24 thoughts on “The Latest Masten Video”

  1. Quite the twitch at the top of the arc. Do they have any steering other than the main engine? Looks like they need something.

  7. They did say they were finished with Xombie as a test-bed after this, so it didn’t really need the ACS for the purpose of the tests, it was stable enough.

    That was very cool.

  8. Thanks for posting this, I will probably watch it a few more times, what a great catch. As others note, very cool.

  13. Well, yes they’re just for roll control. Did I say that they did any more than that?

    No, but the original question was about steering, so your comment wasn’t particularly relevant… 🙂

  15. If all they had is a gimballed engine, that’s really impressive. They had excellent response in throttling. The engine start and stop is cool. Watching that, I wonder why people think the moon has been abandoned.

  17. So if they’re done with Xombie… can I have it? It would beat the hell out of any other RC toy.

    But seriously, what follow on craft are in the works? What increase in capability will it/they have?

  18. I was in Boston visiting with my brother, and we were having some snacks at one of those oyster bars when CNN Headline News was showing over and over again a test of the DC-X, where the rocket blasted off, hovered for a moment, translated sideways, then landed tail first, controlling its descent with rocket thrust.

    Not knowing anything about the tradeoffs between a rocket-thrust landing and a wings-and-wheels Shuttle-style landing, at the time I though the whole exercise was pointless and questioned whether a rocket-thrust “Buck Rogers spaceship” style recovery and landing ever made any sense, especially in our deep Earth-bound gravitational well, and I asked why CNN kept showing the clip over and over again.

    My brother, always quick with a quip, opined, “Well, its not like its ‘rocket science’ or any such thing!”

  19. Ken,
    If you want to make an offer on Xombie, we’d definitely be willing to sell it…unfortunately you won’t be able to buy a new Porsche this year if you do…

    …on a more serious note, I’ll see if sometime soon we can put up a new technical update. Our next step is rebuilding Xoie with an aeroshell (variously called AeroXoie or Brutus, depending on if you’re talking to our marketing guys or the engineers…)

    ~Jon

  20. Am I correct in assuming that they killed the engine on purpose to establish that they could re-start in flight? I haven’t seen anything so far that would indicate that this was an accidental cut-off and a hasty unplanned re-start. Either way, congratulations to Masten! This kind of safety ability is much more reassuring than the self-destruct system the Falcon 9 is having to endure.

  21. Whoops! I found the earlier thread where my question is answered; yes, t’was done on purpose. My hat’s off to them, and you could add me to the volunteer flight list!

  22. the original question was about steering, so your comment wasn’t particularly relevant

    I suspect with enough roll (yaw or pitch) steering could become problematic. Didn’t seem to be a problem here though.

  23. Couldn’t you get this thing to cover a significant area of ground by doing a series of hops and catches. Seems you could go pretty far on a given amount of fuel pogo sticking around instead of one long burn. Or if anything, just even more cool to see 🙂

  24. I don’t think so Josh. If you want to cover ground you need enough vertical component to keep you aloft with the rest going to horizontal movement (both acceleration and deceleration.)

    Perhaps air friction would be an issue. If so, a series of ballistic hops might work as you suggest.

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