SpaceX to attempt landing on solid ground

[Gill]

SpaceX hopes to fly a Falcon 9 rocket booster back to a solid landing platform within a few months, the next step after the company's initial attempts to land boosters in water.

The company last week confirmed that the first stage of a Falcon 9 successfully landed softly in the Atlantic Ocean after its July 14 launch of Orbcomm satellites from Cape Canaveral.

For those whom have not been keeping track, two propulsive landings made over the ocean have been already been attempted by Falcon 9 1.1 first stages in the last year, not including previous attempts without landing gear. SpaceX included such a demonstration as being a target for completion by the middle of 2014 and, "Musk explained that the actual reuse of a recovered first stage could happen as early at the end of 2014 but that it depends on a number of factors". Despite the helium leakage issues related to the retractable landing gear and the numerous delays (including that of the Falcon Heavy series), SpaceX might actually accomplishing their goal as stated. That they actually got this far is rather surprising, considering the notable failures of the since abandoned Falcon 1 series.

Speaking of reusable spacecraft, Sierra Nevada has also announced that their Dream Chaser space plane will have its first flight by 2016, having completed a critical developmental milestone set by NASA. Likewise, Sierra Nevada is entering a partnership with JAXA that may include the unprecedented manned spaceflight operations launched from Japan. This in particular comes as a big surprise, as Dream Chaser was visibly behind Boeing's CST-100 and SpaceX's Dragon V2 in development, something that a recent accident to a test article did not help.

[Iroscato]

I've been following this pretty closely, and I love the concept behind the Dragon V2. I really hope it works, if it does it will be a great step in the right direction.

[Gill]

A lot of people appeared to be concerned that the design changes in the capsule would seriously delay the first manned flight of the Dragon V2, though photos depicting wind tunnel tests of the Dragon V2 leaked onto the internet prior to the official unveiling on the 29th of May revealed that SpaceX has probably had it in mind for a while now.

While it's not gotten as much fanfare, the partnership between Sierra Nevada and JAXA is also quite promising. It's more capital for Dream Chaser and perhaps, as Sierra Nevada has suggested, the first real possibility for manned spaceflight to take place from the nation as plans to man rate sample return variants of the H-II have since amounted to nothing. The real irony, however, is that Dream Chaser is in position that was occupied by Japan's previous attempt at a reusable space plane: The appropriately named HOPE-X.