reusable rockets

A SpaceX concept animation showing the planned fully reusable Falcon 9, with both first and second stages performing vertical landings.

SpaceX footage of the Grasshopper vertical takeoff and landing test vehicle making its first roughly 6-foot hop in McGregor, Texas, on September 21, 2012. It was an early step toward a reusable Falcon 9 first stage.

A SpaceX concept animation of a Falcon 9 and Dragon launch with powered vertical return of both stages and the capsule. It was uploaded to YouTube in 2011.

Footage of DC-X Flight 8 from July 1995 at White Sands, in which the Delta Clipper Experimental reusable rocket turned over into a re-entry profile and re-oriented itself for landing.

SpaceX footage of the Grasshopper vehicle's 744 m test hop, filmed from a hexacopter that gets closer than earlier flights. Grasshopper was a vertical takeoff and landing rig built to test returning rockets to the pad.

A Veritasium video touring Relativity Space and explaining why 3D printing whole rockets cuts tooling costs, allows rapid iteration, reduces part count and enables new designs. It includes an interview with Scott Manley on aerospace engineering.

Curious Droid surveys vertical take-off and landing rockets that predate SpaceX and Blue Origin, including the McDonnell Douglas DC-X of the 1990s. It shows that propulsive landing has about 60 years of history.

SpaceX's September 2019 Starship update presentation, where Elon Musk describes the design and development of Starship and Super Heavy. It covers construction and plans for reusable orbital rockets.

Destin Sandlin tours United Launch Alliance's rocket factory with CEO Tory Bruno, showing friction stir welding, structural rocket skins and large milled parts.

SpaceX footage of the Grasshopper reusable rocket prototype flying 325 m before landing on its pad. It was the first test to use the full navigation sensor suite and closed-loop control for a precision landing.

Everyday Astronaut's Tim Dodd runs an hour-long, data-driven analysis of what rockets actually emit and how that compares with airliners and other industries. It breaks down exhaust by propellant type, per-passenger and total emissions, and ways launches could be cleaner.

A five-hour Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack covering Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, programming, games and rockets.

Sal Khan interviews Elon Musk in a 2013 Khan Academy entrepreneurship series. Musk discusses PayPal, rocket efficiency and reusability, and how he approaches education and learning.

Joe Barnard of BPS.space shows his model rocket Scout F landing vertically like a SpaceX booster after seven years of attempts. The video documents the successful landing and the build-up to it.

Thunderf00t's critique of SpaceX's claims, arguing its launches are not actually cheaper than competitors or the Space Shuttle. It questions the economics of reusability.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

Tom Lehrer's satirical song about Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who went from the Nazi missile program to the US space program. It includes the famous line about not caring where the rockets come down.

Scott Manley looks at SpinLaunch, which aims to throw launch vehicles out of a spinning launcher at hypersonic speed. He covers its recent Mach 1 test of a one-third scale launcher and the engineering problems that remain.

SpaceX's recap of the Falcon Heavy debut launch, with side booster landings and a Tesla Roadster with Starman sent into orbit.

A BBC Four documentary following Alan Bond and Reaction Engines as they pursue the Skylon spaceplane and its SABRE engine. It covers the history from HOTOL and the heat-exchanger breakthrough.

Julia co-creator Stefan Karpinski explains why multiple dispatch makes Julia code and types reusable across packages with so little friction. He covers sharing basic types and sharing generic algorithms.

In a 2010 Google Tech Talk, Kirk Sorensen gives an economic analysis of what spent nuclear fuel actually contains. He argues it is mostly valuable material that can be partitioned and reused, not just waste to be isolated for 100,000 years.

First lecture of Stanford's CS106A Programming Methodology by Mehran Sahami, giving a course overview and starting on programming. The course teaches software engineering principles using Java.

A Channel 4 Equinox documentary on the NK-33 engines built for the Soviet N1 moon rocket and how they ended up in the USA. It includes rare footage and interviews with veterans of the early Soviet space program.

NASASpaceflight's 24/7 live stream from SpaceX's Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, showing Starship and Super Heavy development, testing and launches.

A hobbyist build-and-experiment video on rotating detonation engines (RDEs), where a continuous detonation wave spins around an annular chamber. The creator 3D prints parts and tests a small engine, while being candid about uncertainty over whether a true rotating wave was achieved.

Terry Davis, author of TempleOS, demonstrates his SimStructure physics simulator and builds a PID controller using math from Numerical Recipes in C. The description notes PID controllers are used in everything from rockets to espresso machines.

Neil and Laura Westwood pitch their Magic Whiteboard, reusable static-cling whiteboard sheets, to the investors on the BBC's Dragons' Den and win 100,000 pounds of investment.

Thunderf00t's second video critiquing SpinLaunch, the company that proposes flinging rockets and payloads into space with a giant centrifuge. He argues the idea is physically unworkable.