Is this a precursor to a viable alternative to any of SpaceX products?
replies(3):
reaching an altitude of 300 meters
...but this isn't one of them, yet
If you know that something can be done, and there is a potential market for such a project, it then becomes easier to get the funding. Chicken or the egg...
One thing we also need to point out, is that SpaceX uses like 80% of their yearly launches, for their own communication / sat service. This gave a incentive for that investment.
Is the same reason why, despite SpaceX throwing those things up constantly, there really is a big lag of competitors with reusable rockets. Its not that they where / not able to quickly get the same tech going. They simply have less market, vs what SpaceX does non-stop. So the investments are less, what in time means less fast development.
SpaceX is a bit of a strange company, partially because they used a lot of the public funds to just throw shit at the wall, and see what sticks. This resulted in them caring less if a few rockets blew up, as long as they got the data for the next one with less flaws. It becomes harder when there is more oversight of that money, or risk averse investors. Then you really want to be sure that thing goes up and come back down into one piece from the first go.
A lot of projects funding are heavily based upon the first or second try of something, and then (sometimes unwisely) funding is pulled if it was not a perfect success story.
so now the main problem is building the hardware, there are a lot of solutions for the software part.
Before there were no general-purpose simulators, and barely usable computers (2 MHz computer with 2 KB of memory...), so all you could do was hardcoding the path and use rather constrained algorithms.
The Space Shuttle was wrong in so many ways, not least that it was a "pickup truck" as opposed to a dedicated manned vehicle (with appropriate safety features) or a dedicated cargo vehicle. Because they couldn't do unmanned tests they were stuck with the barely reusable thermal tiles and couldn't replace them with something easier to reuse (or safer!)
Attempts at second generation reusable vehicles failed because rather than "solving reuse" they were all about single-stage to orbit (SSTO) [2] and aerospike engines and exotic composite materials that burned up the money/complexity/risk/technology budgets.
There was a report that came out towards the end of the SDI [3] phase that pointed out the path that SpaceX followed with Dragon 9 where you could make rather ordinary rockets and reuse the first stage but expend the second because the first stage is most of the expense. They thought psychology and politics would preclude that and that people would be seduced by SSTO, aerospikes, composites, etc.
Funny though out of all the design studies NASA did for the Shuttle and for heavy lift vehicles inspired by the O'Neill colony idea, there was a sketch of a "fly back booster" based on the Saturn V that would have basically been "Super Heavy" that was considered in 1979 that, retrospectively, could have given us Starship by 1990 or so. But no, we were committed to the Space Shuttle because boy the Soviet Union was intimidated by our willingness and ability to spend on senseless boondoggles!
[1] The first few times the shuttle went up they were afraid the tiles would get damaged and something like the Columbia accident would happen, they made some minor changes to get them to stick better and stopped worrying, at least in public. It took 100 launches for a failure mode than affects 1% of launches to actually happen.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative (which would have required much cheaper launch)
Really, what SpaceX did was radically different from the tests in the 90s from the rockets, to the controls, to the reusability goals. Otherwise they wouldn't have built Grasshopper.
Now NewGlen is kinda a knockoff of Delta Clipper, but that's a different beast.
This Honda landing neither went to space nor was orbital, so it was a similar test to the DC-X test.
* Better motors for gimballing
* Launch-thrust engines that throttle down low enough and preciesly enough for landing
* Better materials to handle stress for flip over manover etc without added weight
* More accurate position sensors
* Better understanding and simulation of aerodynamics to develop body shape and write control algorithms.
I wonder what the STS system would have been like if the DoD's cross-range requirement hadn't been imposed.
Dragon 9 was based on conservative and boring technology but it was cost optimized before it was reusable, then reusability crushed the competition.
For that matter, Starship is boring. "Throw at the wall and see what sticks" isn't "trying a bunch of crazy stuff" but trying a bunch of low and medium risk things. For instance, development of the Space Shuttle thermal tiles was outrageously expensive and resulted in a system that was outrageously expensive to maintain. They couldn't change it because lives were at stake. With Starship they can build a thermal protection system which is 90% adequate and make little changes that get it up to 100% adequate and then look at optimizing weight, speed of reuse and all that. If some of them burn up it is just money since there won't be astronauts riding it until it is perfected.
I want the NSX edition.
- Advances in rocket engine design & tech to enable deep throttling
- Control algorithms for propulsive landing maturing (Google "Lars Blackmore", "GFOLD", "Mars Landing", and work through the references)
- Forward thinking and risk-taking by SpaceX to further develop tech demonstrated by earlier efforts (DC-X, Mars Landing, etc.)
Modern simulation and sensor capabilities helped, but were not the major enabling factors.
Note that they don't appear to have an orbital engine yet—this thing's far too small, it has to be some kind of one-off for this demo flight. Most of the competition leaped directly to testing an engine they were developing for orbital launches, in their suborbital hops.
I think there is also a distinction to be made between offline (engineering) and onboard computing resources. While onboard computers have been constrained in the past, control algorithms are typically simple to implement. Most of the heavy lifting (design & optimization of algorithms) is done in the R&D phase using HPC equipment.
There might be more in a year or two (New Glenn, Neutron, Starship, a Chinese one), but for now, I would call it extremely difficult, not easy.
"you meet the nicest people on a Honda" <https://www.vintag.es/2017/09/you-meet-nicest-people-on-hond...>
I don't know what kind of people you meet on that other, better-known, reusable rocket company.
This is where I think the business acumen came into play. Because the govt is self-insured, it allowed SpaceX to pass the high risk off to the taxpayer. Once the tech matured, the risk was low enough to be palatable for private industry use.
And FWIW, I don’t mean that as disparaging to SpaceX, just an acknowledgment of the risk dynamics.
It’s like a four minute mile. Now we’ve seen reusable rockets work, everybody builds them and nobody says it won’t work?
