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I remember putting together Estes' Mars Lander with the intention of soft landing it by firing the solid propellant rocket just in time to land the rocket. I did have the TransRock transmitter for locating my rockets if I lost sight of them and tried to use it to soft-land the Mars lander The lander was placed on a first stage booster with F9 rated engines that hoisted up the lander and then ejected it so it would then fall towards the ground.  Unfortunately, it never worked.    At the time there wasn't any public GPS service and a radar approach would have been very costly and complicated and the best approach would have been to put the radar on the rocket itself while possible it was beyond my abilities at the time. I did try a pressure switch but it was never accurate. But today I do think that goal, soft-landing the Mars lander, is very possible.



For those that enjoyed your adolescent years' building model rockets then you'll enjoy this video:

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If I only had access to google when I was a kid then maybe just maybe that lander would have pegged it and decades before Elon Musk's booster landings 

DIY Radar

Amature Radar

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Here's another good video about rocket engines:

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Some built a Mars Lander 10 times bigger than the original model! 

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It's interesting how they keep getting more symmetrical. What's the next step after full flow? Gonna need some lateral thinking on that one.

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It's interesting how they keep getting more symmetrical. What's the next step after full flow? Gonna need some lateral thinking on that one.

Well...cross your fingers but this recently came up.



So if cold fusion is possible that's one new alternative.

Then there is the traditional nuclear solution.



You can take the way back machine with Mr. Peabody to take a look at a real nuclear rocket engine:

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Let's not forget these exotic propulsion ideas:



Does anyone remember the RingWorld series by Larry Niven? The first novel uses a fusion ramjet propulsion system that literally sucks up the thin free hydrogen in space using magnetic fields then compresses the gas for fusion where it then produces thrust.

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I was a big fan of Larry Niven's books and also the ones that he wrote in collaboration with Jerry Pournelle ("Ringworld" wow!). I haven't read any of them in quite a while though, these days I mostly read David Brin, Iain M. Banks, and Neal Stephenson. It's funny to think that just ten years ago, "Heaven's Reach" was blowing my mind with its scope and scale and in the intervening ten years real-life astronomy has made new discoveries that make it seem so small.