Thrusters are as good at flipping cars as they are at hunting ballistic missiles.
Tesla’s long-delayed and still unreleased Tesla Roadster was formally reintroduced on October 15 and besides an angular, Cybertruck-esque design and the ability to go 0-60 mph in less than a second, the company’s big surprise was that it can fly. The car can’t really “fly” in the tradition of Back to the Future Part II, but more through a collection of controlled falling, jumping and flipping maneuvers. While admittedly impressive, the concept isn’t unique to Tesla. Experimental missile defense systems have featured similar uses of thrusters since at least the early 2000s, in a form factor that’s now called a Multiple Kill Vehicle or MKV.
In the case of the Roadster, the supercar is able to pull off its much lauded kickflips thanks to two high-pressure air tanks and ten nozzles placed throughout the car that fire off compressed air to move and stabilize it. Tesla claims the Roadster can refill those tanks on its own, though the full thruster setup is also only fully available on the Rocket trim of the car. The Thruster trim only features thrusters on the back of the car, and the Performance trim doesn’t have them at all. Importantly, Tesla also says that the thrusters “aren’t approved for public road use.”
Missile Defense Agency
Lockheed Martin’s MKV project didn’t begin in earnest until 2004, when the company won a $760 million contract from the US’ Missile Defense Agency to build “the first system capable of destroying multiple ballistic missile threats and decoys with a single launch.” That system carries several smaller vehicles that are designed to smash into missiles to destroy them, and it keeps itself aloft using thrusters that can quickly change its direction and orientation on the fly, not unlike the Roadster.
Finding actual footage of the MKV in action is tricky, particularly because the concept of a single missile system that can take out multiple other missiles has been kicking around since the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which is better known as the “Star Wars” program. The video below is allegedly of Lockheed Martin’s MKV, but similar footage has also been associated with SDI — and Lockheed Martin didn’t exist until 1995, so anything attributed to it before then is suspect. Regardless, that concept is what Lockheed Martin and another contractor, Raytheon, were working on in separate development tracks until the original MKV project was retired in 2009 as part of military budget cuts.
Besides their intended uses — transporting the ultra-rich and destroying intercontinental ballistic missiles — the Roadster and MKV have one other important difference: How their thrusters actually work. Tesla is pretty adamant that the Roadster uses cold-gas thrusters (specifically compressed air), which means they don’t burn fuel to move what they’re attached to around. Based on a 2008 Lockheed Martin press release, its MKV was used in “hot-fire tests” that suggest some part of the system burned fuel for propulsion. Considering no one currently owns either, it’s hard to say what’s better, but Tesla’s is presumably less combustible.
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