A booster / orbital vehicle, when it appears, should have very different characteristics. I can even imagine that some kind of compatibility standard may arise, allowing to stack custom orbital vehicles to reusable boosters, much like the standardized buses for smaller satellites that exist today.
Mass-produced hardware drove prices down, and availability way up, in many industries: motors, analog electronics, computers, solar panels, lithium batteries, various sensors, etc. Maybe reusable rockets, enabled by all that, are going to follow a similar trajectory as air transportation.
If rockets became as common as cars, what kind of accidents would we see? And would insurers insure them?
I wonder if BPS .pace got further with his solid fuel thrust vectoring? Mustn't be far off that if not. https://bps.space/products/signal-r2
https://global.honda/content/dam/site/global-en/topics-new/c...
While cool and all, this type of sim is a tiny, tiny slice of the software stack, and not the most difficult by a long shot. For one, you need software to control the actual hardware, that runs on said hardware's specific CPU(s) stack AND in sim (making an off the shelf sim a lot less useful). Orbital/newtonian physics are not trivial to implement, but they are relatively simple compared to the software that handles integration with physical components, telemetry, command, alerting, path optimization, etc. etc. The phrase "reality has a surprising amount of detail" applies here - it takes a lot of software to model complex hardware correctly, and even more to control it safely.
In the past, there was not much reasons to go into space, commercially, so who would have paid for it? But today there are many more use-cases for sending things to space that are willing to pay for the service.
Personal example buying a used car with 60k miles that had some idle/start issues at times but generally ran well. Everything seemed to be serviced in a timely manner but the spark plugs were still the originals. Those spark plugs have a generous "100,000 mile" service interval. I pulled the originals and sure enough they weren't in the greatest shape. $40 later I never had start/idle issues again for the remaining time I owned the car.
One major reason for this is the mixing plate at the top of the combustor. Fuel and oxygen are distributed to tiny nozzles which mix together. The better the mixing, the more stable the burn. If you get unstable burning -eg momentarily better mixing in one area- it will cause a pressure disturbance which will further alter the burning power in different areas of the combustion chamber. At low throttle, this can be enough to cause the engine to turn off entirely.
Fluid simulations have made a huge difference. It's now possible to throttle engines down to 5% because mixing is much more stable (manufacturing improvements in the nozzles have also helped) and combustion is more protected from pressure variations.
The extra stability also just makes it easier to control a rocket period. Less thrust variation to confuse with drag properties, less bouncing, better sensor data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
It would seem to me that Intel and AMD were not friendly to custom designs at that time, and MIPS was not significantly evolving.
A fast, low-power CPU that can access more than 4gb and is friendly to customization seems to me to be a recent development.
SpaceX' Starhopper was an orbital Raptor engine. The *test vehicle* wasn't orbital, but, it's testing the in-development orbital engine and associated plumbing under flight conditions (which is useful, because... well you can see the various ways Starhopper failed at the start). Likewise, Grasshopper before that, in 2012-3, was a single Merlin engine (the Falcon 9 has, eponymously, 9).
SpaceX never flew a suborbital hop with anything other than an engine intended for orbital flight.
I think if Honda had an orbital-class reusable engine at the hardware stage, that'd be flying that to test it as much as possible. I'm not aware of any of the competitors doing otherwise. This is signalling they don't (yet?) have one.
edit: Or LandSpace, whose 10 km suborbital hop last year flew one of the methane engines their orbital vehicle has nine of.
SpaceX Merlin 1D: ~40% Rocketdyne F-1 (Saturn V): ~70% Space Shuttle Main Engine (RS-25): ~67% Blue Origin BE-4: ~20–25%
Falcon 9 does the "hover slam" where they have to turn off the engine exactly at touch down, or the rocket starts to go back up again. Throttle is too high for the weight of the booster at that point in flight.
Rocket Labs has recovered (not reflown) several orbital boosters, and the rest are within 1-2 years of orbital booster recovery attempts.
That's a huge engineering difference, roughly like the difference between a car and a helicopter. The Falcon 9 was also 4x taller, meaning 16x more force to correct a lean. A little burp would send the rocket right back up in the air.
Instead of news.honda.com (their actual domain) or hondanews.com (actual domain, redirect from before, all owned by them, also has news) or honda.global (makes sense, but nothing there) or honda.com/news (makes sense, but nothing there) they go waste money on a new gTLD. So we have global.honda/en/newsroom/. .
At least they're using it: https://domainmetadata.com/list-of-all-honda-domains
I guess I’m trying to connect the dots on how a simulation improves the actual vehicle dynamics.
The nuclear industry was using metric weights fully when I did my apprenticeship in it in the late 1980s. Good job really as I think a conversion error could be catastrophic.
Same goes for gallons though, US gallon is smaller than a UK one.
Reusable, propulsively landed stages for rockets capable of putting payloads into Earth orbit is stupendously harder. The speeds involved are like 10-100x higher than these little hops. The first stages of Falcon 9 and Starship are still the only rockets that have achieved that. Electron has only re-used a single engine.
> Launch-thrust engines that throttle down low enough and preciesly enough for landing
In large part this is due to improved simulation- spaceX made their own software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozrvfRHvYHA&t=119s
Experimentation was also a large factor- pintle injectors have been around for a long time, but were not used in production rockets until SpaceX (who moved from a single pintle to an annular ring). Pintle injectors are very good for throttling.
> Better materials to handle stress for flip over manover etc without added weight
We're still using the same materials- good ol inconel and aluminum. However 3d printing has made a pretty big difference in engines.
More rockets use carbon fiber, but that isn't new exactly and the main parts are still the same variety of aluminum etc. Titanium has become more common, but is still pretty specialized- the increased availability was probably the biggest factor but improved cutting toolings (alloys and coatings) and tools (bigger, faster, less vibration) have also made a big difference.
Why is that? Is it due to the nature of chemicals it uses?
But an impressively smooth landing regardless, and I would imagine maybe harder the smaller the rocket is.
