Similar work has been done by Armadillo, but it looks like SpaceX's Grasshopper is a bit bigger than anything Armadillo has done. Will be exciting to see the concept continue to scale up.
1) Take off from the pad.
2) Loss of vehicle control (chute deploys), Loss of engine
3) Engine restart.
4) Attitude recovery after engine restart
5) Return to pad capability.
I had no ideas these guys were that far along.
... with what, like 0.0001% of SpaceX's budget and other resources...?
Maybe SpaceX should hire Armadillo...
Since they have the landing and low speed part pretty much covered, they're now looking at the high speed and altitude problematics.
The Stig lands with a steerable chute.
High speed stability, drag and turning for powered landing are a nasty problem field where testing is hard and expensive. Interplay of aerodynamics in a wide speed range, center of gravity shifts and everything else.
Burt Rutan's SpaceshipOne solved it elegantly with feathering: the descent was safe and easy. The mechanism could be troublesome though.
I wouldn't put too much stock in SpaceshipOne's descent scheme. It's not clear at all that's going to work from orbit.
And for a first stage, returning is not nearly as hard.
At first, the reusable first stage might provide only a modest portion of the delta vee and an expendable second stage would do most of the work. That would mean a low payload.
I don't think the SpaceshipOne solution would work "as is", but something like it might work. It only went vertically to 100 km.
When the Space Shuttle was being designed, Max Faget toyed around with different ideas on how to arrange re-entry, with essentially something similar as SpaceshipOne in a sense: a high drag configuration at high speed and then flying at low speed. http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/shuenara.htm
The space shuttle was a disaster from a cost perspective. I don't know how many lessons we can draw from the program beyond "don't do it this way".
We can draw a lot of lessons from the space shuttle - it was very successful in lifting re-entries. It takes a huge amount of expensive wind tunnel and test time to develop something like this.
Why STS was so expensive must be analyzed more deeply - we definitely can not afford to waste all the lessons learned in that program. I think, in details, it contained many technologies that were not robust and required lots of checking and hand work (people with salaries). This also made it less reliable. Strategically, it was a huge one off program, meaning there was no possibility of iteration and trial and error: feeding information from operations back to improving design. (Cue Gall's law.)
Since development is so expensive (afaik a lot of the testing infrastructure has been driven down), this is also why most space capsules use known-to-work shapes: Vostok, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or Soyuz. Some small capsule designs have even used Corona spysat film return canister shape.
I had no idea he was involved with a project like this, and for so long. Too bad they don't appear to have been very active recently.
- Masten Space Systems: https://www.youtube.com/user/mastenspace
- Unreasonable Rocket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PO5cTb_T5M (Couldn't find a better video now)