SpaceX, the commercial space company that is a participant in President Barack Obama's commercial crew program, has acquired an experimental permit to test fly a verticle take off and landing rocket called the Grasshopper at its McGregor, Texas, test site.
The Grasshopper will consist of a Falcon 9 stage 1 fuel tank, a single Merlin-1D engine, four steel landing legs, and a steel support structure. The spacecraft will burn a refined kerosene fuel with liquid oxygen for 122,000 pounds of thrust. The spacecraft's height will be 106 feet, with the fuel tank being 85 feet in height.
The test plan for the Grasshopper suggests it is meant to be a technology test vehicle, similar to the DC-X that was flown in the 1990s at the behest of the Defense Department and NASA, as well as similar vertical take-off and landing vehicles being flown by Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin and Masten Space Systems. The phase 1 test flight will take the Grasshopper to 240 feet and then land, for a total of 45 seconds flight time. The phase 2 test flight would take the vehicle to 670 feet and then descend, again for a total of 45 seconds flight time.
The phase 3 flight tests would take the Grasshopper to increasing altitudes of 1,200 feet, then 2,500 feet, then 5,000 feet, then 7,500 feet, then finally 11,500 feet, with a maximum test flight of 160 seconds.
SpaceX proposes to build a concrete launch pad, which will also double as a landing pad, along with other support infrastructure, at its McGregor, Texas facility. When Grasshopper begins its test regime, it will constitute the third reusable rocket ship to be tested in Texas. Blue Origin has been testing a vertical take-off and landing ship at its facilities in Van Horn, Texas. Armadillo Aerospace has tested a variety of VTVL reusable rockets at Caddo Mills, Texas.
NASA has been testing a VTVL reusable rocket called the Morbeus at the Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston. The Morpheus is based on technology developed by Armadillo Aerospace.
Besides testing rocket technology, there are a number of possible applications for a VTVL reusable rocket, which include taking paying customers to suborbital heights, similar to the horizontal take off and landing space craft being developed by Virgin Galactic. Such rockets could also become reusable craft designed to land on the surfaces of other worlds, including the moon and Mars.
Texas seems to be becoming a center for a new vertical take-off and landing spacecraft industry. This may be despite and not because of the slightly ham handed efforts of an organization calling itself the Texas Space Alliance, which has taken a somewhat combative tone vis-à-vis commercial space as opposed to NASA, centered around JSC. Texas seems to be big enough and business friendly enough to contain both a major NASA facility and a fledgling commercial space sector.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times, and The Weekly Standard.
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