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.
perihelions · 4h ago
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.
SECProto · 3h ago
> 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.
It’s harder to land shorter vehicles. If you can land a short one the taller ones are easier.
throwaway562if1 · 2h ago
Electron is an 18m orbital delivery rocket (14.5m+payload without the optional third stage).
tw04 · 5h ago
> successfully landed its 6.3-metre (20.6-foot) experimental reusable launch vehicle
From another article.
hbrav · 4h ago
Or in natural units: three very tall men stood on top of one another, wearing a top hat.
ryandrake · 3h ago
Oh jeez, how many football fields is that?
RattlesnakeJake · 2h ago
Are all three men wearing individual top hats, or does one cover all of them?
TeMPOraL · 4h ago
It's not a rocket, but three men in a trench coat?
lowestprimate · 3h ago
How many bananas?
imzadi · 3h ago
About the height of a giraffe
hnburnsy · 4h ago
>6.3 m in length, 85 cm in diameter, 900 kg dry weight/1,312 kg wet weight
ricardobeat · 2h ago
That's just a tad longer than a north-american SUV (Escalade, Navigator) standing on it's back. Accurate to say it's a car-sized rocket.
voxic11 · 4h ago
Its like half the size of a Trident missile.
gnatolf · 1h ago
Which inexplicably isn't know for soft landings
Aeolun · 1h ago
They can’t put the video first. This is Japan. First have to strongly declaim how safe they were being with a 6m rocket.
darrelld · 5h ago
I'm accustomed to seeing large plumes of chemicals coming out the other end in my minds eye when I think about rocket launches. This looks "clean" coming out the exhaust.
Why is that? Is it due to the nature of chemicals it uses?
nine_k · 5h ago
Soot means carbon-rich fuel, like RP1, and a very fuel-rich mix. Most launches I ever saw had basically zero soot, and a clean exhaust of a well-balanced fuel / oxidizer mix.
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.
ggreer · 3h ago
Several reasons. It's filmed in daylight, so any flame or exhaust will be less visible. The rocket engine is much smaller than anything that would go on an orbital booster, so there's less exhaust than what'd you see for an orbital launch. Also it's looks like it's a hydrolox rocket (using liquid hydrogen and oxygen as fuel), which has the least visible flame. The combustion product is almost entirely water vapor. Methalox (methane + liquid oxygen) is the next cleanest, which emits water, CO2, and a little bit of soot. Kerolox (RP-1 and oxygen) is the most common propellant used today, and it emits a significant amount of soot.
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.
I doubt it's hydrogen, because the color looks off (blue, rather than pink), and because it'd be a poor fit for a small R&D project. They're not optimizing for performance-at-all-costs on this.
Ethanol/oxygen is my guess. Blue, and also very little soot.
lupusreal · 1h ago
Probably methalox I think. It's the trendy prop mix most reusable programs are settling on because it doesn't coke up engines like kerosene and is easier to model in computers, and doesn't cause metallurgical problems like hydrogen while being much more dense. Alcohol isn't impossible but seems unlikely to me because that's not what you'd want for the full scale rocket they're presumably working towards.
numpad0 · 3h ago
Most civilian rockets have solid strap-on boosters(actual technical term) that emit the signature thick white smokes, as well as leave contrails at high speeds. Neither would be visible for non-solid rockets at low speeds.
fogh1 · 5h ago
Basically yes, other rockets might burn chemicals that create more soot. This one seemingly doesn’t.
djaychela · 5h ago
For some reason the landing of that reminded me of the Eagle from Space:1999 - there was something different in the ballistics of it compared to SpaceX and Blue Origin. Fantastic to see, thanks for the video link.
api_or_ipa · 5h ago
Watching the video, when the rocket lifted-off, it stood on a couple small risers. When it landed, the risers were gone. Did someone run out there and grab them?
feoren · 4h ago
Despite the other comments, the landing spot is clearly the same as where it took off. Take a screenshot at 0:09 and one at 0:48 and you can see that it's most certainly the same pad. The camera has moved slightly to the left on the landing, that's all.
