Grasshopper (rocket)

Grasshopper and the Falcon 9 Reusable Development Vehicles (F9R Dev) were experimental technology-demonstrator reusable rockets that performed vertical takeoffs and landings. The project was privately funded by SpaceX, with no funds provided by the government. Two prototypes were built, and both were launched from the ground.

Grasshopper was announced in 2011 and began low-altitude, low-velocity hover/landing testing in 2012. The initial Grasshopper test vehicle was 106 ft (32 m) tall and made eight successful test flights in 2012 and 2013 before being retired. A second Grasshopper-class prototype was the larger and more capable Falcon 9 Reusable Development Vehicle (F9R Dev, also known as F9R Dev1) based on the Falcon 9 v1.1 launch vehicle. It was tested at higher altitudes and supersonic speeds as well as providing additional low-altitude tests. The F9R Dev1 vehicle was built in 2013–2014 and made its first low-altitude flight test on 17 April 2014; it was lost during a three-engine test at the McGregor test site on 22 August 2014.

The Grasshopper and F9R Dev tests were fundamental to the development of the reusable Falcon 9 and reusable Falcon Heavy rockets, which are planned to require vertical landings of the near-empty Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy first-stage booster tanks and engine assemblies. The Grasshopper and the F9R Dev tests led into a series of high-altitude, high-speed controlled-descent tests of post-mission (spent) Falcon 9 booster stages that accompanied the commercial Falcon 9 missions since September 2013. The latter eventually resulted in the first successful booster landing on 21 December 2015.

The Grasshopper technology demonstrator first became known publicly in the third quarter of 2011, when space journalists first wrote about it after analyzing space launch regulations of the Federal Aviation Administration.

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