Besides SpaceX, its also being worked on by Rocket Lab, Stoke, maybe Blue Origin, and too many Chinese companies to count.
I mean for/example the Apollo lander was a tail landing rocket and lunar landing is way fucking harder because a thick atmosphere gives you some room for error.
Simulation inside the engine can find resonances, show where shockwaves propagate, and show you how to build injectors (pressure, spray etc) so they are less affected by the path of reflections. Optimizing things like that smoothly along a range of velocities and pressures without a computer is not very feasible, and you need a minimum of computing power before you start converging to accurate results. The unpredictability of turbulence means low-resolution simulations will behave very differently.
Military rockets, and solid-fuel boosters like the kind the Shuttles used to use, indeed produce very visible exhaust, because they use heavy fuels, and sometimes heavier oxidizers, like nitric acid. This is because they need to be in the fueled state for a long time, ready to launch in seconds; this excludes more efficient but finicky cryogenic fuels used by large commercial rockets.
The large plumes that you usually see the first few seconds when a rocket is blasting off a launch pad are mostly water vapor. The launch pad would be destroyed by the exhaust were it not cooled during the launch by large amounts of water, which gets evaporated instead of the concrete.
Modern pressure vessels can reach 5% empty mass, thats a factor of 20
Rockets have stages, a good approximate is to stage half your rocket to get rid of the most empty mass. This also means your first stage has to have double the thrust to lift itself and its stage. Now you're at a factor of 40 just to hover.
Now you actually have to take off, usually around 1.2 to 1.4 thrust to weight.
So a more realistic scenario means your rocket engine has to throttle down to exactly 2% power while the laval nozzle is optimised for takeoff thrust only.
Most launch suppliers just make rockets single-use and write it off because it's not like you're launching weekly. Who knows how much it costs in labor and parts to refurbish landed rockets, it's probably cheaper to just keep making new ones.
^ you know what to say in response to this; we're all in the process of finding out which one is more correct.
Ultimately I "gave up" and just bought a 981 Boxster S (a 2013) for $42k. A 986 Boxster from the same era as an S2000 would absolutely be S2k prices.
I owned a Miata and wanted to own an S2k before moving up to the Boxster, but for today's asking prices, it just didn't make sense.
European colleagues regularly go, "what other kind of tonnes are there?" and we get to share the joke of how silly Americans are for still using imperial tonnes.
They linked details to look into in their original post.
Why the huge release of steam from the top of the rocket at the end? Release of heat that builds up during the descent? (Though it's not depending that fast, so it wouldn't be heat from atmospheric friction.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(mass)
The table at right is based on the kilogram (kg), the base unit of mass in the International System of Units (SI). The kilogram is the only standard unit to include an SI prefix (kilo-) as part of its name. The gram (10−3 kg) is an SI derived unit of mass. However, the names of all SI mass units are based on gram, rather than on kilogram; thus 103 kg is a megagram (106 g), not a kilokilogram.
The tonne (t) is an SI-compatible unit of mass equal to a megagram (Mg), or 10^3 kg. The unit is in common use for masses above about 10^3 kg and is often used with SI prefixes. For example, a gigagram (Gg) or 10^9 g is 10^3 tonnes, commonly called a kilotonne.
One context where I have seen this used is carbon stocks, e.g. petagram of carbon (PgC):
https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Carbon+Cycle
Of course Gigatonne of Co2 is also found very frequently.
Someone must have run out and grabbed the risers.
[edit] the camera angle and the camera height from the ground is different as well between the lift off and landing.
This means that 3d-printed copper (alloy) is an amazing process and material for them. You can build the kind of structurally integrated cooling channels that the people building rockets in the 60's could only dream about, and it's not a gold-plated part that required a million labor hours to build, it's something you can just print overnight.
It makes more sense than someone going out and grabbing them during the short flight. Those things would need to be sturdy and attached to not melt or blow away during the launch, and they would be hot.
edit: If you open up the first image on the submission and look to the left of the crane, you can see what look like the risers. They do seem to come out of the ground. You can see the same trees as the landing shot.
edit: I didn't realize the page had more videos under the Download button. I was wrong about the rectangles, but you can definitely see it's landing in a different spot in the onboard video (#3). You can still see the risers when it lands.
So they need to "hoverslam", that is, arrive at the landing pad rapidly decelerating so that their altitude hits zero just as their speed hits zero. This was thought to be very hard, but I don't think SpaceX has lost a stage due to estimation failure there. It helps that there is significant throttle range and fairly rapid throttle response on the engines, so they can have some slack. (Plan to decelerate at 2.5g for the last ~20s or so, with the ability to do anything between ~1.5g to 4g, so you can adjust throttle based on measured landing speed.)
Their Superheavy has more engines, allowing them to bring the TWR below 1, enabling hovering.
At a scale of 433 tons, it doesn’t really matter much which kind of tons (unless you’re actually doing the rocket science, of course).
I'd really like to see them scale this up commercially quicker than they did with the humanoid robot they built well ahead of many others.
Nope.
https://global.honda/en/topics/2025/c_2025-06-17ceng/image_d...
Video three and four clearly show it lands a little bit away from the risers. Same pad, but only 1/2 comments--not mine--suggested it was a different pad.
Pure HN distilled
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.
I wonder if that's the optimal design for VTOL rocket landers? Or is that more particular to smaller lighter rockets and eventually you need heavier duty options for bigger rockets?
Also the DC-X was eventually intended to be single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO). Do any of these reusable rockets plan on being SSTO? Whether from Space-X/Blue Origin or this or the Chinese ones? SSTO is where you're going to dramatically change the economics of rockets, as you now only have to worry about refueling when launching satellites, instead of using an expendable second stage..
Solid boosters put out the most visible exhaust, as burning APCP[1] emits solid particles of metal oxides. Also some rockets (mostly Russian, Chinese, and Indian) use unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine + dinitrogen tetroxide, which emits a reddish-orange exhaust. Both compounds are toxic, as is the exhaust.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_perchlorate_composite...
