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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

This is so epically awesome that I feel like we orbited a human for the first time or something. Bezos whining aside, its a huge deal to return 9 engines from a workhorse booster back to the pad to be refurbed and re-used. If the $5M each costs are correct, that is $45M in cost savings right there.

But perhaps more importantly its the first "first" for SpaceX which has not been done by NASA or anyone else. Launch a payload in to orbit and recover the booster back to the launch site. The SRBs from the shuttle were essentially shell refurbs, SpaceShip 1 and Blue Origin sub-orbital hops. This was, in my estimation, the real deal. It has to be an amazing feeling being on the team that made this possible. Congratulations, that is one way to write yourself into the history books.

Edit: I was so excited I couldn't even multiply 9 by 5!

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The whole Bezos/BlueOrigin thing is kind of sad. They are nowhere near a "club" with SpaceX.

One of the huge differences (and there are many) is that Falcon 9 was doing 6,000 Km/hr (~4,000 mi/hr) when the first stage separated and turned around to come back.

The path was not straight up, but rather one to launch the second stage into orbital flight (which reached 26,000 Km/hr and 600 miles of altitude).

Then Falcon9's first stage FLEW a curved return path; fired three engines to slow down from holy-crap miles-per-hour, shut them down and then, at exactly the right moment in time, fired one engine to land.

The Bezos rocket went straight up to zero velocity and came straight back down.

It's like throwing a bottle straight up in the air compared to throwing one in a parabolic path to the top of the Empire State building and having that bottle then turn around, fly that same parabolic path to return and land at your feet.

Not sure why Bezos feels the need to try to imply his effort (which IS significant) is on the same league as SpaceX other than to potentially try to leverage the fabricated parity for publicity and external funding.

Not only this, but the spacex grasshopper test was the first that I saw that had the rocket do a vertical takeoff, and then land.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZDkItO-0a4

get a load of this: https://youtu.be/wv9n9Casp1o?t=2m11s

1995, DC-X, and it's pyramidal

Yeah, I still have a newspaper clipping on my wall from Aug 21st, 1993 (San Jose Mercury News) showing it in the take off, hover, and landing stages. I really wanted to work on it then too!

TIL that the DCX was canceled by Nasa not for technical reasons - looks more like politics. The program was 21 months old and cost $60M.

Is that correct? Amazing that this was achievable 20 years ago. Why no other re-usable rocket since 1996 if this was doable?

   > Why no other re-usable rocket since 1996 if this 
   > was doable?

Economics, technology, motivation. All were in short supply in the 90's. One of my favorites was Rotary Rocket. It made great strides but didn't have the right team to get it into production.

You should read one of Jerry Pournelle's rants on the subject. There was a lot of bitterness from people who supported the program.

The problem with SSTOs, in general is that while getting them to take off and land isn't a big hurdle, getting them into orbit with more than a nontrivial payload is pretty difficult.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/SSX.html

It's a concept with its supporters, but there's a pretty large program risk - the numbers are so tight you may get to the end of your development and realize your rocket works but can take only, you know, 25 pounds of payload to LEO. Or maybe a few tons. Or maybe you can't get to orbit at all.

SpaceX's plan to land each stage individually probably makes a lot more sense from the risk perspective.

This has been done a dozen times, from DC-X to JAXA's RTV to Armadillo's Stig. What makes the SpaceX effort different is it's part of a practical launch system and not an SSTO concept prototype like the others.

Bezos and Musk should NOT be on twitter for their sake. Imagine for a few decades no one tells you "no" or "you're wrong" and you have thousands of peons to kick around. Megalomania is 100% going to happen. Best just contain that behind closed doors.

I think it's great how Elon uses Twitter. It's better than him being a shadowy figure shrouded in mystery. Remember, he's doing this primarily for the passion, not money, and he wants to inspire others to join him. You don't do that by being a Mr ??? sat in the background.

Have you beenin twitter? There's plenty of people there, ready not only to tell you that you're wrong, but explain why and how in great excruciating detail

The only thing that can be explained on Twitter in excruciating detail is its obnoxiously short character limit resulting in no possibili

> excruciating detail

Sure in 140 characters.

Eh - I think a good bit of it is entertainment for public consumption. Competition keeps people interested. It's pretty neat how we've gone from two superpowers duking it out in a cold war to two rich dudes exchanging barbs on twitter.

I am of the opinion that I don't give a damn, what both are doing is incredibly complex and from a nerd/geek perspective very cool. If there is some rivalry then so be it, but damn they are both working to make space accessible and for that we need to cheer them both on.

Still Elon is more geeky, technical, coder, not-care about money than Jeff is.

Question: if what Bezos did was just launching straight up and then landing, why is it any better than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwS4YOTbbw

when SpaceX launched 1000m and landed? Just because it was higher? It seems like SpaceX has Bezos beat on both sides - they launched and landed a rocket before Bezos, and now theyve launched and landed a rocket higher than Bezos. So all Bezos did was launch his rocket higher than SpaceX's at the time. Is that right?

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