Falcon 9 first stage landing on Droneship

Vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) is a form of

takeoff and landing Aircraft have different ways to take off and land. Conventional airplanes accelerate along the ground until reaching a speed that is sufficient for the airplane to takeoff and climb at a safe speed. Some airplanes can take off at low speed, this b ...

for rockets. Multiple VTVL craft have flown. A notable VTVL vehicle was the

Apollo Lunar Module The Apollo Lunar Module (LM ), originally designated the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), was the lunar lander spacecraft that was flown between lunar orbit and the Moon's surface during the United States' Apollo program. It was the first crewed sp ...

which delivered the first humans to the

Moon The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It Orbit of the Moon, orbits around Earth at Lunar distance, an average distance of (; about 30 times Earth diameter, Earth's diameter). The Moon rotation, rotates, with a rotation period (lunar ...

. Building on the decades of development, SpaceX utilised the VTVL concept for its flagship

Falcon 9 Falcon 9 is a Reusable launch system#Partial reusable launch systems, partially reusable, two-stage-to-orbit, medium-lift launch vehicle designed and manufactured in the United States by SpaceX. The first Falcon 9 launch was on June 4, 2010, an ...

first stage, which has delivered over three hundred successful powered landings so far. VTVL technologies were first seriously developed for the

Apollo program The Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo, was the United States human spaceflight program led by NASA, which Moon landing, landed the first humans on the Moon in 1969. Apollo followed Project Mercury that put the first Americans in sp ...

. By the '90s, development on large reliable restartable rocket engines made it possible to use the already matured technology for rocket stages. The first pioneer was the

McDonnell Douglas DC-X The DC-X, short for Delta Clipper or Delta Clipper Experimental, was an uncrewed prototype of a reusable single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle built by McDonnell Douglas in conjunction with the United States Department of Defense's Strategic ...

demonstrator. After the success of the DC-X prototype, the concept was developed substantially with small rockets after 2000, in part due to

incentive prize competitions In general, incentives are anything that persuade a person or organization to alter their behavior to produce the desired outcome. The laws of economists and of behavior state that higher incentives amount to greater levels of effort and therefo ...

like the

Lunar Lander Challenge The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge (NG-LLC) was a competition funded by NASA's Centennial Challenges program. The competition offered a series of prizes for teams that launch a vertical takeoff/vertical landing (VTVL) rocket that achiev ...

. Starting in the mid-2000s, VTVL was under intense development as a technology for reusable rockets large enough to transport people. From 2005 to 2007

Blue Origin Blue Origin Enterprises, L.P. is an American space technology company headquartered in Kent, Washington. The company operates the suborbital New Shepard rocket and the heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. In addition to producing engines for its own ...

did a series of successful tests, first with the jet powered Charon demonstrator, later using the Goddard demonstrator. Small VTVL rockets were also developed by

Masten Space Systems Masten Space Systems was an aerospace manufacturer startup company in Mojave, California (formerly in Santa Clara, California) that was developing a line of vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) rockets, initially for uncrewed research s ...

Armadillo Aerospace Armadillo Aerospace was an aerospace startup company based in Mesquite, Texas. Its initial goal was to build a crewed suborbital spacecraft capable of space tourism, and it had also stated long-term ambitions of orbital spaceflight. The company w ...

, and others. In 2013, after the failure of stage recovery with parachutes,

SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly referred to as SpaceX, is an America, American space technology company headquartered at the SpaceX Starbase, Starbase development site in Starbase, Texas. Since its founding in 2002, the compa ...

demonstrated vertical landing on a Falcon 9 prototype after climbing 744 meters in the air. Later,

(

New Shepard New Shepard is a Reusable launch vehicle, fully reusable Sub-orbital spaceflight, sub-orbital launch vehicle developed for space tourism by Blue Origin. The vehicle is named after Alan Shepard, who became the List of space travelers by nationali ...