Ethanol/oxygen is my guess. Blue, and also very little soot.
But OP states that, body aside, the car's condition was suitable to deliver at least two more decades of driving time. Buying a different used Civic at market value would introduce an unknown, unbound cost of repairs to reach that goal. Unless you're a mechanic it's essentially gambling. Or* it's a new vehicle-- in which case it will cost vastly more than the cost of the body repairs.
I suppose I understand why the market is relevant-- if it were $1 then it would be worth the gamble. But given OP's goals and foreknowledge of the car's condition, I don't understand why market value would create a hard limit against paying for the repairs. That foreknowledge is worth at least a few hundred dollars, probably way more if you factor in time to find another car and risk of it being in ill-repair. Edit: (Not to mention the depth of knowledge since OP had been driving it for nearly a decade already!)
Edit: Plus the fact that OP would have run this car into the ground. So while market value still plays some role, resale value does not.
There's some ODD behavior where people in the US want to fuck up metric units (MB being the obvious in my lifetime non-engineer renaming of the meaning of a unit). I find the MM of finance confusing (not sure of origin). Calling tonnes, metric "tons", seems to be a US confusing thing. Or spelling metres vs meters.
Or creating units that depend on something country specific like football field (is that FIFA (EU), US, Canadian, Aussie).
Actually it seems common to desire to create industry units: https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...
Sort of a NIH at the county level.
I'll be thrilled when someone does! Competition is great! But let's do it via technological progress, not through abuse of the english language.
https://thegaijinghost.com/blog/japan-life-sized-gundam-thro...
Is this basically a technical way of saying "people realized it could be done"? Like the 4 minute mile, once it was done once, many people accomplished the same feat soon after. The realization that it was possible changed people's perception.
$185,000 application fee to apply for a new gTLD, plus maybe some auctions for gTLDs that multiple entities wanted, resulted in just under $60 million for ICANN.[2]
Apparently Google and Amazon were the most prolific appliers, with 101 and 76 applications respectively.[3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN#TLD_expansion_and_concer...
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2015/04/17/icann_gltd_auction_mo...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#Expan...
Notably:
> The name “Honda” has its roots in Japan, a country known for its rich traditions and cultural heritage. In Japanese, the name is written as 本田, which can be broken down into two characters: 本 (“hon”) meaning “origin” or “root” and 田 (“da” or “ta”) meaning “rice field” or “paddy field.” The combination of these characters conveys a sense of familial roots or origin tied to agricultural land, which was historically significant in Japan’s agrarian society.
> Traditionally, Japanese surnames like Honda were often linked to geographic locations or land ownership, reflecting the agricultural lifestyle of early Japan. Thus, the name Honda could have been used to denote a family that owned or worked on rice fields, marking them as stewards of the land.
The surrounding features are a match.
The cost to repair from multiple shops within transportable distance (important consideration as I'm sure someone somewhere could have done it for less) was $16k. To get it to an ugly but functional state was about $10k, which would have to be paid out of pocket.
Even if repaired to "roadworthy" condition, it would need to be reinspected and if deemed to be roadworthy would hold a salvage title, meaning insurance would go through the roof, my liability coverage would be dropped, and the car could not be resold. If not deemed roadworthy, more cost.
Needless to say, I considered the car totaled and used the $11k for a down payment towards another Honda.
https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Spac...
If you look at the landing shot, you can see that towards the corner are some markings for previous risers which were used for previous launches (or markings for future risers for future launches). The risers it launched from this time are just in a different corner.
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)
Basically the only things we know of that can survive our spin launch systems is stuff like 'very crushable food supplies' or 'a giant lump of steel'.
But it also illustrates that I've seen in the Bay Area time and time again, which is that once you demonstrate that something is doable (as SpaceX has) It opens the way for other capital to create competitive systems.
At Google, where I worked for a few years, it was interesting to see how Google's understanding of search (publicly disclosed), and the infrastructure to host it (kept secret) kept it comfortably ahead of competitors until the design space was exhausted. At which point Google stopped moving forward and everyone else asymptotically approached their level of understanding and mastery.
I see the same thing happening to SpaceX. As other firms master the art of the reusable booster, SpaceX's grasp on the launch services market weakens. Just as Google's grasp of the search market weakens. Or Sun's grasp of the server market weakened. When it becomes possible to buy launch services from another vendor which are comparable (not necessarily cheaper, just comparable) without the baggage of the damage Elon has done, SpaceX will be in a tougher spot.
It also helps me to understand just how much SpaceX needs Starship in order to stay on top of the market.
Some folks will no doubt see this as casting shade on SpaceX, I assure you it is not. What SpaceX's engineering teams have accomplished remains amazing and they deserve their success. It is just someone who has been through a number of technology curves noting how similar the they play out over their lifetimes.
Having witnessed first hand how DEC felt that Sun's "toy computers" would never eclipse DEC in the Server business, and watched as United Launch Alliance dismissed Falcon 9 as something that would never seriously challenge their capabilities, it feels almost prophetic to watch SpaceX's competitors emerge.
I also won't forget the marketing department at the camera company I worked at, dismissing the iPhone, when it first came out (it ended up eating their lunch).
The list is longer than that! The earliest hop was probably by McDonnell Douglas in 1993 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_QQDY7PYc8
Pretty sure that, or some other hobbyist project, is going to take the prize for "smallest".
It's hard to say for sure, but I lean towards Honda's rocket using hydrogen. Honda has experience with it. They use hydrogen in their fuel cell vehicles, and their press release from 2021 mentions using hydrogen for rockets.[1]
I'm pretty sure both fuel and oxidizer are cryogenic, because when the rocket lands it vents from several areas (most likely separate tanks). That would rule out ethanol or methanol as the fuel.
