but it's like riding a bike. Built my own small-scale solid fuel rocket engines.

I wonder what they pay?

Re:

[kfg]

I wonder what they pay?

Money.

KFG

Re:

[kfg]

I'll have you know that "dollars" are completely supported by futures in unsecured bad debt; the most sophisticated financial instrument yet devised by man.

KFG

Re:

[Forbman]

free shipping on Amazon.com orders over $14.92

Re:

[Gramie2]

So you don't want a job with them and it's entirely irrelevant, but you felt like telling us why you are such a hardware stud. Thanks for sharing.

Re:

[Overzeetop]

Yeah, I'm in that kind of mood today.

C'mon - when I was in college we used to joke that there was a senior aero course called "Advanced Unemployment Line Mechanics." It's not often a company likely to do cool things happens to fit my background. Let me crow a little. Ignore me if you like. Eveybody else does.

Re:

[Gramie2]

Then apply to that company. Call them up and see if what they are doing fits what you are doing. Just offer to take their engineers out for a beer when they're in town, because you know their pain and they know yours.

But the feigned insouciance: "oh, I'm not interested..." seems a bit prima donna-ish

Re:

[Overzeetop]

Actually, I am interested in what it would be like 'cause it does sound cool, but it turns out I really don't have a desire to move to the west coast. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.

We all have our moments...yesterday I had mine.

Re:

[Media Withdrawal]

But the feigned insouciance: "oh, I'm not interested..." seems a bit prima donna-ish

Boy did you ever hit the nail on the head! The bane of any rocket company's existence is prima donna rocket scientists. You must never hire these guys, they'll sink your program and they're everywhere. Space attracts that personality type. I worked at a rocket company once, and we had 4 prima donna engineers each presenting their own redundant, slightly different designs as the "final" design to the customer. They routin

Who needs spaceships?

[Non-CleverNickName]

I, for one, will just wait for Willy Wonka to finish the Phase III testing of his fizzy lifting drinks [virginia.edu]

Re:

[sentientbeing]

Coke and Mentos works equally well as a propellant.

The tricky part is dealing with the ants and wasps on the launchpad..

Re:

[Moofie]

Hmm. Most insects don't seem to care too much about NutraSweet, and diet soda is the preferred working fluid.

Not like DC-X

[J05H]

The Blue Origin's vehicle isn't anything like DC-X, except that they are both VTVL. The Goddard/New Shepard vehicles are axisymetric, base-first reentry and use hydrogen peroxide/kerosene. DC-X (and follow-ons) were biconic, used a side-first reentry with body flaps and were LOX/LH2 powered. Very different machines, both these test vehicles and any further versions. DC-X was based on the classified AMARV test article, the Goddard is more like the old "mega capsule" heavy lift concepts from the 60's and 70's, such as Boeing's LEO.

All the best to Bezos and Blue Origin! The flight video is excellent!

Josh

Re:

[Rei]

Apparently you've forgotten that you're on Slashdot, where:

1) A minimally suborbital vehicle is only a hop, skip, and a jump from being an orbital vehicle.
2) A heavy, low ISP vehicle without a TPS is a stepping stone (or even "an upper stage") to an orbital craft.
3) A rocket that carries a few hundred kg up 100 km is somehow something new, and is somehow a significant force to advancing rocketry technology, simply because the payload is humans instead of sounding rocket insturmentation.
4) If two spacecraft

Re:

['nother poster]

1) I don't think anyone said it was.

2) H2O2/Kerosene isn't LOX/LH2, but at an ISP of 319 in vacuum (273 at sea level) it's no slouch and can be handled and stored much easier. (no cryogenic storage needed)

3) Yep, it is. This and the other X Prize ships are made on shoestring budgets and are getting experimental "manned" ratings. I assume you understand what that means, but are ignoring it.

4) Nobody said they were alike beyond looks. You didn't, the grandparent didn't, and rrohbeck, the submitter, didn't

Re:

[Rei]

1) People *always* say that on rocketry forums on Slashdot. It's a tradition.

2) Stored much easier? Apparently you've never dealt with high-test peroxide. It's not like the stuff you find in your medicine cabinet. Ask the crews of the Sidon and the Kursk what they think of this "easy" to store material.