) and

(

), both demonstrated recovery of launch vehicles after return to the launch site (RTLS) operations, with Blue Origin's New Shepard booster rocket making the first successful vertical landing on November 23, 2015, following a flight that reached outer space, and SpaceX's

Falcon 9 flight 20 Falcon 9 flight 20 (also known as Orbcomm OG2 M2) was a Falcon 9 space launch that occurred on 22 December 2015 at 01:29:00 UTC (21 December, 8:29:00 pm local time). It was the first time that the first stage of an orbital rocket made a success ...

marking the first landing of a commercial orbital booster roughly a month later, on December 22, 2015. Many launches of the SpaceX

Falcon Heavy Falcon Heavy is a super heavy-lift launch vehicle with partial reusability that can carry cargo into Earth orbit and beyond. It is designed, manufactured and launched by American aerospace company SpaceX. The rocket consists of a center core ...

have included VTVL attempts for the two side boosters on each rocket. SpaceX is also developing a fully reusable rocket named

Starship A starship, starcraft, or interstellar spacecraft is a theoretical spacecraft designed for interstellar travel, traveling between planetary systems. The term is mostly found in science fiction. Reference to a "star-ship" appears as early as 1 ...

. Starship became the first launch vehicle to demonstrate the technology with both of its stages on its fourth test flight. VTVL rockets are not to be confused with aircraft that take off and land vertically and use air for support and propulsion, such as

helicopters A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forward, backward and laterally. These attribu ...

and jump jets which are

VTOL A vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft is one that can takeoff and landing, take off and land vertically without relying on a runway. This classification can include a variety of types of aircraft including helicopters as well as thrust- ...

aircraft.

History

* 1961

Bell Rocket Belt The Bell Rocket Belt is a low-power rocket propulsion device that allows an individual to safely travel or leap over small distances. It is a type of rocket pack. Overview Bell Aerosystems began development of a rocket pack which it called the ...

, personal VTVL rocket belt demonstrated. * VTVL rocket concepts were studied by

Philip Bono Philip Bono (13 January 1921 – 23 May 1993) was a Douglas Aircraft Company engineer. He was a pioneer of reusable launch system, reusable vertical landing single-stage to orbit launch vehicles. As a visionary designer, he is credited with in ...

of Douglas Aircraft Co. in the 1960s. *

was a 1960s two-stage VTVL vehicle for landing and taking off from the Moon. *Australia's

Defence Science and Technology Group The Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG) is a part of the Australian Department of Defence, which provides science and technology support to Defence and defence industry. The agency's name was changed from Defence Science and Technolog ...

successfully launched the Hoveroc rocket on 2 May 1981 in a test at Port Wakefield, South Australia. It was capable of "a controlled flight path within a horizontal plane and terminating, if needed, in a controlled descent." * The Soviet Union did some development work on a vertically landing crewed capsule called Zarya in the late 1980s. * The

was a 1/3 scale uncrewed prototype SSTO VTVL

launch vehicle A launch vehicle is typically a rocket-powered vehicle designed to carry a payload (a crewed spacecraft or satellites) from Earth's surface or lower atmosphere to outer space. The most common form is the ballistic missile-shaped multistage ...

that flew several test flights in the 1990s. Its first successful flight was in 1993. In June 1996, the vehicle set an altitude record of , before making a vertical landing.Klerkx, Greg: ''Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age'', page 104. Secker & Warburg, 2004 *

Rotary Rocket Rotary Rocket Company was a rocketry company that developed the Roton concept in the late 1990s as a fully reusable single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) crewed spacecraft. The design was initially conceived by Bevin McKinney, who shared it with Gary Hud ...

successfully tested a vertical landing system for their Roton design, based on a rocket tipped helicopter system in 1999, but were unable to raise funds to build a full vehicle. * On June 13, 2005,

VTVL Suborbital Reusable Launch Vehicle was announced. * 2005: Blue Origin Charon, a jet engine propelled test vehicle, verified the autonomous guidance and control technologies later used in Blue Origins VTVL rockets. * 2006, 2007:

Blue Origin Goddard Blue Origin Goddard is the name of the first development vehicle in Blue Origin's New Shepard program, which flew for the first time on November 13, 2006. Named after rocketry pioneer Robert H. Goddard, the vehicle is a subscale demonstrator and f ...

