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Comment by whitehexagon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> It's much smaller than other suborbital hop vehicles.

You likely weren't being exhaustive in your listing, but I first started watching aerospace development with Armadillo Aerospace, and some of their rockets were much smaller. Their largest one was still shorter than the dc-x.

http://www.astronautix.com/q/quad.html

Electron is an 18m orbital delivery rocket (14.5m+payload without the optional third stage).

Japan holds the record for the smallest rocket to reach orbit with the SS-520, which put a cubesat into orbit in 2018.

Its dimensions according to Wikipedia:

Height – 31 feet (9.54 meters)

Weight – 2.9 tons (2.6 metric tons)

Diameter – 20 inches (52 centimeters)

Payload to Low-Earth Orbit – ~9 lbs (4 kg)

I believe they can do 140kg to 800km, but #5 was only 4kg to a 180km x 1800km orbit..

It’s harder to land shorter vehicles. If you can land a short one the taller ones are easier.

There's a hobbyist ~1m orbital hop vehicle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH3lR2GLgT0

Pretty sure that, or some other hobbyist project, is going to take the prize for "smallest".

The important thing about Starhopper was that it had a Raptor engine. And the Falcon 1 had a Merlin engine. They were testing with the engines they intended to put into orbit. Blue Origin are also going with orbital class engines.

I doubt that this rocket has an engine intended for orbit? So it makes me wonder how serious this program is.

> successfully landed its 6.3-metre (20.6-foot) experimental reusable launch vehicle

From another article.

Or in natural units: three very tall men stood on top of one another, wearing a top hat.

It's not a rocket, but three men in a trench coat?

How many bananas?

And under the French cost is an African swallow.

Oh jeez, how many football fields is that?

Let’s see. 2 cm of grass on top of, say, 10 cm of earth would make the height of a football field 12cm. That would make it as high as about 50 football fields.

Are all three men wearing individual top hats, or does one cover all of them?

About the height of a giraffe

there are giraffes that are 6m tall?!?

It is said that many males exceed 5.5 m in height.

A record height for a giraffe in a UK zoo was 5.8 m, but the tip of his horns was said to have reached close to 6.1 m.

So 6 m is about in this ballpark.

>6.3 m in length, 85 cm in diameter, 900 kg dry weight/1,312 kg wet weight

That's just a tad longer than a north-american SUV (Escalade, Navigator) standing on it's back. Accurate to say it's a car-sized rocket.

I'm a bit confused, most cars aren't more than 3m in length. This rocket is 6.3m.

Or are there really SUVs which are > 6m in length?

the mentioned suvs are 5.7m and 5.6m long, respectively

wow, and I thought F350s were big

Huh? Even in Europe most cars are longer than 4m (a VW Golf is 4.28m for example).

Current gen Prius is about 4.5m in length, 1.8m in width, 1.5m in height. "Slightly under 5 x 2 x 1.5m" has been the standard size of a sedan for past few decades.

Its like half the size of a Trident missile.

Which inexplicably isn't know for soft landings

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