Someone must have run out and grabbed the risers.
Kye · 3h ago
>> "Despite the other comments, the landing spot is clearly the same as where it took off."
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.
numpad0 · 3h ago
This is Taiki site, so either within the circular pad at (42.500394123580, 143.43589082745), or maybe from the end of 08R to neighboring Interstellar Tech pad area?
It may not have landed on the same pad it took off from.
Kye · 4h ago
I think the landing spot is different from where it took off from. The trees in the landing shot weren't there in the takeoff shot.
sprkv5 · 4h ago
the lift off spot is at the edge of the launch pad, whereas the landing spot is at the center of the launch pad.
[edit] the camera angle and the camera height from the ground is different as well between the lift off and landing.
Kye · 4h ago
Taking another look, I see four little rectangles that seem to match the risers close to the camera at the landing, but far from the rocket. I think they may have actually retracted. That would be neat.
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.
wiseowise · 3h ago
Amazing. Looks like cartoons I saw when I was a child, expect now it is in real life. Surreal.
redbell · 3h ago
From the second 22 to 44, I really couldn't tell if the rocket is ascending or descending :)
Also, I believe it would have been a historical moment if they filmed the entire staff watching the event from the control room.
neodypsis · 3h ago
What is the steam cloud for after landing?
420official · 3h ago
It's liquid propellant being vented, the fuel is under extreme pressure so when its released it immediately expands to a gas. I don't know that Honda has said what their propellant is, but it's probably liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
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..
kapildev · 2h ago
First time I saw a domain named `honda`. On further research [1], I see that many companies have Top Level Domains of their name. Why did IANA/ICANN allow TLDs of company's names?
$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]
> 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.
mkw5053 · 1h ago
Years ago, I worked for Neustar [1], and they were trying to sell .<brand> domains to everyone. Looks like they finally got at least one customer.
Before the video even launched (it took a few seconds to load while I stared at the address bar), that's exactly what I was wondering too.
whatever1 · 7h ago
Question why is it so easy today to build reusable rockets? Is it because the onboard cpu speed of the chips can solve more granular control problems with low latency?
roshdodd · 6h ago
As someone who actively works in the field, it was a culmination of:
- 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.
giarc · 1h ago
>Forward thinking and risk-taking by SpaceX to further develop tech demonstrated by earlier efforts (DC-X, Mars Landing, etc.)
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.
No comments yet
bumby · 6h ago
Can you elaborate on the advances in deep throttling?
hwillis · 5h ago
Not in industry, but: rockets can be like 90% fuel by weight. All engines on 105% can lift the rocket, so if you want to land while the tanks are nearly empty you need to be able to get to less than 1/10th of your thrust. Turning off engines only gets you so far- the Space Shuttle engine could throttle between 67% and 109% of rated power but if you only have 1/3 engines on you can only get as low as 22% power.
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.
bumby · 5h ago
So I’m assuming the simulations lead to better controls software and/or mechanical nozzle designs? Similar to how CFD leads to more efficient vehicle aerodynamics?
I guess I’m trying to connect the dots on how a simulation improves the actual vehicle dynamics.
hwillis · 5h ago
There is some improvement in vehicle control, but the biggest impact was inside the engine. Controlling the vehicle at transonic speeds benefits a lot from simulation- control inversion is an example. When grid find pass the sound barrier, the flow through the holes of the grid becomes choked off by shockwaves, and the fin starts acting like it was solid and sideways. Since it's effectively pointed 90 degrees off, it acts like its reversed. Knowing when, how intensely, and how turning affects that is important. Simulation also helps you find unexpected places where flows may unexpectedly become super/subsonic and cause torque. Experimenting at these speeds is... hard.
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.
Out_of_Characte · 5h ago
the poster above was very conservative in his metrics and throtteling requirements.