, a subscale demonstrator for the later New Shephard suborbital vehicle, made 3 successful flights before retirement. * During 2006–2009,

's Scorpius / Super Mod,

' Xombie and Unreasonable Rocket's Blue Ball flying VTVL rockets competed in the

Northrop Grumman Northrop Grumman Corporation is an American multinational Aerospace manufacturer, aerospace and Arms industry, defense company. With 97,000 employees and an annual revenue in excess of $40 billion, it is one of the world's largest Arms industry ...

/ NASA

. Follow-on VTVL designs including Masten's Xaero and Armadillo's Stig were aimed at higher-speed flight to higher

suborbital A sub-orbital spaceflight is a spaceflight in which the spacecraft reaches outer space, but its trajectory intersects the surface of the gravitating body from which it was launched. Hence, it will not complete one orbital revolution, will no ...

altitudes. *

announced plans in 2010 to install deployable landing gear on the

Dragon spacecraft Dragon is a family of spacecraft developed and produced by American private space transportation company SpaceX. The first variant, later named Dragon 1, flew 23 cargo missions to the International Space Station (ISS) between 2010 and 2020 be ...

and use the vehicle's thrusters to perform a land-based landing. It was cancelled in 2017. * In 2010, three VTVL craft were proffered to NASA in response to NASA's

reusable launch vehicle (sRLV) solicitation under NASA's Flight Operations Program: the

, the Masten Xaero, and the

Armadillo Armadillos () are New World placental mammals in the order (biology), order Cingulata. They form part of the superorder Xenarthra, along with the anteaters and sloths. 21 extant species of armadillo have been described, some of which are dis ...

Super Mod. *

Morpheus Morpheus ('Fashioner', derived from the meaning 'form, shape') is a god associated with sleep and dreams. In Ovid's ''Metamorphoses'' he is the son of Somnus (Sleep, the Roman counterpart of Hypnos) and appears in dreams in human form. From the ...

is a 2010s NASA project developing a vertical test bed that demonstrates new green propellant propulsion systems and autonomous landing and hazard detection technology. *

Mighty Eagle The Mighty Eagle (also known as the Ethan Chapman) was a prototype robotic lander developed by NASA at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The vehicle is an autonomous flying testbed that is used for testing hardware, senso ...

was an early 2010s Robotic Prototype Lander that was being developed by NASA as of August 2012. * SpaceX announced in September 2011 that they would attempt to develop powered descent and recovery of both

stages, with a VTVL Dragon capsule as well. * 2012: SpaceX's

Grasshopper Grasshoppers are a group of insects belonging to the suborder Caelifera. They are amongst what are possibly the most ancient living groups of chewing herbivorous insects, dating back to the early Triassic around 250 million years ago. Grassh ...

rocket was a VTVL first-stage

booster Booster may refer to: Amusement rides * Booster (Fabbri ride), a pendulum ride * Booster (HUSS ride), an evolution of the Breakdance ride * Booster (KMG ride), a pendulum ride Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional characters * Booster, a cha ...

test vehicle developed to validate low-altitude, low-velocity engineering aspects of its large-vehicle reusable rocket technology. The test vehicle made eight successful test flights in 2012–2013. Grasshopper v1.0 made its eighth, and final, test flight on October 7, 2013, flying to an altitude of (0.46 miles) before making its eighth successful VTVL landing.The Grasshopper prototype test vehicle has been retired. *2013–2017:

DragonFly A dragonfly is a flying insect belonging to the infraorder Anisoptera below the order Odonata. About 3,000 extant species of dragonflies are known. Most are tropical, with fewer species in temperate regions. Loss of wetland habitat threat ...

