Armadillo Aerospace, led by John Carmack, made a vertical-takeoff-vertical-landing (VTVL) rocket test flight on Sat Aug 7. John’s report describes a story of lessons learned and dramatic video of the vehicle crashing. However, if you want to know what a successful rocket hover flight should look like, refer back to the notes and video from their Aug 1 flight test.

Though I don’t have exhaustive records, my rocketry experience leads me to believe that Armadillo Aerospace is the only project which has succeeded with VTVL rocket flights without government funding. Carmack posts notes from the research on the web regularly. Prior examples of VTVL rockets with government funding included the Apollo lunar landers, McDonnel Douglas’ DC/X and an ongoing Japanese space agency experiment which started in the mid-90’s.

Update [2004-8-9 6:47:32 by rickyjames]: : Member barakn also notes: “Space Transport Corp.’s Rubicon 1 crashed on Sunday. Looks like the Ansari X Prize is really is causing engineers to push the envelope.”