I don't see any secondary exhaust from a gas generator, and staged combustion would be something to brag about (and much higher thrust), so my guess is that it's an expander cycle. Expander cycle engines require a fuel that boils easily, so it would have to be fueled by propane, methane, or hydrogen. I don't think it's propane, as the only propane/lox rocket I've seen has orange exhaust.[2] If Honda poached some engineers from Mitsubishi, I could see them going with a hydrolox expander cycle, as that's what the H family of rockets use.
The only thing that doesn't line up with hydrogen is the low thrust given the propellant consumption. Based on the claimed wet/dry mass (1,312kg/900kg), they used at most 412kg of propellant. Flight duration was 56.6 seconds, so that's an average of 7.28kg of propellant per second. If the stated wet/dry mass is correct and the rocket used up all of its fuel, then the rocket's thrust was around 13kN at the start and around 7kN near the end. Let's say it averaged 10kN. Force equals mass flow rate times exhaust velocity. So 10kN divided by 7.28kg/sec is 1.374 km/s. Divide by standard Earth gravity and you get 140 seconds, which is pathetic for a rocket. It could be that they only used a small fraction of the available propellant, or they had a poor nozzle design, or the engine was throttled very low and was therefore less efficient. If we assume the test flight only used 40% of the available propellant, then we'd get a flow rate of 2.9kg/sec and a specific impulse of 352 seconds. But that sort of assumption can be used to come up with any Isp.
Still, I think it's using either hydrogen or methane as fuel. Nothing else fits with the video.
1. https://global.honda/en/newsroom/news/2021/c210930beng.html
2. Here's a video of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket, which uses propane/lox: https://x.com/isaraerospace/status/1906418985173758236
Why not? Certainly not for technical reasons, the shuttle had automatic landing capability (which was never used, purely from the pilot's preference).
RIM got so completely smoked with their ten year development cycles. It’s amazing if that they still have a business today to be honest.
This is the "markets mature and commodify over time" thing.
What companies are supposed to do in those cases are one of two things. One, keep investing the money into the market or related ones so you keep having an advantage. Or two, if there is nothing relevant and adjacent to productively invest in, return it to shareholders as dividends or share buybacks so they can invest it in some other unrelated market.
But space seems like it would be the first one big time because of the amount of stuff that still has yet to be developed. Starlink was an obvious example of something in that nature, and then it's going to be things like "put datacenters in orbit so you can use solar without worrying about clouds or nighttime" and "build robots that can do semi-autonomous work in places far enough away for both human presence and round trip latency to be an inconvenience" etc.
We'd be living in Star Trek by the time they'd run out of something more to do.
Falcon 9 didn't have three versions of which two were obsolete. Falcon 9 didn't put optional goals on the critical path, which are now delaying and preventing commercial launches.
> a country known for its rich traditions and cultural heritage
Chances are that we will be living on the consequence of the end of fossil fuels and the rise of climate change long before that, though.
And something that went orbital at supersonic speed
Is not even remotely the same universe
McDonell Douglas have done up and down since 1992
SpaceX is the only entity that have recovered and reused any rocket parts after sending payloads orbital
Wake me up when someone have done even a test that resembles orbital recovery
Until then all the EDS in here has zero power over reality
Doesn't look like it has a deep meaning does it? I'm thinking that's how the Honda name looks to a Japanese.
The one major Japanese company whose name does have a deep meaning - that I know of - is Mazda, which is explicitly derived from Ahura Mazda.
Toyota's founder is Kiichiro Toyoda (with a 'd'), and the company was originally named Toyoda, named after the founder. It was later changed to Toyota because it looked better in Katakana script (8 brush strokes, which is a lucky number), and it had a better meaning in Japanese. Apparently Toyoda is a farmer's name, and the company did not want to be associated with farming.
Similarly, Mazda comes from it's founder's name Matsuda, but was changed to Mazda when the first wheeled vehicles were produced (Mazda-Go). The official claim from Mazda is that it was named after Ahura Mazda, a God, but it is widely speculated that the name change was done to make it more appealing for international markets. I don't speak Japanese, but I have seen several videos on social media where the Japanese still pronounce Mazda as Matsuda.
It could simply be pressure-fed. No turbopump at all—just a helium tank.
You have a preference for assuming sophistication, but this is a one-off inexpensive test article with trivial performance needs. My guess is that they'd made the simplest engineering choices possible at every turn.
There's also an entertaining movie based on this book, a rare business film that is more about failure than success.
Deep Blue, several km, hard landing — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-g26Zt15lo
iSpace, 0.3 km — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKCH9ElmmZA
CASC, 12 km — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55iVjGuf_sE (their 75 km attempt in January failed, and doesn't have a public video)
Space Epoch, 2.5 km, hard landing — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTQK1kDpbw4
The challenge with orbital booster reuse is getting them threw the atmosphere intact and ready to land and then be reused quickly. And do that while being optimized enough to carry payload. That is the actual challenge. And that's just the first, then you need to build everything to be able to do this 5-10 times.
Only one other company then SpaceX has achieved getting a booster back at all, and that was by dropping it into an ocean. RocketLab, and they so far as I know have never reflown a complete booster. BlueOrigin has never landed a complete booster. ULA and Arianespace aren't close.
Honda in particular is not a launch competitor and is very unlikely to be one in the future. Japan already has a pet rocket that they support that has low launch rates. Honda isn't just isn't a competitor in the launch sector, and I don't think they are even planning that.
BlueOrigin might emerge as a competitor, but its nothing like Sun (sun was profitable in the first year). BlueOrigin simply has an infinite money glitch, that almost no other company in history had. The amount of money BlueOrigin spent in the last 10 year is actually unbelievable, they at times had the same amount of people as SpaceX, while having near 0 revenue. By any rational evaluation BlueOrigin is completely non-viable as a company, any they are burning billions per year.
RocketLab will likely be a real competitor eventually, but they are pretty clearly positioning themselves at being Nr.2, not aiming for flight rates nearly in SpaceX territory. And they have a lot of technical risk left to clear.