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.
briandw · 5h ago
Rocket engines struggle to throttle down to low levels due to combustion instability, injector dynamics, and turbopump limitations.
Here are some stats on minimum throttle levels:
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.
93po · 6h ago
Also didnt spacex do reuse without throttling and only having on/off?
Tuna-Fish · 4h ago
They do throttle, and quite low compared to other comparable engines, but they still cannot throttle an engine below 1 TWR when the stage is near empty. Meaning that they cannot hover a stage, either the engine is on and the stage is accelerating upwards, or it's off and it's accelerating downwards. (And you cannot rapidly turn engines on and off.)
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.
@roshdodd - Is there a modern reference/book that covers the design of such systems?
softfalcon · 4h ago
> Google "Lars Blackmore", "GFOLD", "Mars Landing", and work through the references
They linked details to look into in their original post.
hinkley · 4h ago
I recall hearing SpaceX cite manufacturing improvements as well. How do you feel about materials science and the ability to source parts not made of unobtanium?
Tuna-Fish · 4h ago
Many of the hardest problems facing rocket engines are about temperature, heat and thermal density, not structural strength.
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.
floxy · 32m ago
I don't know how representative it is, but this photo seems impressive:
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.
roshdodd · 6h ago
I don't think this was the cause. Advanced simulation capabilities have existed for many decades in the industry. Many if not most of those tools are not publicly available.
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.
nine_k · 6h ago
You can now buy vastly more computing power and do fancy fluid dynmaics, etc thanks to GPUs. 20 years ago it was much more expensive to procure, and much harder to find expertise. 30 years ago, I suppose, the field was even less mature, and limited to the few HPC installations and in-house bespoke software.
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.
chasil · 5h ago
If we are going to be specific, 64-bit ARM (in the form of AArch64) arrived in 2011.
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.
morganherlocker · 6h ago
> so now the main problem is building the hardware, there are a lot of solutions for the software part.
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.
rvnx · 5h ago
Certainly not a trivial problem I totally agree, but still significantly easier than Von Braun with his paper calculations.
xeromal · 7h ago
SpaceX showed it was possible and also a crappy place to work means those knowledgeable people go work elsewhere for less work and more money.
inb4 blue origin / DC-X did it first
bryanlarsen · 6h ago
Actually, the DC-X did it first, in 1993. The DC-X was the first vertical rocket landing, Blue Origin was the first vertical landing of a rocket that went to space, and SpaceX was the first vertical landing of an orbital rocket.
This Honda landing neither went to space nor was orbital, so it was a similar test to the DC-X test.
LorenDB · 6h ago
Actually, retropeopulsive landing was demonstrated during the Apollo program, both on the moon with the LM and with LM trainers on the earth. Those systems were human controlled, of course.
mensetmanusman · 6h ago
Crappy for 10% amazing for 90%, somewhat better than the 80/20 70/30 seen by most F500s.
MattRix · 2h ago
I imagine they mean crappy as in really poor work life balance.
advisedwang · 6h ago
I don't know the answer, but some possibilities beyond CPU capabilities include:
* 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.
hwillis · 5h ago
Electrical engineer: motors and sensors are not really any better- motors have gotten more efficient and sensors have gotten cheaper, but gold standard sensors like ring laser gyroscopes have existed since the 60s.
> Launch-thrust engines that throttle down low enough and preciesly enough for landing
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.
kurthr · 7h ago
Proof of concept. It's a lot easier to do something, if you know it can be done.
benjiro · 7h ago
Its more about money.
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.
PaulHoule · 6h ago
Even before SpaceX started launching their own satellites in huge numbers they had a business model where they were selling the launch, not the rocket, and selling it at a fixed price, so if some small refinement saved them 5% on launch costs it went to their pockets so they had an incentive to make those small refinements.