3) Okay, lets pick one -- SS1. Budget ~25 million. Payload -- ~300kg to 100km. Per-launch cost undisclosed, but believed to be about half a million dollars. Lets compare this to, say, the SR-S soundi

Can't get to orbit that way

[Animats]

It looks impressive, but you can't get to orbit that way.

Single stage to orbit craft have to be somewhere above 97% fuel, with the best chemical fuels possible. People have tried to build SSTO craft, Rotary Rocket being a good example, but when your weight budget is that tight, it's next to impossible, and even if it works, the payloads are dinky.

Two stages work. The Shuttle is two stages; the solid boosters and the external tank are dropped off. To get to orbit on chemical fuels and have any useful payload, you have to dump some mass during lift. Even with two stages, the weight reduction efforts result in fragile spacecraft.

Now if we had nuclear rockets, we could get somewhere.

Re:

[jandrese]

Of all of the possible uses of Nuclear power, using it to power a rocket out of the atmosphere is perhaps the last one I'd want to see actually implemented. It is hard to think of a better way of spreading radioactive particles all over a huge landscape, not to mention what happens when you crash.

Re:

[Artifakt]

I think the parent poster was referring to an Orion-like design, which would produce substantial fallout. Some Nuclear lift rocket designs don't spray radiation out the back. Some designs heat external air as a working fluid, some heat H2, water or some other carried mass, some (ion drives) toss electrons, which can be beta particles produced directly in a reaction, or otherwise, but are low acceleration devices (at least for the current generation).
Unless we get invaded by the

Re:

[Cerebus]

Read this if you haven't already:

http://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-S paceship/dp/0805059857 [amazon.com]

Very interesting book. One of the interesting tidbits was they figured out that an Orion burning out of *orbit* would result in significant fallout at ground level--enough so that they could estimate the additional number of cancer deaths--and this was one reason among many why the thing never got built. To be safe to Earth-bound life, Orion would have be launched from the Moon (how to build one *on*

Re:

[jandrese]

The problem is that the ISP from "use nuclear reactions to heat up some other fuel" tends to be too low to be useful. It's a lot easier/safer/cheaper/lighter to just use a reactant that expands on its own (conventional rocket fuel). That's why I specified ground-to-orbit in my post. Once you're in space there are a lot of uses for nuclear propulsion that actually make sense (Nuclear powered Ion drives for instance), but for getting out of the atmosphere you're options are a lot more limited.

Re:

[inviolet]

Of all of the possible uses of Nuclear power, using it to power a rocket out of the atmosphere is perhaps the last one I'd want to see actually implemented. It is hard to think of a better way of spreading radioactive particles all over a huge landscape, not to mention what happens when you crash.

Yes, what a disaster that would be -- we would get trace amounts of radioactive particles on the Earth's surface! Oh teh noes!!!11!

Been down in any good basements lately? :P

But seriously, spreading radioactivit

Re:Can't get to orbit that way

[FleaPlus]

Of all of the possible uses of Nuclear power, using it to power a rocket out of the atmosphere is perhaps the last one I'd want to see actually implemented. It is hard to think of a better way of spreading radioactive particles all over a huge landscape, not to mention what happens when you crash.

I'm sure it'd be trivial compared to the spread of radioactive particles from coal power plants.

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html [ornl.gov]

Re:

[dthx1138]

Uhhh.... no.

Assuming we're talking about the Nuclear Salt Water Rocket [wikipedia.org], the engine literally ejects the contaminated fuel out the exhaust nozzle. From the wiki on Nuclear Thermal Rocket [wikipedia.org]:

An alternative liquid-core design, the nuclear salt-water rocket has been proposed by Robert Zubrin. In this design, the working fluid is water, which serves as neutron moderator as well. The nuclear fuel is not retained, drastically simplifying the design. However, by its very design, the rocket would discharge massiv

Re:

[waveclaw]

Of all of the possible uses of Nuclear power, using it to power a rocket out of the atmosphere is perhaps the last one I'd want to see actually implemented.

Let's see:

1. Throium [earthlink.net] Nuclear reactor to make the hot parts safer than your car's gasoline engine.
2. Hydrogen as the reaction mass (yes, you still need reaction mass) so no secondary active radionuclides get made.
3. ????
4. Orbit?