At the moment SpaceX is moving forward faster then anybody else is catching up. Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy still run loops around everybody and nobody will challenge it for another 10 years at least, and that's assuming Falcon 9 operations don't improve.
Starship isn't needed for the launch market, but for their own constellation.
But maybe that's because USA has a tendency to make everything a super commercial event which gives us that idea.
Like, to a non-english speaker? Because it looks loaded with meaning to me. Would you think that all instances of the word "morgan" refer to the bank "jp morgan"? Do you think that people who gamble are referring to the company you brought up? Why would you just give a top level domain name to a single company? No company is that interesting by itself. Hence, my question.
But maybe I'm just weird when it comes to language.
Anyway, I'll wait for a japanese person to fill me in ig—I can google where a name comes from, but this doesn't answer how it's actually perceived by someone who speaks the language.
SpaceX invested in reusability long before they had any idea about their own launch services.
> Its not that they where / not able to quickly get the same tech going. They simply have less market
BlueOrigin has been trying for nearly as long as SpaceX and have infinite money and don't care about market. Apparently having lots of money doesn't make you able to 'quickly get the same tech'.
RocketLab was to small and had to first grow the company in other ways. And the CEO initially didn't believe in large rockets. And their own efforts of re-usability, despite excellent engeeners didn't pan out to 'quickly get the same tech'.
Arianespace had enough market in theory, they just didn't want to invest money. And now that they do, they are completely failing at at 'quickly getting the same tech' despite them getting lots and lots of money. More money in fact then SpaceX used to develop the Falcon 9 initially. And at best they get some demonstrators out of it.
ULA has invested many billions in their next generation rockets, and they were absolutely not confident that they could 'quickly get the same tech'.
Tons of money flowed into the rocket business, specially if you include Blue. Japan, India, Europe, China and US market have all ramped up investment. And nobody has replicated what SpaceX did more then 10 years ago.
So as far as I can tell, there is exactly 0 evidence that people who can invest money can replicate the technology and the operations.
> partially because they used a lot of the public funds to just throw shit at the wall
The used all their costumers rockets to do tests after they had performed the service. Some of those rockets were bought by 'the public'. And the first reflown rockets didn't carry public payloads. Other companies could have done the same with not that much investment, they just didn't care to.
What result SpaceX caring less, is because they were already so good at building rockets that even their non-reusable rockets were cheaper then anybody else, even with reusable tech like legs attached. Falcon 9 was so much better then anything else that even without re-usabiltiy they were profitable.
Their business didn't depend on re-usability. I don't think the other rocket companies could even imagine something like that to be possible.
Not remotely the worst case. How do you expect to power all the ships needed for globalisation with nuclear power? What about planes? Can a rocket take off with a nuclear engine?
Fossil fuels account for 80% of the energy we use, electricity merely 20%. A whole lot of those 80% come from use-cases that were built around fossil fuels (how do you make plastic and all the materials that depend on it with nuclear energy?), and we don't (yet) have a way to replace that with something else. Try to power a ship with electricity...
Hydrogen, you say? We would need a lot more energy to produce enough hydrogen to replace oil. So we're going from "we don't have a way to compensate for the lack of oil" with "our solution is to not only compensate, but actually produce more energy than what oil was giving us".
All that while currently living a mass extinction and having already missed the reasonable objectives for global warming. So we have a few decades to get there, and what we have seen in the last few decades is that all we have achieved is making the problem worse.
I think the timeline is very difficult to predict here. We've seen countless companies who are leading in technologies who when others see it can be done... -know- it can be done so then can do it. Like the 4 minute mile.
I know it's not simple and no-one else is near SpaceX at the moment, but to ignore reusability has become an extinction-level event for launch providers. Some will learn from the 'break it and learn quickly' mentality that SpaceX followed for getting F9 to reliable reusability and there will be more competition.
Second-stage re-use is clearly the next phase and that's what Starship is targeting (plus massive capacity). I don't know if it scales to smaller rockets, but if it does (and we know that it's physically possible as some of the Starship second-stages have made it back kinda-alive), then it will be revolutionary.
Look at the lead that Tesla has thrown away in the EV market. I remember seeing an interview with Elon Musk talking about BYD EVs - "Yes, but look at their car, it's a joke"... to now having better tech in some ways than Tesla, and an up-to-date product line which looks way better than the staid models that Tesla is producing. Only the charging infra is keeping them ahead in terms of overall usability - and at some point that will be a solved problem for disparate third-party charging providers.
Cybertruck is a child-like anomaly which is not a mass seller. The M3 and MY are dated, and the robotaxi is merely a rehash of those stylistically (as well as completely the wrong thing to be making in terms of the market it's supposed to serve, IMO). I have read that Tesla is stuck in a rut, and their line-up looks like it. The 'highland' refresh and model y are both sticking-plaster makeovers.
When I ask my (mid 20s) kids if they'd buy a Kia EV3, a BYD Dolphin Surf or a Tesla, it's the Kia or the BYD. They look like cool cars, not something that a 50 year old (me!) would like (I prefer the EV3 if I had a choice). I know this is a bit off topic, but I'm just trying to illustrate that it's easy to think you're unassailable, and then the competition not only catches up, but overtakes. And timelines are impossible to predict to that scale, IMO.
If you have enough electricity, you can manufacture avgas, methane and whatever other fuels you need for aerospace.
What's the ratio of nuclear-powered big ships vs non-nuclear-powered big ships?
> If you have enough electricity
We're talking about moving our current electricity production entirely out of fossil fuels (because we produce a lot of electricity with them), then multiplying that production by 5, and at this point we're only producing the same amount of energy as today. But of course that's not enough, because we then need to use a lot of that energy to produce what's needed to replace oil, e.g. hydrogen.
We currently need what... 10-15 years to build a nuclear power plant? We're talking about building multiple orders of magnitudes more of them in a few decades, together with the electrical network and of course everything that needs to be re-engineered now that they can't run with oil anymore. And we're currently using oil for a reason: it's super dense, there is nothing more convenient.