was a prototype low-altitude

rocket-powered A rocket-powered aircraft or rocket plane is an aircraft that uses a rocket engine for propulsion, sometimes in addition to airbreathing jet engines. Rocket planes can achieve much higher speeds than similarly sized jet aircraft, but typically ...

test article for a propulsively-landed version of the

Dragon A dragon is a Magic (supernatural), magical legendary creature that appears in the folklore of multiple cultures worldwide. Beliefs about dragons vary considerably through regions, but European dragon, dragons in Western cultures since the Hi ...

space capsule A space capsule is a spacecraft designed to transport cargo, scientific experiments, and/or astronauts to and from space. Capsules are distinguished from other spacecraft by the ability to survive reentry and return a payload to the Earth's surfa ...

. It was intended to use the technology on

Dragon 2 Dragon 2 is a class of partially reusable spacecraft developed, manufactured, and operated by the American space company SpaceX for flights to the International Space Station (ISS) and private spaceflight missions. The spacecraft, which cons ...

, their second generation crew-carrying reusable space capsule, for landing after

returning In retail, a product return is the Action (philosophy), process of a customer taking previously purchased merchandise back to the retailer, and in turn receiving a :wikt:refund, refund in the original form of payment, exchange. Overview Many ret ...

from space, as well as a launch abort system. The DragonFly prototype was used for low-altitude propulsive flight testing in 2014 and 2015. Development was abandoned by mid-2017. * 2014: SpaceX's Falcon 9 Reusable Development Vehicle was approximately 50 feet longer than Grasshopper, and was built on their full-size Falcon 9 v1.1 booster tank, with flight-design

landing legs Landing gear is the undercarriage of an aircraft or spacecraft that is used for taxiing, takeoff or landing. For aircraft, it is generally needed for all three of these. It was also formerly called ''alighting gear'' by some manufacturers, s ...

and gaseous nitrogen thrusters to control the booster attitude. F9R Dev1 made its first test flight in April 2014, to an altitude of before making a nominal vertical landing. *On November 23, 2015,

booster rocket made the first successful vertical landing following an uncrewed suborbital test flight that reached space. *On December 21, 2015,

's 20th

first stage made the first successful vertical landing of an orbital-class booster after boosting 11 commercial satellites to

low Earth orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an geocentric orbit, orbit around Earth with a orbital period, period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an orbital eccentricity, eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial object ...

Falcon 9 Flight 20 Falcon 9 flight 20 (also known as Orbcomm OG2 M2) was a Falcon 9 space launch that occurred on 22 December 2015 at 01:29:00 UTC (21 December, 8:29:00 pm local time). It was the first time that the first stage of an orbital rocket made a success ...

. *On April 8, 2016, SpaceX's Falcon 9 made the first successful landing on their

Autonomous spaceport drone ship An autonomous spaceport drone ship (ASDS) is a modified ocean-going barge developed by SpaceX and equipped with propulsion systems to maintain precise position and a large floating landing platform, landing platform. They were developed to re ...

as part of the

SpaceX CRS-8 Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly referred to as SpaceX, is an American space technology company headquartered at the Starbase development site in Starbase, Texas. Since its founding in 2002, the company has made numerous a ...

cargo resupply mission to the

International Space Station The International Space Station (ISS) is a large space station that was Assembly of the International Space Station, assembled and is maintained in low Earth orbit by a collaboration of five space agencies and their contractors: NASA (United ...

. *Since 2017, DLR,

CNES CNES () is the French national space agency. Headquartered in central Paris, the agency is overseen by the ministries of the Armed Forces, Economy and Finance and Higher Education, Research and Innovation. It operates from the Toulouse Spac ...

and

JAXA The is the Japanese national air and space agency. Through the merger of three previously independent organizations, JAXA was formed on 1 October 2003. JAXA is responsible for research, technology development and launch of satellites into o ...

are developing a reusable VTVL rocket demonstrator called

CALLISTO CALLISTO (''Cooperative Action Leading to Launcher Innovation in Stage Toss-back Operations'') is a reusable VTVL Prototype, demonstrator propelled by a small 40 kN Japanese LOX-LH2 rocket engine. It is being developed jointly by the CNES, French ...

