Japan's Space Agency Conducts First Test Flight For Experimental Reusable Rocket (apnews.com) 9
"Japan's experimental reusable rocket took off and safely landed in a first test flight Saturday," reports the Associated Press, as Japan "seeks to achieve the technology key to cut launch costs and compete in the global space market dominated by SpaceX."
The RV-X rocket lifted off, hovered and moved horizontally before landing [watch the video here] during its less than one-minute flight at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Noshiro Testing Center in northeastern Japan, which was livestreamed by the NVS, a group of space fans...
Saturday's flight is a step forward for Japan in achieving the technology needed to develop a lower cost successor to the country's current mainstay, single-use H3 series.
Japan's test comes the same week that China recovered an orbital booster rocket for the first time.
Japan's test comes the same week that China recovered an orbital booster rocket for the first time.
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Elon Musk's company pioneered reusable rockets so we should just accept and embrace that he is a conspiratorial white nationalist who is extremely gullible to conspiracies, spreads heinous ideas to his millions of followers and spent $50+ billion dollars to help turn the election towards Trump, then proceeded to quasi-illegally create his own government agency, illegally accessed records, stole American's data and farmed it to private companies [house.gov], tried to illegally commandeer a Federal building [abcnews.com] and then "too
Reusable Launch Vehicle is key to sustainability. (Score:4, Interesting)
If we expect to have a space industry for the next 20 years, we need to urgently get back to reusable launch vehicles. I'm not saying we need to go quite as far as the NASA space shuttle, but we need to get reusability of large vehicles to get the next space station or even build larger orbital space stations or spacecraft.
But ultimately some kind of space catapult/electrically launched vehicle/space-plane is the final form of this. We know "technically" we can push a jet high enough that a space craft could then be launched from to have the first stage be a completely reusable by landing it right after the vehicle unmounts from the launch vehicle.
Re: Reusable Launch Vehicle is key to sustainabili (Score:5, Insightful)
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There are a few places trying catapults and planes, but they can't carry a lot of weight.
The Soviet Buran spaceplane is probably the model to follow. Unlike NASA's Space Shuttle, it didn't have its own main engines. It only has orbital manoeuvring thrusters, and possible some jet engines for use in the atmosphere when returning to Earth. Instead the whole thing was lifted by a rocket and boosters.
Well, now we can recover the boosters, so you can see where this is going. The rocket was needed for steering, b
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Actually Energia first stage was meant to be reusable. They then became the Zenit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It all went mostly nowhere when Buran/Energia program was shut down in 1988/89
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We know "technically" we can push a jet high enough that a space craft could then be launched from to have the first stage be a completely reusable by landing it right after the vehicle unmounts from the launch vehicle
There was an old commenter on Slashdot that like to point out that "Mach 6 at 60,000 ft altitude is only 6% of the way to orbit". The math is just approximate, but tells you something about the (poor) viability of air-launching to orbit. See this detailed video from Everyday Astronaut [youtube.com].
Awesome Achievement (Score:4, Insightful)
That said: what they have achieved is basically the same as the DC-X [wikipedia.org] from 30+ years ago! Let us sincerely hope this effort has a longer life ahead of it than that one did!