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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

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".

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

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..

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.

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