“To provide a little perspective on the size of Grasshopper, we added a 6 ft cowboy to the rocket” tweeted SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
On December 17, SpaceX conducted a test flight of its reusable vertical takeoff, vertical landing rocket Grasshopper. The 12 story pin-straight test was enlivened by the addition of a 6 ft (2 m) cowboy. The cowboy – a model, naturally – was provided for scale, according to a tweet from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, although one imagines the Texans at the McGregor SpaceX facility were also having themselves a bit of fun.
Watch the test flight below:
![A trajectory analysis that used a computational fluid dynamics approach to determine the likely position and velocity histories of the foam (Credits: NASA Ref [1] p61).](http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/fluid-dynamics-trajectory-analysis-50x50.jpg)
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