(''Cooperative Action Leading to Launcher Innovation in Stage Toss-back Operations).'' *January 2018: Chinese private space company

LinkSpace LinkSpace ( zh, s=翎客航天, p=Líng-kè Hángtiān , l= LINK Aerospace) or Link Space Aerospace Technology Inc. is a Chinese private space launch company based in Beijing. It is led by CEO Hu Zhenyu, and founded as the first private rocket f ...

successfully tested its reusable experimental orbital rocket with a vertical takeoff and vertical landing (VTVL) *On February 6, 2018, SpaceX successfully landed two of their first stage boosters during their demonstration flight of the Falcon Heavy. *2018:

ISRO The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO ) is India's national space agency, headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka. It serves as the principal research and development arm of the Department of Space (DoS), overseen by the Prime Minister o ...

revealed details about the ADMIRE test vehicle for which a test and landing site was being developed. The vehicle will have supersonic retro propulsion, special retractable landing legs which will act as steerable grid fins & will be guided by integrated navigation system that will have a laser altimeter and a

NavIC Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), with an operational name of NavIC (acronym for Navigation with Indian Constellation; also, 'sailor' or 'navigator' in Indian languages), is an autonomous regional satellite navigation syste ...

receiver. *Low-altitude VTVL testing of the large -diameter ''

Starhopper Since April 2023, Starship has been launched times, with successes and failures. The vehicle Starship composes when combined with the Super Heavy booster, also named Starship, has been developed with the intention of lowering launch costs usin ...

'', an early test article for the

SpaceX Starship Starship is a two-stage fully reusable launch vehicle, reusable super heavy-lift launch vehicle under development by American aerospace company SpaceX. On 20 April 2023, with the Starship flight test 1, first Integrated Flight Test, Starship b ...

, occurred at the SpaceX South Texas Launch Site near

Brownsville, Texas Brownsville ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the county seat of Cameron County, Texas, Cameron County, located on the western Gulf Coast in South Texas, adjacent to the Mexico–United States border, border with Matamoros, Tamaulipas ...

in July and August 2019 with flights up to ~ were made. *In August 2020, SpaceX began testing its Starship prototypes. SN5, SN6, and SN15 made successful VTVL launch and landings while SN8, SN9,

SN10 The unimolecular nucleophilic substitution (SN1) reaction is a substitution reaction in organic chemistry. The Hughes-Ingold symbol of the mechanism expresses two properties—"SN" stands for "nucleophilic substitution", and the "1" says that t ...

, and SN11 were destroyed due to landing failure. *On July 20, 2021,

rocket made its first successful vertical landing following a crewed suborbital flight. Four passengers were on board the

NS-16 Blue Origin NS-16 was a sub-orbital spaceflight mission operated by Blue Origin which flew on 20 July 2021. The mission was the sixteenth flight of the company's New Shepard integrated launch vehicle and spacecraft, and its first flight with h ...

, including

Jeff Bezos Jeffrey Preston Bezos ( ;; and Robinson (2010), p. 7. ; born January 12, 1964) is an American businessman best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and clou ...

. *In July 2021, October 2021, and May 2022,

Deep Blue Aerospace Jiangsu Deep Blue Aerospace Technology Co., Ltd. () is a private space launch enterprise founded in November 2016 by Huo Liang. The company is located in Jiangsu province on the East coast of China. It is engaged in the development of reusable ...

's Nebula M1, equipped with the Leiting-20 kerolox engine, successfully conducted VTVL flight tests at ten-meter, hundred-meter, and one-kilometer altitudes respectively. *On November 2, 2023 and December 10, 2023, i-Space’s Hyperbola-2Y, powered by a restartable methalox engine, completed vertical launch and recovery twice, with flight heights of 178 meters and 343 meters respectively. *On January 19, 2024,

LandSpace LandSpace Technology Corporation (doing business as LandSpace) is a Chinese commercial space launch provider based in Beijing. It was founded in 2015 by Zhang Changwu. In July 2023, the company's Zhuque-2 rocket became the world's first methan ...