And what value does it add? Nothing. It's just for replacing what currently works. Who will pay for that? Where will the money come from?
And this has to be done in a context where geopolitical instability will grow every year (because it is a fact: our access to abundant fossil fuel is coming to an end; Europe has seen it since 2007). And of course in a context where we are not remotely thinking about doing it. In the last decades, we as a society have actually kept accelerating in the opposite direction.
How realistic do you think your scenario is, really?
Then you still need to design a rocket. You still need a rocket engine and all the other parts of the rocket. So even best case, you only eliminate like 60% of the cost. Now you have to completely different engineering teams with little overlap in skills.
You can only build tiny rockets. In order for your accelerator not to be just completely absurd in size and cost, your gone build a rocket in the 100-200kg range. For that you can maybe ask for like 5 million $. But SpaceX is already doing that at far lower cost. And you don't even have the same flexibility of costume orbital insertions as other small launchers do.
Small launchers are a bad business, of the 100s of small launch companies, the only one that has had any success is RocketLab, other then them its a graveyard.
It will be hard to impossible for your rocket to be reusable. So you need to build the rocket for sub-1million $ including the launch to compete.
But then ... you need specifically designed sats that can handle the acceleration. So you need costumers to specifically design their sats to a complete different standard then for your competitors. And why would any costumers do this if you significantly cheaper then your competitor. Spinlaunch has started to develop its own rocket components that they hope to get other people to use.
But there are many other potentially things on a sat that could break, so for most costumers its simply not an option.
The industry has been moving to larger sats, the old idea of cubesats has gone and even small sats are regularly 200kg or more. So the market for anything below is pretty tiny, and the market for sats of less then 200kg that can handle 10000g is even smaller. And the market for 200kg sats that can handle 10000g and want to go into the specific orbit that you built your catapult for, is even smaller.
If there were many 100s of launches available, just desperately looking a way to get sats to a specific orbit, it might be worth a discussion. But there just isn't.
This kind of technology might make sense on the moon, if you want to bulk export something like ice.
Source is the official SI brochure: https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/
We have to find a replacement for oil and get it to the scale of oil in a fraction of the time we had to get where we are now with oil. And getting there with oil was easier, because oil is extremely convenient.
It's a bit like saying "we need to rewrite the Linux kernel with a new language that we are yet to invent, and it has to reach feature-parity in 5 years". Sure, theoretically we know how to create a new language and how to write a kernel, but can we do both in 5 years? Ever heard of e.g. Fuchsia? And they didn't try to invent a language for it.
For example "Honda Discovers Gene Which Improves Regeneration Ability in Rice" [1].
[1] https://global.honda/en/newsroom/news/2005/c050809a-eng.html
Seriously, when I bought a Civic in 1989, I looked at both the smaller Japanese cars (Civic, Sentra, Corolla) and bigger American cars. I'm tall and big and had trouble fitting comfortably in the American cars. No problem in the Japanese cars.
Next time I was car shopping, sometime around 1999, I decided to take a look at SUVs which had become pretty popular by then. Again I tried the American ones. They were very large--and very cramped inside. Then I tried a Honda CR-V. It was way smaller than the American SUVs but just as with the Civic there was plenty of room.
It struck me as absurd. How the heck are car companies of Japan, a country whose people average over 2" (5 cm) shorter than Americans and weigh about 2/3 what Americans weigh, so much better than American car companies at making cars that can fit tall fat Americans?
The real friction in building a reusable rocket isn't the engineering, it's setting "let's build a reusable rocket" as a design goal, and getting a whole bunch of engineers and a whole bunch of dollars to start on that goal.
You have to start with a whiteboard sketch and board-room presentation that shows it's achievable, and then send the engineers out to refine the sketch into something worth funding, and then work for months or years to build a rocket that would be a disaster if it's not achievable.
For example, the US in its current form is older than China, which was taken over relatively recently by the CCP who are also actively destroying most vestiges of cultural heritage through forced migration and erasing of inconvenient history.
This.
What I wanted to emphasize was how, after Bannister finally broke through the 4-minute barrier, many others did it soon after: 3 more in 1954; 4 in 1955; 3 in 1956; 5 in 1957; 4 in 1958.
Part of this is we don't build a lot of them and so are not good at it. If we set out to build hundreds of them per year we could do that, and costs would go down.
>And what value does it add? Nothing. It's just for replacing what currently works. Who will pay for that? Where will the money come from?
That is not an issue. A quick search says that ships have a lifetime to 20-30 years after which they are replaced. Sure there are a few antiques older than that, but for the vast majority of ships the owner will pay to replace it in 20-30 years anyway. Oil is not going to run out on a single day, it will be a process of years which is plenty of time for normal processes to work.
I don't favor nuclear in general, but for large ships it remains the only thing I know of that makes sense. (synthetic fuels are expensive, and solar/wind needs more space than a ship to deliver the power a ship wants).
We also know from experience that synthetic fuels are around 5 times more expensive than oil, and so only niches are willing to pay for it if oil is an alternative.
I doubt that this rocket has an engine intended for orbit? So it makes me wonder how serious this program is.
Don't imagine because this rocket is a certain size or lift capacity, that it isn't serious. And, this was just an R&D technology test. Who knows where they'll go from here.
But it hasn't, that's just a fact. Neither ULA, nor Arianespace, nor Russia have gone extinct or embraced reuse to any degree at all. Same goes for India and Japan. Because this market simply doesn't operate like typical markets.
ULA and Arianespace have lots of orders. There a complex reason for this, but its still just a reality. Neither Russia or India have made major investments in reusable rockets. China to some degree does but we have little insight.
The only competitors are all new companies that had no position in the market before.
> Like the 4 minute mile.
No amount of believe makes it just happen. You can't just work a bit harder and get there incrementally. That's not how rockets work. Its not like running at all. Runners already existed, they just needed to incrementally improve a little bit, believe can help with that.
