SpaceX, the private space transport company founded and run by Elon Musk, has made yet another advance: rockets that not only don’t burn up in the atmosphere on the way down, but are actually capable of landing vertically on the exact spot from which they took off.
Their Grasshopper is, according to the press release, “a 10-story Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing (VTVL) vehicle designed to test the technologies needed to return a rocket back to Earth intact.” And the video of a recent test on June 14, 2013, is pretty awesome. And no, the second part of the video is not the first part in reverse — I checked.
Wow. Those guys have gotten -really- good at playing Lunar Lander.