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.
kurthr · 6h ago
I agree, a lot is about money, but it's not like Honda is raising external funds. Getting management to agree to do anything pretty much requires guaranteed success in large organizations.
bumby · 6h ago
>they used a lot of the public funds to just throw shit at the wall, and see what sticks.
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.
IncreasePosts · 6h ago
Bezos wants to do satellite internet just like spaceX, owns a rocket company, but is still going to buy rides on 3rd party non-reusable rockets
PaulHoule · 7h ago
Also psychology and politics kept people from following the easy path.
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.
> 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.
I wonder what the STS system would have been like if the DoD's cross-range requirement hadn't been imposed.
PaulHoule · 6h ago
That too... And the whole boondoggle about launching from Vandenberg that never happened. That bit about it being "dual use" though helped in the "intimidate the Soviet Union" department.
EvanAnderson · 6h ago
I enjoy the theory that the Space Shuttle fulfilled its mission as an economic weapon w/ respect to Buran.
PaulHoule · 6h ago
Well it did, but if you look at health care or infrastructure you'll see that the U.S. can intimidate anybody except maybe the Chinese when it comes to spending money.
bookofjoe · 5h ago
See, for example: 4-minute mile
mempko · 7h ago
I mean, SpaceX also knew it could be done since reusable rocket tests happened in the 90s.
hwillis · 5h ago
The DC-X was 9.1 tonnes empty and 19 tonnes full- meaning landing thrust was ~half of takeoff thrust. The Falcon 9 was 400 tonnes full and 26 tonnes empty, so takeoff thrust was >20x higher than landing thrust.
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.
kurthr · 6h ago
Don't you mean the SpaceShuttle in the 80s? or Delta Clipper which didn't reach orbit?
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.
mensetmanusman · 6h ago
And physics, nothing prevents the goal beyond execution.
didibus · 6h ago
Someone proved that there is market demand which could make it profitable.
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.
numpad0 · 5h ago
It's not hard-hard to build recoverable rockets, but it's hard to make money launching reusable rockets that goes to space. This one is not going to space, not making money, and not clear if it's reusable.
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.
SoftTalker · 4h ago
What is the point of making a recoverable rocket if not to reuse it (or at least reuse substantial components)?
numpad0 · 3h ago
Exactly why the rest of the world isn't jumping into it. $THEY are still skeptical of airplane style rapid reuse, so much so that vehicles with zero reusability like Mitsubishi H3 are still being designed from clean sheet.
FuriouslyAdrift · 7h ago
They've been working on this (in cooperation with JAXA (Japan's NASA)) since 2021.
jessriedel · 5h ago
The premise of this question is wrong, and it's super disappointing that everyone is giving answers as if it's correct. The Honda test rocket only went to an altitude of 300 meters. It's been possible to propulsively land rockets from such low altitudes for decades, e.g., McDonnell Douglas DC-X test in 1996. (And ofc, if you're just talking about re-use for any landing method, the space shuttle first reused the solid rockets and the orbiter in 1981.)
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.
odo1242 · 7h ago
I mean, it's mostly that we've decided to try to do it nowadays. Problems tend to get easier when we put hundreds of thousands of hours of work into them. It wasn't in the scope of the original rocket projects because if it was, we probably would never have launched them.
rsynnott · 7h ago
I mean, it's been around as a concept since at least the 50s, but there was quite a lot of scepticism that it was worth the cost (this would only have been reinforced by the Shuttle, whose 'reusable' engines were a bit of a disaster)
Avshalom · 5h ago
It's always been easy. People just didn't think it made much sense. The thing about reusability is that it seriously cuts down on your payload.
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.
yieldcrv · 7h ago
Because there’s a bigger market for space cargo
I wouldn’t say anything has fundamentally changed in the rocket coordination tech itself, just the private sector being able to rationalize the cost of the trials with ROI
starik36 · 6h ago
I don't know about easy. Today we have exactly 1 proven reusable orbital class family of rockets: Falcon. And even at that Falcon 9 only recovers 1st stage and the fairings. And Falcon Heavy has never recovered the center stage.
