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Honda conducts successful launch and landing of experimental reusable rocket

(global.honda)
1355 points LorenDB | 1 comments | 17 Jun 25 15:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.287s | source
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3ds ◴[17 Jun 25 17:14 UTC] No.44301389[source]▶
Here is the video which they should have put in the post:

https://global.honda/content/dam/site/global-en/topics-new/c...

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whitehexagon ◴[17 Jun 25 18:00 UTC] No.44301924[source]▶
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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perihelions ◴[17 Jun 25 19:05 UTC] No.44302678[source]▶
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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1. SECProto ◴[17 Jun 25 19:37 UTC] No.44303010[source]▶
> 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