’s Zhuque-3 VTVL-1 test made its first successful vertical landing following a suborbital hop test powered by a methalox engine. *On January 26, 2024,

ExPace ExPace (ExPace Technology Corporation; also called CASIC Rocket Technology Company) is a Chinese state-owned space rocket company, based in Wuhan, Hubei, China. Its corporate compound is located at the Wuhan National Space Industry Base space ...

's Kuaizhou reusable technology test rocket completed its inaugural vertical takeoff and landing (VTVL) test, hovering for nine seconds before touching down at the launch pad. The entire flight lasted 22 seconds. *On October 7, 2024, ISRO revealed plans to test VTVL technology on a small-scale vehicle (possibly ADMIRE test vehicle) before integrating it into the NGLV first stage and booster stage.

Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre The Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) is a major space research centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), focusing on rocket and space vehicles for India's satellite programme. It is located in Thiruvananthapuram, in the India ...

is developing advanced navigation system, as well as steerable grid fins, deployable landing legs, and advanced avionics. *On October 13, 2024, SpaceX landed Super Heavy Booster 12 at the launch site. Unlike Falcon 9, Super Heavy lacks landing legs, and is instead caught by the launch tower. Its upper stage, Ship 30, landed softly in the Indian Ocean before detonating.

Vertical landing technology

The technology required to successfully achieve retropropulsive landings—the vertical landing, or "VL," addition to the standard vertical takeoff (VT) technology of the early decades of human spaceflight—has several parts. First, the thrust is normally required to be vectored and requires some degree of

throttling A throttle is any mechanism by which the power or speed of an engine is controlled. Throttle or throttling may also refer to: Fiction * ''Throttle'' (film), a 2005 thriller * ''Throttle'' (novella), a 2009 novella by Stephen King and his son Jo ...

. However, a

thrust-to-weight ratio Thrust-to-weight ratio is a dimensionless ratio of thrust to weight of a rocket, jet engine, propeller engine, or a vehicle propelled by such an engine that is an indicator of the performance of the engine or vehicle. The instantaneous thrust-to-w ...

of more than 1 is not strictly necessary. The vehicle must be capable of calculating its position and altitude; small deviations from the vertical can cause large deviations in the vehicle’s horizontal position.

RCS RCS may refer to: Organizations Arts and entertainment * Radio Corporation of Singapore * Radcliffe Choral Society, a choral ensemble at Harvard University *RCS MediaGroup (Rizzoli-Corriere della Sera), an Italian publishing group *Royal Conserva ...

systems are usually required to keep the vehicle at the correct angle. SpaceX also uses

grid fin Grid fins (or lattice fins) are a type of flight control surfaces, flight control surface used on rockets and bombs, sometimes in place of more conventional control surfaces, such as planar fins. They were developed in the 1950s by a team led by ...

s for

attitude control Spacecraft attitude control is the process of controlling the orientation of a spacecraft (vehicle or satellite) with respect to an inertial frame of reference or another entity such as the celestial sphere, certain fields, and nearby objects, ...

during the landing of their

boosters. It can also be necessary to be able to ignite engines in a variety of conditions potentially including

vacuum A vacuum (: vacuums or vacua) is space devoid of matter. The word is derived from the Latin adjective (neuter ) meaning "vacant" or "void". An approximation to such vacuum is a region with a gaseous pressure much less than atmospheric pressur ...

hypersonic In aerodynamics, a hypersonic speed is one that exceeds five times the speed of sound, often stated as starting at speeds of Mach 5 and above. The precise Mach number at which a craft can be said to be flying at hypersonic speed varies, since i ...

supersonic Supersonic speed is the speed of an object that exceeds the speed of sound (Mach 1). For objects traveling in dry air of a temperature of 20 °C (68 °F) at sea level, this speed is approximately . Speeds greater than five times ...

transonic Transonic (or transsonic) flow is air flowing around an object at a speed that generates regions of both subsonic and Supersonic speed, supersonic airflow around that object. The exact range of speeds depends on the object's critical Mach numb ...