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.
treis · 7h ago
This doesn't feel like that much of an accomplishment relatively speaking. It's a smallish rocket that went up and down. Very far away from landing something 100 times heavier from orbit.
lupusreal · 7h ago
Nobody is propulsively landing anything from orbit yet. (Dragon is supposedly capable of it, as a backup if the chutes fail, but has never done so.)
xixixao · 5h ago
Starship is already pretty much there (almost-orbit and water splash)
lupusreal · 5h ago
They've had three failures since those earlier successes, and while I expect they'll get it eventually I wouldn't count them as doing it yet.
Besides SpaceX, its also being worked on by Rocket Lab, Stoke, maybe Blue Origin, and too many Chinese companies to count.
robszumski · 7h ago
For reference, Rocket Lab's Electron has a wet mass of 13,000 kg. This rocket is much smaller at 1,312 kg wet mass.
delichon · 6h ago
Falcon 9 433k kg
Atlas V 547k kg
Starship 1,200k kg
Starship Booster 3,600k kg
Certhas · 6h ago
k kg is a funny unit... Much more readable than Mg of course. Tonnes would also work...
overfeed · 5h ago
Tonne is unfortunately overloaded, the US and the UK have their own versions, but for the rest of the world is on metric, and a tonne is 1000 kg. The Falcon 9 weighing "433 t" reads way more elegantly to me.
softfalcon · 4h ago
Here in Canada (where the mixup of metric vs imperial tonnes is common) we just say "metric tonnes" and move on. Everyone here knows that means 1000 kg.
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.
robocat · 2h ago
I've often seen mt written as the units for metric tons.
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).
FTR no-one I know (other than in old school industry about 20 years ago) used the UK 'Ton' any more. One place of work made this clear by having different pronuncication ('Tonn-ey') as they were an old-school foundry. And the spelling is different from wherever I've seen it.
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.
My understanding was that "ton" is the US / imperial and "tonne" is the metric one, but I see people using them interchangeably here, so I guess whether that's technically true or not is a bit moot!
pseudocomposer · 4h ago
Unless https://www.math.net/pounds-to-tons is severely wrong, a US ton is 2200lbs, UK 2240lbs, metric 2204lbs. Put a different way, US to metric is a <0.2% difference (the smallest), US to UK is a <2% difference (the biggest).
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).
nneonneo · 4h ago
US ton is 2000 lb, not 2200. I spent some time in the US and had never heard of a ton meaning 2200 lb. Unfortunately, that's a 10% error off of a metric ton.
jjj_throw · 3h ago
US short ton is 2000lbs, long ton is ~2200.
dguest · 3h ago
Starship is 1.2 kilotons, but I feel like quoting rockets in kilotons might cause some confusion.
carabiner · 4h ago
I like kilodollars for salaries and kilofeet for elevation though.
littlestymaar · 5h ago
“Mg” wouldn't even be valid since the SI unit is the kilogram. But yeah, using tons is the sensible choice.
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):
Using a Class N rocket motor, the High Steaks rocket reached about 8500m, earlier this year. I think Joe abandoned the thrust vector control for control surfaces within the fins to stabilise rotation.
This is a tiny rocket going up 300ms and coming back down. Happy for them but they're a long way from any utility ( and a decade+ behind other companies )
throaway920181 · 5h ago
Which companies have this capability besides SpaceX and Blue Origin? More competition is always welcome.
perihelions · 5h ago
Rocket Labs, Stoke Space, Deep Blue, Landspace, Space Pioneer, iSpace, Galactic. (The last five are Chinese startups).
Rocket Labs has recovered (not reflown) several orbital boosters, and the rest are within 1-2 years of orbital booster recovery attempts.
bpodgursky · 2h ago
So the correct answer is "nobody else has the capability"
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.
