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Comment by emkoemko | Hacker News Reader

didn't the NASA have a rocket doing these type of manoeuvres multiple times a day? in like the early 90's?

It was the Delta Clipper (DC-X) [0] and that was actually like the SpaceX, grasshopper. It stayed upright, translated hovered and came back to land.

Starship has flaps, a low terminal velocity belly flop maneuver, and then a rotation up to landing only a few hundred meters up. They definitely build on each other, but this is more impressive.

0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

Here's flight 8 from 1995. Up, translate, suicide burn, stuck the landing.

I feel we missed a serious opportunity with DC-X.

Thunderf00t recently made fun of SpaceX for failing to do what DC-X did in 1995, but he ignored the fuel savings of the belly flop followed by a brief burn. Doing it fuel efficiently is critical to practical reuse.

Thunderf00t attacks any kind of progress. He nitpicks things that aren't important and ignores things that are important.

The slightly mirrored fresnel lens of the internet.

My take is if someone is doing this, they are complaining about the overall lack of progress from an ancient achievement till now. They aren't wrong usually, but our flawed system doesn't make progress in that way.

That sounds pretty neat; I'd love to read more about it if you recall the name.

The shuttle technically does a flop (it flies backward in orbit) and comes down via active control w/ aerodynamic surfaces. Not sure if that what poster means tho.

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