But if you don't have the necessary rocket engine or architecture, you can't just incrementally improve to get to the goal. You need to redo the whole architecture from the ground up. No amount of testing and believe turns Ariane 5 into a Falcon 9 competitor. And that's going to cost billions even if everything goes well.
That's why non of the existing competitors have done it. Its new potential competitors coming up that work on it.
> Some will learn from the 'break it and learn quickly' mentality that SpaceX followed for getting F9 to reliable reusability and there will be more competition.
That mentality is almost 20 years old and nobody has embraced it in the same way. There are many reasons for this that I could get into. But its far more then simply a shift in mentality. If your fundamentals are wrong, no amount of mentality shift changes anything.
And even if you embrace that mentality, its still a 10 year journey, see Stoke Space for example.
And many companies that had that mentality have gone bust, see ABL and others.
> Look at the lead that Tesla has thrown away in the EV market.
Tesla lead wasn't really technological. They never had battery technology better then what many other companies can produce. Except maybe their packs, were a bit better in the beginning, but that's about it and that wasn't a huge engineering lift to replicate.
What made them get a lead is the complete believe in the concept, and their ability to raise enough money to make it happen on a large scale, plus proving there is demand.
Also I think drawing parallels between car industry and space industry isn't really relevant at all.
For the first real hop see Xombie circa 2010.
This is not true. Say what you will about the Shuttle, but they definitely recovered and reused rocket parts from both the boosters and the orbiter.
"main farm", "rich farm", "pine farm", "bell tree", "sun field", "river cape", "fifty bells", it's all just surnames. Nothing particularly more awe inspiring than any regular surnames would be.
They are so far ahead even their biggest competitor can’t comprehend what they’re doing.
[0] https://www.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:73...
Happened to the unreal team, who created the z-buffer reflections in the marble floor- because some other "engine" from around the world "could do that" - which ironically was a rendered non-real time image.
To sum it up nicely the real innovators, are marketing gurus, lying with "pretend proof" forcing the competition to adapt. Thank you for coming to my TED-walk
But all national launch providers use to supplement their income with commercial launches and SpaceX has completely sucked the air out of the room in that regard. It’s now more expensive for all these countries to keep these programs operational.
>once you demonstrate that something is doable (as SpaceX has) It opens the way for other capital to create competitive systems.
>buy launch services from another vendor... without the baggage of the damage Elon has done
Can anyone point to a single launch contract cancelled because of "baggage?" Big media would no doubt gleefully shout that story from the hilltops, but I haven't seen it.
>it feels almost prophetic to watch SpaceX's competitors emerge.
All Goliaths eventually fall, but they have an annoying tendency of not doing so on the timelines we might hope for. Just look at Microsoft in the 90s.
At the time, data was mondo expensive. Everyone was stuck low-bandwidth. Then when the iphone launched, Jobs + Apple did an exclusive with Cingular/AT&T. The talk at the time, was it was a bidding war -- they all wanted the iphone on their network first.
That exclusive opened the door to a phone manufacturer, for the first time, negotiating bandwidth, new data plans and more. RIM didn't have a lot of software that was high bandwidth, because the carriers wouldn't even allow it before Apple broke that hold.
So suddenly here's this new phone, with an exclusive, and with actual usable web browsing with a usable data plan price.... and RIM still begging for that.
(Obviously RIM still could have caught up if they didn't drop the ball, but this was a big shift in the market)
Where's the money?
It cost them more than Falcon 9 development.
Same with Starlink.
This isn't Concorde
As in thousand
Now Honda does
Maybe disposable rocket designs lost the hat and got too overengineered and expensive? Saturn V costs seem absurd to me when the USSR was also making similar rockets presumably far cheaper. Maybe the US defense spending model is just a poor one for getting a lean product developed compared to nations and groups that absolutely must be lean to achieve anything at all.
How do you get from "it takes 10 years now" to "it takes less than a year now if we really want it"?
Also you need qualified people to build that, it's not like you can vibe code it.
Again, peak oil in Europe was 2007, in the world it was currently 2018, it's not like we have 100 years to solve our energy problem. And I'm not talking about climate yet.
>peak oil in Europe was 2007
Europe is still using a lot of oil in 2025! They didn't have to change overnight, it is a long term process.
Data centers in space are a pipedream until we have a material-science breakthrough: radiating heat into space is too inefficient at rack-scale, let alone DCs.
Honda is still in the jet industry, despite joining late. The Honda Jet was a fresh take on what small jet design. Moving into new, adjacent markets is their schtick. Motorcycles -> passenger vehicles -> jets -> rockets
But that is very far from being a goal! Every year we emit more CO2, even though we already start seeing the effects of climate change (it's only beginning), but we keep accelerating in the wrong direction.
> Europe is still using a lot of oil in 2025!
That's not what I said. First, Europe imports pretty much the totality of their fossil fuels. And second, the European economy has been slowing down since 2007. The US likes to say "we have a better economy because we work more and better", but actually it seems pretty reasonable to think that it may be related to access to fossil fuels.
SpaceX itself took the risk on reusability after expendable launch was proven.
Your comment seemed to me like the Feds bore most/all of the risk for this development.
I’m not making an argument about reusability. I’m talking about the business risk. Note my original statement is about business strategy.
The Feds do bear most of the launch risk. That’s exactly what “self-insured” means. If you have enough wealth, many states allow you to self-insure your car; that means if something happens the resulting financial responsibility is yours. In the case of spaceflight, when a govt loses its payload, the taxpayer just eats that cost; no insurance company reimburses them. Many in the govt aren’t thrilled with that risk dynamic because it subsidizes the risk but privatizes the profit. But when the risk of a new industry is too high for private industry to shoulder, the government is about the only game in town with that level of risk tolerance.
> Perhaps even the only place that can top Japan in this regard.
"The smart cow problem is the idea that a technically difficult task may only need to be solved once, by one person, for less technically proficient group members to accomplish the task using an easily repeatable method. "