Rebelgecko · 5h ago
I think the DC-X program did this first in the 90s. It ran into funding issues and it turns out there isn't a ton of value in reusable rockets that only go a few hundred feet (although more advanced applications are potentially worthwhile)
markhahn · 4h ago
maybe that's the hard part, and scaling isn't.
jethronethro · 3h ago
Starting small, gradually scaling up. What a concept!
alexathrowawa9 · 3h ago
This right here is the quintessential hackernews comment
Pure HN distilled
hluska · 3h ago
Congratulations, you found the most obvious negative thing to say. Good for you?
amelius · 5h ago
It's not a difficult problem. It's just Newtonian mechanics plus control theory. You only need a lot of funding and then just do it (of course build a simulator first).
IgorPartola · 1h ago
I might as well ask here though this is probably a bit off topic: for smaller rockets why are catapults not used? Seems like it could save a bit on fuel and maybe even a stage.
I often described my wife's old Honda Civic, which we finally sold (still running and able to be driven) w/ just north of 340,000 miles, as having been to the moon and on its way back. I like the idea that someday Honda hardware could, in fact, send something to the moon.
CobrastanJorji · 6h ago
The real fun is the equivalent spaceship. "This here Honda Bucolic has so many miles on from its Earth-Moon runs that it's basically been to Neptune and back."
GeneralMayhem · 5h ago
That'd be a very impressive service record - Neptune is right around ten thousand times as far as the moon.
littlestymaar · 5h ago
That's just short of 20 years worth of use if earth-moon is your work-home commute, that's a pretty good analogy actually.
jamesgill · 6h ago
Perhaps Honda should launch an old Civic into space, like Musk's Tesla.
EvanAnderson · 5h ago
A Civic would be on-brand, but an S2000 convertible with an ASIMO waving from the driver's seat would be much more fun.
caycep · 5h ago
S2000 is worth too much, in SoCal, their going rate is probably equal or above that of an equivalent Porsche Boxster/Cayman of the same era...
rconti · 5h ago
Not just SoCal; watch the auction sites. I really only wanted an AP2 in Rio Yellow Pearl, and their values are perilously close to $30k. In fact, a 70k mile example I bid on last year on BaT or C&B (in San Jose) went for over $30k.
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.
wmeredith · 3h ago
I'm fairly certain that an S2000's current worth is a rounding error in rocket-science economics.
I'd still send the Civic. Sending another convertible is imitation, but sending a Civic, a people's car, especially an older model, would by quite humorous.
nick486 · 5h ago
find an old one, connect the odometer to count the distance flown in addition to the x00k miles it already has, stream the video as it flies around the moon and back.
would be a fun publicity stunt.
agumonkey · 3h ago
perhaps they could launch Elon into space, that would be civic
le-mark · 6h ago
A lady backed into my 99 civic in 2008, totaled it. The body work was more than the value of the car. I’d still be driving it if that hadn’t happened :sad-face.
t-3 · 1h ago
My yearly car insurance bill is more than I paid for my Civic.
pjmorris · 6h ago
An inattentive person rear-ended my 82 Civiv in 87. I probably wouldn't still be driving it, but it has led to a long association with Honda/Acura products.
If rockets became as common as cars, what kind of accidents would we see? And would insurers insure them?
jancsika · 5h ago
If you'd still be driving it then how was the resale value relevant?
nsriv · 4h ago
I think he means that the cost to repair exceeded the market value of the car. As a recent victim of something similar with an 09 Accord, I feel the pain. Was the perfect car.
jancsika · 2h ago
I'm supposing he meant that the body damage was the only damage, and that the known cost to repair the body exceeded the market value.
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.
nsriv · 34m ago
It comes down to insurance and salvage titles mostly. In PA, the vehicle I have experience with was valued by insurance at $11.5k, minus a $500 deductible, so $11k. That value determination was made by the insurance company by market factors, which is why market value comes into play. Looking around at comparable used vehicles of same make, model, year, mileage, I found that to be fair price.
