You may well be forgiven for thinking that Rockets which take off vertically
and then land again vertically were a recent development by the likes of Blue
Origin and SpaceX but a quick look back into the history of rocketry and you'll
see that this technique is far from new and was first used nearly sixty years
ago. Just to get a rocket to take off and land vertically requires a lot of
technology to come together. You need to have enough thrust to take off but then
enough fuel left to descend back to earth, you also need to be able to
relight the engines and up to hypersonic speeds as the rocket falls back to the
ground. You need to be able to gimbal or tilt the engines and the Rockets angle
of descent without it tumbling out of control you also need to be able to
throttle down the engines to a small amount of thrust comparable to that
which is required to launch the rocket with the same engines and you need legs
to land on and the mechanism of which to deploy them. The image of rockets landing
vertically on their tail fins has been popularized in science fiction since the
early 1930s though it took nearly 30 years to bring the technology to a point
where it could be used practically though it wasn't quite in the way you
might have expected. The first instance of a rocket-powered vertical takeoff and
vertical landing was shown in 1961 with the Bell rocket belt. Although the first
rocket pack had been developed and patented by a Russian Alexander Andreyev
in 1919 and various people since have claimed to have invented things like the
flying rucksack, it wasn't until the mid-1950s that Bell AeroSystems starting
work on the Bell rocket belt for the US Army. The rocket belt used a hydrogen
peroxide engine but the 19 liters of fuel in the tanks could only provide 21
seconds of flight and travelled around about a 120 meters. But it was
a hit with the public and it was toured around the world and also appeared in
the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball.
But the US army were less impressed with the amount of backup required to get one
man 120 meters and they canceled the contract but within a few years there
would be a rocket-powered vertical takeoff and vertical landing vehicle
that would be a total success and be seen by hundreds of millions of people
around the world. That vehicle was the Apollo Lunar Lander, a design that was
used in the most inhospitable place man had ever been to and worked without fail
on six separate missions. Though when you think about it it actually worked in
Reverse because it dropped from orbit to land on the moon and then the ascent
module which was only part of a lunar lander took off to return the crew back
to the command module and then back onto earth. There was also an advantage to
landing on the moon because he only has one sixth of gravity of that on the
earth. Fighting gravity is the biggest issue for any rocket but particularly
one which had to slow and hover to find a landing spot
although the lander had some automation in the form of radar to detect the
distance from the ground and computer control of a single engine when the
radar which should have been turned off for the final part of a descent was
accidentally left on an overloaded the computer with data. Without the computer
it fell to Neil Armstrong to manually land the lander on the surface of the
moon. Armstrong was well versed with a procedure as he had trained on the
earth-based version of the lander which was affectionately known as the flying
bedstead. In Earth's gravity and with no computers to help him, he described
controlling it as like trying to balance a plate on the end of a broom handle and
on one occasion when a thruster ran out of fuel he had just a seconds notice to
eject and avoid almost certain death as the vehicle lost control and crashed.
This shows just how difficult it is to actually land something which is powered
by rockets especially an object which is tall and
thin and not really designed to come back in the reverse manner of how it
took off. It wasn't until the mid 1990s but the first true vertical takeoff and
vertical landing rocket was seen in the form of the McDonnell Douglas Delta
clipper experimental for DC X. The idea of a low-cost single-stage-to-orbit
vehicle using off-the-shelf components was proposed to McDonnell Douglas in
1985 by max hunter, their ex chief engineer for Space Systems who had been
thinking of the concept since the sixties but Mcdonnell Douglas weren't interested
in funding the idea themselves. So hunter who had also worked for President Ronald
Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative organizational SDIO went with Jerry
Pournelle and General Graham to sell the idea to Vice President Dan Quayle on the
premise that any space-based defense system would need a delivery system that
would be far cheaper more reliable and with much faster turnaround times than
the space shuttle. With the approval of a project and it coming under the SDIO
banner away from the bureaucracy of NASA and
the Air Force it allowed the small team of around a hundred people at McDonnell
Douglas to build a one-third scale prototype in just 21 months for a cost
of just $60 million dollars starting in 1991. The design would take off like a
normal rocket and then land back again in the same vertical position as it took
off on extendable legs under its own power and without any parachutes. The
prototype was never designed to go into orbit and in fact only of a flew to a
height of around 2-1/2 km but that was enough to prove
the concept. The outer shell was custom-built by Scale Composites and the
rest of a craft including the RL-10A engines and the control systems were
off-the-shelf components. The testing program started in 1993 and flew three
test flights until funding ran out as a result of the SDI program coming to
an end. NASA provided further funding and testing resumed. On one flight a minor
explosion occurred and the DCX can be seen with a hole in its side but it
successfully performed an abort and an auto landing. After the repairs it
continued testing in 1995 but after a hard landing cracked the outer shell and
again funding had been cut, there was not enough funds to carry out repairs. During
1995 NASA begrudgingly agreed to take on the project because of its previous test
flight successes but with several upgrades and a project would be renamed
as the DC XA. In 1996 testing resumed but this time it was also in competition
with the Lockheed Martin X-33 venture star project which NASA had chosen as a
possible replacement for the shuttle and ultimately the DC-X lost out to what
NASA said were budgetary constraints but too many the X-33 was NASA's pet project
and the DC-X was something they didn't really want even though the cost of
building a new DC XA was just $50 million, a very cheap price when compared
to other rocket projects. NASA would go on to spend $920M
on the X-33 over the next few years
only to cancel it at the last minute due to technical issues with the composite
fuel tanks and before any test flights had taken place.
Although the DC-X was at an end it inspired the Blue Origin New Shepard and
some of the engineers which worked on the DC-X project went on to work at Blue
Origin. Although SpaceX won't say directly we
can see the influence of the DC X on the Falcon 9 reusable rockets. Some NASA
engineers also believe that DC-X concept would make a good Mars Lander with a
crew of up to six people. The testing on earth proved that it could be done and
with the weaker gravity of Mars the payload capacity would be greatly
enhanced. And so we come to the present day with both SpaceX and blue
origen both using similar techniques to the DC-X though with the benefit of the
extra time since the demise of a DC-X the designs have moved on considerably with
the SpaceX Falcon 9 proving but it can be used for delivering commercial and
military payloads into orbit and even sending a car to Mars. They say that
there is nothing new and that we stand on the shoulders of giants and that's
pretty much true but each step of a way needs skilled people to fully understand
what has gone before in order to build the new ideas just as the DC-X proved a
principle of vertical takeoff in air maneuvering and vertical landing. SpaceX
have taken those principles and found new solutions to enable them to make a
fully working reusable rocket delivery system and that takes people that have
the skills to make those next steps. Our sponsor for this video Brilliant.org is
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