[rplnt]

I believe same thing was done by NASA in the 70s. So not really big step forward in this particular regard.

edit: Can't find it at the moment. So far I've found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X which did what grasshopper and more almost 20 years back. I still believe I've read something earlier though. Will edit when/if I find it.

[nkoren]

Nope, aside from the Lunar Excursion Module and its simulators, NASA did nothing like this until the 1990s, with the Delta Clipper. And that wasn't really NASA - it was a BMDO project which later got taken over by NASA. (NASA then crashed the Delta Clipper on their first flight with it, and promptly went back to their preferred innovation strategy: very large contracts which result in absolutely nothing).

[JshWright]

>very large contracts which result in absolutely nothing

That's a moderately ironic statement, given the fact that SpaceX wouldn't be doing anything remotely close to what they're doing today without the very large contract they got from NASA.

[nkoren]

Actually, no irony at all here. The large contract that SpaceX (and Orbital Sciences) received were for shipping cargo to the space station -- cash-on-delivery. No delivery, no cash. This is profoundly different from the business-as-usual NASA contract which is: give a contractor a billion dollars. Contractor produces a bunch of powerpoint slides. Give the contractor another billion dollars. Contractor goes a further billion dollars over budget, and produces a bunch of powerpoint slides. Rinse & Repeat.

This is how NASA was able to spend over 30 years and $30B trying and failing to develop a new orbital vehicle, where SpaceX was able to do it for under $400M.

[InclinedPlane]

Without NASA contracts (to be noted: fixed price contracts predicated on delivery of goods, for the most part) SpaceX would have much less cash on hand and their pace of R&D would be much slowed. But they would still exist and still be pushing the state of the art, just at a slightly slower pace. They have one of the most competitive orbital launchers on the market, they have a ton of commercial business already on the docket, and the next 3 SpaceX launches are, in fact, non-NASA commercial flights (a Canadian weather satellite, a commsat for servicing East Asia and Oceania, and several Orbcomm commsats).

[JshWright]

That's essentially what I meant... They'd still be making progress, they just got to make progress much faster thanks to some big contracts from NASA.

[ChuckMcM]

Actually not true, but I suspect if you've been researching this you've discovered that. NASA has of course researched vertical landing techniques from the beginning, both with manned missions (Apollo) and robotic. However, it was "on the list" prior to the great de-funding and generally sat in the 'to be looked at' drawer from then on.

The DC-X program, and others like it were spawned by private industry who were betting on a huge 'single stage to orbit' (or SSTO) model for satellite launches that would be needed for the Reagan 'Star Wars' missile defense program. They died when Star Wars died and NASA briefly assumed control of DC-X when its private backers pulled out but was stretched too thin to give it any real push.

That said, Elon and others will tell you that the current crop of rockets would not be possible without the work that NASA did and has shared. SpaceX also has benefited from computer systems that are 10,000X more powerful than the ones that NASA had available for their use, and materials that are 1/3 to 1/2 the weight and yet stronger than their NASA counterparts. Sensors that are 100x more sensitive and 1/1000th the cost. A six degree of freedom inertial unit was $125,000 in 1970 and resolved differences of .1G. A 9 degree of freedom unit from Sparkfun Electronics [1] is now $125, and reliably resolves 1/4096'th of a G. So I don't doubt that the same engineers at NASA could build what SpaceX is building today, today, but I assure you they didn't have the tools to build it back in the 70's or even in the 90's.

[1] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10736

[schiffern]

>A six degree of freedom inertial unit was $125,000 in 1970 and resolved differences of .1G. A 9 degree of freedom unit from Sparkfun Electronics [1] is now $125, and reliably resolves 1/4096'th of a G.

And the 1970s one weighed a lot more than 3.52 oz!

http://i.imgur.com/nrm2fUb.jpg

[Gravityloss]

That's still peanuts in rocket money and scale.

All these things could have been done earlier if the politics was different.

DC-X used F-15 gyros / guidance with some software tweaks for example.

[ChuckMcM]

So true, so true.

[jerf]

No. It was a stated goal of the Space Shuttle project, but it failed. Had the Space Shuttle been a commercial venture it would have been abandoned decades ago; other than the fact that it generally worked (which, to be clear, is saying something, that's not guaranteed), it was an awful design.

[rplnt]

Can't edit the parent post anymore, indeed I was wrong, but only about the year. The project I've added however is around 20 years old, so I still don't find Grasshopper revolutionary in this one aspect - reusable VTVL rocket.

[smackfu]

Yeah, I was going to mention the DC-X. The video you link below shows what is probably a future grasshopper test, where they take the vehicle off of vertical to show it can really reorient itself.

[derekp7]

Are you referring to that neat trick they pulled a half dozen times, where they landed a rocket on its tail in an airless environment with 1/6 gravity? That was still pretty impressive on a bunch of other levels.

[rplnt]

No, I'm referring to on-earth tests, such as this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o However I can't find the exact one I had in mind, or perhaps I was off with the date.

[EthanHeilman]

[citation needed]