Don't skimp on that hyrdogen, though. The difference between a clean single-to-orbit nuclear spacecraft and a planet-sterilizing cruise [popularmechanics.com]

Re:

[Cassini2]

Now if we had nuclear rockets, we could get somewhere.

Would we get there in one piece?

Re:

[Moofie]

Sure! And we wouldn't even need flashlights when we get there!

Re:

[Rei]

Space Shuttle is a bit harder to classify into stages, but I'd list it as "2 1/2". The first stage (SRBs) and second stage (SSMEs fuelled by the ET) burn at the same time. The SRBs jetisson relatively early. The ET remains with it almost all of the way, but not quite. The shuttle ditches it (often using the OMS to help deorbit it), and then uses the OMS to get to their final altitude.

The shuttle could take the ET all the way to LEO, which would make it a true 2-stage rocket, but it could carry little pa

Re:

[mikeee]

It could be the top stage of a two-stage SSTO, though.

Re:

['nother poster]

Um, ah?!?! SSTO is Single Stage To Orbit. You can't have a "two stage" single stage rocket.

Re:

[powerlord]

I think you may be on to something. All of the people here keep talking about how you can't get to orbit ... if you start on the ground.

This things seems to have really good handling, and is probably has less Kinetic energy than most other Launch Vehicles. What if you launched it/recovered it off a stable suborbital platform (say a structure suspended between to dirigibles? (although I suppose that would make this a second stage) ... Or recovered it through the use of a deployed parachute and a ground la

Re:

[Moofie]

"what makes people think all the answers are going to be what we are used to?"

Dunno. What makes you think that the people who are thinking about this problem think all the answers are going to be what you think some people are used to?

Re:

[powerlord]

Good point. I stand corrected. I'm just tired of people saying "that can't be done", because they haven't thought of a way to do. :)

Re:

[Moofie]

The bottom line is, altitude doesn't really matter that much. The "kinetic energy" you mention is the killer. There is a big, big difference between a sub-orbital shot to a certain altitude, and orbiting at that altitude. All the notions about flying launch platforms only address the altitude problem, not the kinetic energy one.

Rocket science is kinda funny. It's governed by a fairly straightforward set of equations, and until there's some sort of radical change in the way we accelerate reaction mass, t

Re:

[powerlord]

But isn't part of the equation the air resistance that the vehicle has to move through, so wouldn't launching at a higher latitude help minimize that?
(Of course I bet this is probably negligible relative to the whole equation so I can see where the reduced atmosphere wouldn't make a difference :) )

I was grouchy over VentureStar getting canned also, thats why I'm somewhat optimistic about this. :)

This seems like a Corporate take on a similar approach:

Step 1) Build a test vehicle X

Re:

[Moofie]

"But isn't part of the equation the air resistance that the vehicle has to move through"

That's not accounted for in the simple statement of "The Rocket Equation", but you're absolutely right: Atmospheric drag is significant. Getting out of the atmosphere is a good idea, and that's why SpaceShip 2 and Pegasus and all those systems use an air-breathing carrier aircraft as a first stage.

That's not a bad idea, by any means, but it's not a panacea. (Few things are.) My off-the-cuff guess would be that a zepp

Re:

[Jonathan_S]

was grouchy over VentureStar getting canned also, thats why I'm somewhat optimistic about this. :)

That's ok, I'm grouchy that VentureStar got the DC-Y canned. (Which actually sounds like you might have been thinking of)

The DC-X -> DC-Y -> Delta Clipper was exactly the kind of evolving path you described as making sense. And the DC-X part was already built and doing flight testing.

But NASA picked the super hi-tech, long shot, all or nothing choice of Lockheed's VentureStar over McDonald Douglas's De

Re:

[Moofie]

"two-stage SSTO"

You're going to need to run that by me again. A two-stage, single stage to orbit rocket? Pretty sure that you've run into a little glitch in your acronym parser there, buddy.

Re:

[mikeee]

er, so I did. Let me rephrase:

Yes, but you could put something much like this rocket as a second stage on top of a big dumb booster and maybe get to orbit that way.

Re:

[Moofie]

Now you're talkin'. : )

Re:

[rbanffy]

I wouldn't want to go through the nightmare of approvals required to fly a fission-thermal rocket.

I hope someday we could build a fusion-thermal engine. That would make a very interesting SSTO vehicle. Imagine re-entry without need for atmospheric braking.

