Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I would drive any distance to see a vstol landing of an suborbital or orbital vehicle. Talk about game changing.



Agreed. If you'd like to cheat and get a sneak preview of what it could be like, at least the last leg, go dig up the Armadillo Aerospace videos of their capsule VTOL launch/land successes. As a thumbnail argument, if we've seen Armadillo do just the VTOL launch/land part, and we've seen SpaceX do the rocket launch & parachute splashdown part, it's not hard to imagine the engineering equivalent of smooshing those two solution spaces together into a single entity which can accomplish both.

I will be as giddy as a lunch table of teen girls at recess when I see SpaceX pull this off.


Armadillo, Blue Origin, and Masten (and the DC-XA before them) have all been working on rocket powered VTVL flights and have done sub-scale test flights. It's a technology that just plain makes sense, especially now that computers are so cheap and so fast. Perhaps in 20 or 30 years it will be so common and routine that a lot of people will think it's a natural part of spaceflight and wonder how it could possibly be done any other way.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: