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.
> 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.
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).
>once you demonstrate that something is doable (as SpaceX has) It opens the way for other capital to create competitive systems.
In the abstract I agree, but there's zero chance Honda is getting into the orbital launch business. This is a recruiting stunt (and probably to help push for a bailout from Japan), not a real product.
>buy launch services from another vendor... without the baggage of the damage Elon has done
This misjudges what their customers care about.
Can anyone point to a single launch contract cancelled because of "baggage?" Big media would no doubt gleefully shout that story from the hilltops, but I haven't seen it.
>it feels almost prophetic to watch SpaceX's competitors emerge.
Prophesy, but also a healthy dose of wish fulfillment.
All Goliaths eventually fall, but they have an annoying tendency of not doing so on the timelines we might hope for. Just look at Microsoft in the 90s.
"The smart cow problem is the idea that a technically difficult task may only need to be solved once, by one person, for less technically proficient group members to accomplish the task using an easily repeatable method. "
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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?
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.
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.
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.
ChuckMcM|8 months ago
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|8 months ago
The list is longer than that! The earliest hop was probably by McDonnell Douglas in 1993 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_QQDY7PYc8
AnthonyMouse|8 months ago
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.
ChrisMarshallNY|8 months ago
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).
brianpan|8 months ago
BPS.space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH3lR2GLgT0
bigiain|8 months ago
schiffern|8 months ago
Can anyone point to a single launch contract cancelled because of "baggage?" Big media would no doubt gleefully shout that story from the hilltops, but I haven't seen it.
Prophesy, but also a healthy dose of wish fulfillment.All Goliaths eventually fall, but they have an annoying tendency of not doing so on the timelines we might hope for. Just look at Microsoft in the 90s.
maximus-decimus|8 months ago
"The smart cow problem is the idea that a technically difficult task may only need to be solved once, by one person, for less technically proficient group members to accomplish the task using an easily repeatable method. "
panick21_|8 months ago
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.
kortilla|8 months ago
yoko888|8 months ago
[deleted]
mbowcut2|8 months ago
jagged-chisel|8 months ago
gessha|8 months ago
almosthere|8 months ago
bee_rider|8 months ago
LargoLasskhyfv|8 months ago
bozhark|8 months ago
Intermernet|8 months ago
throwaway2037|8 months ago
whitehexagon|8 months ago
But an impressively smooth landing regardless, and I would imagine maybe harder the smaller the rocket is.
perihelions|8 months ago
tw04|8 months ago
From another article.
hnburnsy|8 months ago
voxic11|8 months ago
darrelld|8 months ago
Why is that? Is it due to the nature of chemicals it uses?
nine_k|8 months ago
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.
ggreer|8 months ago
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...
numpad0|8 months ago
fogh1|8 months ago
duxup|8 months ago
djaychela|8 months ago
Aeolun|8 months ago
vFunct|8 months ago
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..
wiseowise|8 months ago
api_or_ipa|8 months ago
feoren|8 months ago
Someone must have run out and grabbed the risers.
CMay|8 months ago
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.
Kye|8 months ago
pavel_lishin|8 months ago
redbell|8 months ago
Also, I believe it would have been a historical moment if they filmed the entire staff watching the event from the control room.
vzaliva|8 months ago
dumdedum123|8 months ago
For the first real hop see Xombie circa 2010.
LargoLasskhyfv|8 months ago
neodypsis|8 months ago
420official|8 months ago