In the meantime, I still expect somehow Brukhard Heim's ideas to bring some interesting ideas for propulsion once we reach LEO.

What could be sweeter than that?

Re:Can't get to orbit that way

[rrohbeck]

Jerry Pournelle has some data [jerrypournelle.com] that make it sound feasible.
A mass ratio of 17 (5.9% payload) with RL-10 engines [wikipedia.org] doesn't sound too bad for a start.

Re:

[powerlord]

Thanks interesting article.

The really interesting part was where he talked about building a 'near orbital' SSTO craft as a testbed and learning tool for a true SSTO craft.

Comparing that to the Blue Origin craft, makes me wonder if they aren't aiming for true SSTO while using sub-orbital space tourism as a way of defraying the development costs (perhaps with suborbital travel as a future business plan?).

Re:

[nuckfuts]

They're not trying to get into orbit. If you had bothered to RTFA, it states that the craft is "designed to take a small number of astronauts on a suborbital journey into space".

Blue Origin Design

[amightywind]

Powered ascent and descent results in a craft that is 4 times more massive than one that would reach the same altitude but land using a ballistic reentry and a parachute. You would not see Burt Rutan embrace an inefficient design like that.

Re:

[UtilityFog]

It's not that simple. The basic design of the SSTO as a cone-shaped capsule uses ballistic re-entry. The powered landing needs only the delta-V of terminal velocity, not orbital. We're talking on the order of 100 m/s instead of 8000 (probably more like 10k if you account for air resistance on the way up).

good backgrounder: Harry Stine's Halfway to Anywhere.

Re:

[FleaPlus]

Powered ascent and descent results in a craft that is 4 times more massive than one that would reach the same altitude but land using a ballistic reentry and a parachute. You would not see Burt Rutan embrace an inefficient design like that.

Keep in mind that cost-effectiveness is the goal, not efficiency. Many slashdotters seem to get the two confused with each other. Considering that your main cost is paying employees, which method results in fewer employees to pay? If you use a ballistic landing it tends t

Re:

[amightywind]

If you use a ballistic landing it tends to be a much harder landing, so you have to spend more on quality control to ensure that your craft is still structurally ok after each landing.

Parachutes and skids are chosen for spacecraft because they are light and reliable. A stall landing of a craft with a square chute on skids is pretty benign. The DC-X experience (explosion) shows that high thrust landings on retractable legs is a needlessly unreliable and unsafe.

Re:

[FleaPlus]

The impression I get is that the failure modes are worse for a controlled landing, but for a "normal" landing a parachute can only slow you down to some minimum velocity, while a powered landing can touch down at an arbitrarily small velocity. This is particularly critical if you want to fly your craft on a daily basis, like Blue Origin probably wants to do.

Also important for a repeated-flight company like Blue Origin is that a powered landing can touch down at a particular location, while a parachute landi

Re:

[Moofie]

"but I also suspect that it can be tricky to properly and safely load a parachute of that size."

It may be tricky, but the math of carrying all that propellant with you is pretty darn inflexible. I've done that math, and I don't know how Blue Origin (and/or Rotary Rocket and/or Armadillo) plans on making it work.

I'm very, very eager to find out. : )

Re:

[Media Withdrawal]

Powered ascent and descent results in a craft that is 4 times more massive...

Than what? What alternative are you suggesting for POWERED ASCENT? A giant cannon? Some sort of sky-hook?

As for descent, keep in mind that even the expendable Soyuz re-entry capsules have landing rockets. If you want a parachute system to be re-usable, you would need either landing gear or a structure and re-entry shield built strong and leak-proof enough to take repeated water landings. That adds mass, too. Parachutes are not

Blue Origin Design Confusion

[amightywind]

Than what? What alternative are you suggesting for POWERED ASCENT? A giant cannon? Some sort of sky-hook?

Jackass. If you purposely misread a simple sentence I can't help you much.

As for descent, keep in mind that even the expendable Soyuz re-entry capsules have landing rockets.

Keep in mind that a Soyuz descends under parachute and uses the rocket firing briefly before impact to reduce landing shock. They have nothing to do with the rest of the descent. They stand in place of a landing bag.

If you wan

Re:

[Media Withdrawal]

Heh, you really crack me up. OK, I'll integrate that equation. It's great for parachutes. Perfectly accurate...

