Sideways Style: SpaceX’s Grasshopper Is the Future of Reusable Launch Systems

On Wednesday, SpaceX released a video of its Grasshopper rocket ascending 820 feet high, hovering laterally for 328 feet in a controlled burn, and then settling itself comfortably back on the launch pad. At over 10 stories tall, the rocket is “particularly challenging” to control according to SpaceX officials. But it still looked stylish as hell.

That’s what we call a 21st Century rocket ship. The Grasshopper is Phase 1 of SpaceX’s master plan to build an entirely reusable launch vehicle (RLV). Elon Musk wants a spacecraft that can launch, chuck its payload into space, complete a powered descent back to the launch pad, and be ready for the next trip all within 24 hours. It’s a tall order, but this week’s test flight proves that SpaceX is already well on their way to conquering it. The age of the daily space ferry is nigh.

Expendable launch vehicles (ELVs) have been the industry standard since Sputnik kickstarted the Space Age. It is easier and cheaper, so the conventional wisdom goes, to trash rocket stages in the atmosphere than it is to bring them home. An RLV must be much be built to endure several flights, plus they require re-entry equipment—heat shields, for example—which can limit payloads. The only RLV to have been recycled for multiple trips into orbit is the Space Shuttle, and its pockmarked history hasn’t been great PR for the idea as a whole.

Even so, Musk thinks that after the initial investment, the benefits of an RLV system will easily outweigh the negatives. In fact, if we’re serious about becoming a space-faring species, it’s obvious that we can’t keep junking half our ships every single time we want to visit our secret moon families. When the Grasshopper does become a frequent space-flyer, SpaceX projects the cost of each trip will go down a hundredfold. It will always be a more complex system to operate than the ELVs, but it will save time, money, and resources. Plus, we won’t be using our own atmosphere as a rocket incinerator anymore.

The Grasshopper might be the coolest thing to come out of SpaceX this year, but the company isn’t planning to rest on its laurels. The first launch of the Falcon Heavy, essentially three Falcon 9s strapped together, is on their 2014 Launch Manifest. That’s the juggernaut they intend to send to Mars one day, and it will be reusable too.

Stay tuned for news of Martian Hyperloops, because they are inevitable.