Ben Brockert | Rocket "boosted hop" soft abort to 823.4 meters, 27 January 2010 @bbrockert | Uploaded January 2010 | Updated October 2024, 8 hours ago.
823.4 meters above sea level, that is. It started at 822.2 meters above sea level idle hover position, making it about a 4 foot hop. On this flight Ian told the rocket to soft abort right after takeoff, which meant that it went into an automatic landing routine.

What's a boosted hop? It's where the vehicle accelerates rapidly to get vertical velocity, then sets the engine down to idle, coasts over the top, then throttles up again to land. It's more similar to a suborbital science flight than the velocity-based hovering flights we've done so far.

This was obviously a very small test to see how the new controller and new guidance routine works, and it behaved quite nicely. It's flying on the tether to keep the vehicle safe.

A payload on the vehicle would have felt 1.4g on the boost portion. The acceleration is slightly less than normal gravity on the coast, about 0.7g, equivalent to the gravity at the top of the clouds of Uranus.

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