(wait for it...)

...on the Moon!

DC-X?

[locokamil]

Like a development of the DC-8?

If I didn't know better, I'd think they were planning on launching a "new and improved" scientology [wikipedia.org].

In case you're an aerospace engineer

[iamlucky13]

Correction: In case you're a highly experience aerospace engineer.

I already checked. They don't seem to be doing a Google style "young talent" hiring search or accepting those with marginally-related experience. If you look through the jobs page, they're generally asking for 10 years experience with some very specific skills (like direct experience with RS-68's or RL-10's). Your chances probably aren't very good if you're looking to break into aerospace, even with an advanced degree. *sigh*

With good reason, I'd wager. I would attribute a large part of SpaceX's rapid pace of development of the Merlin engines to having recruited the same kind of talent directly off of Lockheed and Boeing. They didn't have to figure out many of the details of how to build a working rocket because they people they hired had already built them.

This is probably critical for Blue Origin. Space.com's reported that their current test vehicle is powered by catalytically decomposed hydrogen peroxide. If they're going to achieve the payload and altitude they want, suborbital though it may be, I doubt they're going to get there without a bipropellant; fuel + oxidizer. Just switching to H2O2 + kerosene would double the theoretical specific impulse, or energy they can get per mass of fuel. On the downside, burning a bi-propellant increases the complexity of the engine significantly and complicates throttling, and if they're planning on using turbopumps instead of a pressure-fed system (a scheme their jobs page supports), it gets even more complicated.

Next up for Blue Origin

[sokoban]

Building DC-9 Lookalikes, but with rocket engines in order to transport Thetans to Teegeeack in clusters (packaged by the thousands together), and thereafter drop them in two volcanic areas, one of which is Las Palmas, and the other Hawaii.

(The preceding joke is based upon the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, which make up a core belief in Scientology (OT III, Incident 2))

Testing VTL control...

[bodland]

Vertical Take off and landing. Notice the lack of heat, that is simple escaping gas, notice the lake of "smoke" or product of a oxygen reaction, the liquid and frost?...Some compressed gas propellent in the form of pressurized liquid was used to propel this "pod". Probably a test of the computer controls required to do a vertical landing.

The pod will probably be deployed atop a conventional rocket to shoot tourists into low earth orbit, take some snaps, puke in zero G then fall to earth, chute deploys th

Re:

[rrohbeck]

I read somewhere (can't remember where) that they're using H2O2 monopropellant for the demo and will use H2O2/kerosene for the real thing. That's why you only see steam in the demo.

Re:

[DerekLyons]

Vertical Take off and landing. Notice the lack of heat, that is simple escaping gas, notice the lake of "smoke" or product of a oxygen reaction, the liquid and frost?...Some compressed gas propellent in the form of pressurized liquid was used to propel this "pod". Probably a test of the computer controls required to do a vertical landing.

The pod will probably be deployed atop a conventional rocket to shoot tourists into low earth orbit, take some snaps, puke in zero G then fall to earth, chute deplo

Scifi

[chord.wav]

The Goddard has a science-fiction sleekness

Damn right! The only thing missing from that pick are Tatooine's 2 suns and Luke kicking a rock right next to it.

Re:

[chord.wav]

pick = pic as in picture

My favortite part of the video...

[Anonymous Coward]

"10... 9... 8... 7,6..5... 4...... 3, 2... 1"

H2O2 Rocket (s)?

[Paracelcus]

Sure did look like steam coming out of those engines, I thought that hydrogen peroxide just didn't have enough energy for a practical launch vehicle??

Did they read Fallen Angels?

[ibirman]

This ship sounds suspiciously like the Phoenix from Larry Niven's Fallen Angels. Here is a passage from the book describing it:

Phoenix stood in the center of the enormous room. It looked like a giant ice cream cone, sixty feet high, standing on its big end. At the slightly rounded base it was half as big across as it was high. It stood alone, with no scaffolding around it.

The book is available online from the Baen Free Library at: http://www.baen.com/library/ [baen.com]

Re:

[rrohbeck]

This ship sounds suspiciously like the Phoenix from Larry Niven's Fallen Angels.

No surprise. Larry Niven is part of the Citizen's Advisory Council [google.com], who pushed for DC-X style VTVL for a long time. See here [jerrypournelle.com].