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.
Finnucane · 5h ago
Insurance won't pay for it. But it's probably still cheaper to fix than buy a new car (I had a '99 CRV that I drove for 17 years).
lampiaio · 4h ago
You should watch Pontiac Moon! (Or maybe not, it's not that great of a movie)
Agreed, same experience with my wife's current Honda Fit. And I like the thought experiment of Tesla Model S (or whatever) is to Falcon 9 as '98 Honda Civic is to... Wait they do they say the name if this rocket anywhere?
EvanAnderson · 6h ago
The Honda rocket won't be as "fancy" as the SpaceX but it'll have vastly better parts availability.
SEJeff · 6h ago
I can't wait to see the GIANT spoiler on the engine cowling that does nothing more than help them push it if it breaks down.
randmeerkat · 6h ago
And JDM badges.
robertlagrant · 6h ago
And magic seats
tersers · 6h ago
VTEC decal on the side
redwall_hp · 5h ago
Hopefully anime wraps will be available as well.
spacecadet · 6h ago
US Taxpayers ain't wrong, voted most reliable rocket 10 years in a row.
HeWhoLurksLate · 5h ago
I just want to know who will get the J.D. Power Initial Quality Award and then subsequently fall apart five minutes after it gets judged (lookin at you, Stellantis)
SoftTalker · 6h ago
My experience with Honda has not been great. Both Hondas I have owned had complete transmission failures. Full disclosure, I bought them used (as I do all my cars) with unknown maintenance history and I did get a few years out of each of them so it still worked out "ok" in an economic sense. The engines do seem pretty bulletproof. But I would not buy another, at least not one with an automatic transmission.
officeplant · 5h ago
I find the common problem with automatics is their service time scale. Bad car owners often forget to do oil changes often enough and those are only 3.5-10k miles apart depending on climate/oil type/etc. Which means services that happen every 50-75k miles or greater get left to people that actually maintain service histories and timely maintenance.
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.
caycep · 5h ago
That was a known thing from the '00s decade cars. But good excuse for a manual transmission swap!
legitster · 6h ago
Make sure you do a valve adjustment on the Fit engine every 100k or so. Easy job to do with some basic tools and a few hours on a Saturday afternoon.
mofunnyman · 6h ago
0.711 of the way to the moon and back. It has been to the moon though.
tonyhart7 · 25m ago
its not really high in the atmosphere but its a good start
finally SpaceX got competition
cududa · 7h ago
Initially wanted to say I’m impressed they got it on the first launch
But, couldn’t specifically tell if this was indeed the first launch or not, and perhaps there were some private failures before - anyone know?
walterbell · 7h ago
One small step for Japan, one big step for space industry competition.
echelon · 6h ago
Please! We need lots of competition in this space. I hope Japan develops a burgeoning private space industry.
mbowcut2 · 3h ago
I read this as "pirate space industry" and got real excited.
jonplackett · 6h ago
No-one thought to make a video of this momentous occasion?
JAXA is pretty well set up with expendable launchers already, built by Mitsubishi. The "geopolitical" state of affairs isn't threatening their ability to put stuff into orbit, Japan doesn't rely on America/Russia/China/etc for that.
mrguyorama · 6h ago
Any reusable rocket is also an expendable rocket with slightly better payload.
perihelions · 6h ago
I think there's about 5 or 6 private startups on the brink of attempting orbital booster landings within the next few months. This... is at least a decade behind that, if they're serious.
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.
nine_k · 6h ago
I assume this rocket is not a part of some orbital program. It's more like the SpaceX's Hopper [1], intended to test the control algorithms and such.
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.
> "competition leaped directly to testing an engine they were developing for orbital launches"
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.
nine_k · 5h ago
From the press release: «Honda rocket research is still in the fundamental research phase, and no decisions have been made regarding commercialization of these rocket technologies». It also has no mention of the engine used. Honda indeed appear to not have an engine worth noticing yet.
wood_spirit · 6h ago
It’s not clear that they need to take so long to catch up.