, and subsonic. The additional weight of fuel, larger tank,

and their deployment mechanisms will usually reduce the performance of a soft landing system compared to expendable vehicles, all other things being equal. The main benefit of the technology is seen in the potential for substantial reductions in space flight

cost Cost is the value of money that has been used up to produce something or deliver a service, and hence is not available for use anymore. In business, the cost may be one of acquisition, in which case the amount of money expended to acquire it i ...

s as a result of being able to reuse rockets after successful VTVL landings.

Popular culture

Vertical landing of

spaceships Spaceship may refer to: Spaceflight * Space vehicle, the combination of launch vehicle and spacecraft * Spacecraft, a craft, vehicle, vessel or machine designed for spaceflight * Starship, a spacecraft built for interstellar flight Computing ...

was the predominant mode of rocket landing envisioned in the pre-

spaceflight Spaceflight (or space flight) is an application of astronautics to fly objects, usually spacecraft, into or through outer space, either with or without humans on board. Most spaceflight is uncrewed and conducted mainly with spacecraft such ...

era. Many

science fiction Science fiction (often shortened to sci-fi or abbreviated SF) is a genre of speculative fiction that deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts. These concepts may include information technology and robotics, biological manipulations, space ...

authors as well as depictions in popular culture showed rockets landing vertically, typically resting after landing on the space vehicle's

fin A fin is a thin component or appendage attached to a larger body or structure. Fins typically function as foils that produce lift or thrust, or provide the ability to steer or stabilize motion while traveling in water, air, or other fluids. F ...

s. This view was sufficiently ingrained in popular culture that in 1993, following a successful low-altitude test flight of a prototype rocket, a writer opined: "The DC-X launched vertically, hovered in mid-air ... The spacecraft stopped mid-air again and, as the engines throttled back, began its successful vertical landing. Just like

Buck Rogers Buck Rogers is a science fiction adventure hero and feature comic strip created by Philip Francis Nowlan first appearing in daily American newspapers on January 7, 1929, and subsequently appearing in Sunday newspapers, international newspapers, b ...

." In the 2010s,

rockets A rocket (from , and so named for its shape) is a vehicle that uses jet propulsion to accelerate without using any surrounding air. A rocket engine produces thrust by reaction to exhaust expelled at high speed. Rocket engines work entirely fr ...

have likewise seen the appellation to this popular culture notion of Buck Rogers in a "Quest to Create a '''Buck Rogers''' Reusable Rocket." The ''

Young Sheldon ''Young Sheldon'' is an American sitcom television series created by Chuck Lorre and Steven Molaro which aired on CBS from September 25, 2017, to May 16, 2024. The series is a Spin-off (media), spin-off prequel to ''The Big Bang Theory'' that ...

'' episode, " A Patch, a Modem, and a Zantac®" features

Sheldon Cooper Sheldon Lee Cooper, B.S., M.S., M.A., Ph.D., Sc.D., is a fictional character and one of the protagonists in the 2007–2019 CBS television series ''The Big Bang Theory'' and its 2017–2024 spinoff series ''Young Sheldon'', portrayed by act ...

developing the equations for VTVL in the 1980s, only to have them rejected by NASA for lack of the technical capability to implement it at that time. Sheldon concludes that he is ahead of his time. A flashforward to 2016 shows the successful SpaceX CRS-8 mission, followed by SpaceX founder Elon Musk looking over Sheldon's old notebook then hiding it in a desk drawer.

References

External links

* Astronautix.com �
List of VTVL rocket concepts from the past
* Hobbyspace.com �
Development of VTVL rockets around the world
{{Types of take-off and landing Types of take-off and landing *

History

Vertical landing technology

Popular culture

See also

References

External links