A big hop for SpaceX's Grasshopper

On March 7th, the SpaceX Grasshopper doubled its previous best height.  Reaching 262.8 feet (80.1m), hovering for several seconds, and descending gently to the ground - all with perfect looking control.  Starting from a mere 6ft hop, Grasshopper has been steadily increasing the size of its hops as shown here and here.  The goal of Grasshopper is to provide the research that will lead to a reusable launch platform.  Such a platform will be able to launch payloads into orbit, autonomously land, and then be refitted and relaunched.  This will significantly reduce cost and turn around time.

Check out the video.  Its a little hard to tell the scale of this rocket, but it's 10 stories tall and quite heavy - which makes this a pretty impressive feat.