Grasshopper

[Valthissa]

My company makes wind tunnel models. SpaceX is one of our customers. When they started talking about landing vertically on the tail of the rocket we laughed at them. Last year we made a model that resolved all of the forces on the rocket nozzles while modeling the gimbaled nozzle assemblies. This year we are making an acoustic model. We have always been impressed with how smart the people at SpaceX are, we just thought they were trying to do something almost impossible.

click here (http://spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=0) to see who's laughing now.

This is pretty fancy engineering.

[Latrinsorm]

Wow.

Space launch in general is wow, but seriously landing a rocket on its tail? Seriously? Even if it turns out to be impractical for stages getting all the way to space, it's pretty amazing.

[Ardwen]

its also so 1950s scifi, very very cool

[Archigeek]

Saw this on wimp.com. Pretty great. They need to spiff up that rocket a bit though. If you're going to space, you should do it with class.

[Back]

Thanks for sharing this. I believe that there is nothing we cannot do if we put our heads together to make it happen.

[BigWorm]

Engineering, fuck yeah!

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lj8nu5RLx81qif8uco1_500.jpg

[Originate]

That is pretty cool.

[SHAFT]

Agreed, pretty sweet. As is this http://applicants.mars-one.com/