It’s like a four minute mile. Now we’ve seen reusable rockets work, everybody builds them and nobody says it won’t work?
pmdulaney · 6h ago
Congratulations to our friends in Japan!
ghxst · 6h ago
Big congratulations to the engineers! Also had no idea that .honda is a TLD that's really cool.
throaway920181 · 5h ago
For anyone else that's curious, it turns out there are a TON of company-specific TLDs.
I don't know what kind of people you meet on that other, better-known, reusable rocket company.
brianbreslin · 7h ago
Is this a precursor to a viable alternative to any of SpaceX products?
stego-tech · 7h ago
Not at this stage. Looks like they used a smaller rocket to test the core concepts involved, rather than build a huge, production-ready platform like SpaceX. Good to see Japanese industry still improving their self-reliance.
Honda has historically invested heavily in R&D. They are robotics pioneers, have made jet skis, power tools, sell a commercial jet [1], and are responsible for the engine powering the winner (RB) of the last four F1 championships,
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.
insane_dreamer · 4h ago
I wouldn't have expected Honda to enter this space.
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.)
artursapek · 5h ago
Honda has a TLD????
tzury · 7h ago
so now any company can get its own TLD?
that's cool.
kube-system · 7h ago
Brand TLDs became a thing in 2012 under ICANNs New gTLD Program
1970-01-01 · 5h ago
I've only seen it used by companies that cannot get out of their own way.
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/. .
https://global.honda/content/dam/site/global-en/topics-new/c...
https://thegaijinghost.com/blog/japan-life-sized-gundam-thro...
But an impressively smooth landing regardless, and I would imagine maybe harder the smaller the rocket is.
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
From another article.
Why is that? Is it due to the nature of chemicals it uses?
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.
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.
Someone must have run out and grabbed the risers.
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.
1: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BhfWBSBWgPQaa64g7
The surrounding features are a match.
[edit] the camera angle and the camera height from the ground is different as well between the lift off and landing.
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.
Also, I believe it would have been a historical moment if they filmed the entire staff watching the event from the control room.
No comments yet
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..
[1]: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
$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...
it feels weird seeing no .com at the end of it
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neustar
- 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.
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.
No comments yet
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.
I guess I’m trying to connect the dots on how a simulation improves the actual vehicle dynamics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They linked details to look into in their original post.
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.
https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Spac...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
inb4 blue origin / DC-X did it first
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
I wonder what the STS system would have been like if the DoD's cross-range requirement hadn't been imposed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn’t say anything has fundamentally changed in the rocket coordination tech itself, just the private sector being able to rationalize the cost of the trials with ROI
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.
Besides SpaceX, its also being worked on by Rocket Lab, Stoke, maybe Blue Origin, and too many Chinese companies to count.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UX7NJLYyb4
Rocket Labs has recovered (not reflown) several orbital boosters, and the rest are within 1-2 years of orbital booster recovery attempts.
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.
Pure HN distilled
https://www.spinlaunch.com/
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.
would be a fun publicity stunt.
If rockets became as common as cars, what kind of accidents would we see? And would insurers insure them?
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.
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.imdb.com/title/tt0110867/
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.
finally SpaceX got competition
But, couldn’t specifically tell if this was indeed the first launch or not, and perhaps there were some private failures before - anyone know?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgaGUb1GAEo
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.
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.
[1]: https://starship-spacex.fandom.com/wiki/Starhopper
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.
It’s like a four minute mile. Now we’ve seen reusable rockets work, everybody builds them and nobody says it won’t work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
"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.
reaching an altitude of 300 meters
...but this isn't one of them, yet
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I want the NSX edition.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/v00pN4FyfuM
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_HA-420_HondaJet
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.
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.)
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
https://icannwiki.org/New_gTLD_Brand_Applications