Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace Rocket Crashes and Burns 353
mcgrew (sm62704) writes "New Scientist is reporting that John Carmack's 'Armadillo Aerospace' has suffered a large setback in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge after one of its two main rockets crashed and burned. 'During the test, Texel lifted off and hovered without incident, then descended again and touched the ground. But it then rose again unexpectedly and began accelerating upward. "Crap, it's going to fly into the crane, I need to kill it," Carmack recalls thinking. He hit the manual shutdown switch, turning off the vehicle's engine in mid-flight. Texel was about 6 metres above the ground and fell like a stone. One of its fuel tanks broke open when it hit the ground, spewing fuel that ignited and engulfed the vehicle in flames. "It made a fireball that would make any Hollywood movie proud," Carmack says.' No one was hurt in the crash, but the vehicle was destroyed."
Re:to boldly go.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Progress Comes At A Price (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:to boldly go.... (Score:5, Insightful)
And to think, they want us all to ride in these things commercially....
Actually, this is exactly why John and company will be successful. The biggest problem with modern aerospace is "paralysis by analysis". They're so afraid of crashing anything that they have to produce (sometimes literally) millions of pages of documentation before they actually put something into the air.
Armadillo learns by *doing*, not just by creating paper studies. When they're ready to put humans in space, you can bet that their ships will have had hundreds of test flights.
It's a learning process (Score:5, Insightful)
So they're not there yet. Big deal. Armadillo's attitude to safety is that it's ok to risk the vehicle in testing, as long as people aren't at risk. They do a *very* fast development cycle, and they don't pretend to be able to find every problem through analysis -- which means some of them get found the hard way. That's a *good* thing for safety, not a bad thing. You *can't* find every problem through analysis, even if your budget is 5 orders of magnitude larger than Carmack's and you try.
Carmack's approach is to treat the vehicle as a developmental test platform, and that involves a certain level of risk to the vehicle and acceptance of that risk. The result, however, is that he learns things a *lot* faster than he otherwise might, and as a result the entire development program is faster and cheaper, counting the cost of the lost vehicles.
When Carmack shifts the vehicle from developmental status to operational testing status and then to operational status, I'd be happy to trust him when he says it's safe. It's unfair to criticize him for being unsafe now -- crashing the vehicle wasn't a safety risk!
Re:to boldly go.... (Score:2, Insightful)
X-Prize Cup (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:to boldly go.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Had Carmack's rocket killed someone (or many people), he would would have been stopped by "paralysis by lawsuit-ysis". Ignoring the huge dangers of rocketry by cutting corners during design may be cheaper in the short run, but as soon as real human lives are lost because of it, you can bet your ass they are going to have to spend more time and money testing their designs "on paper".
The point isn't "cutting corners", the point is learning by testing and learning with actual hardware, rather than testing with paper. No one was in any danger at any point during this test. You would have a point if you could claim they were cutting corners in *safety culture*, but they're not. They're not strapping people into test vehicles. There is no human risk here at all.
Re:Bad comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
There aren't any naturally occurring animals or phenomena from which to figure out space travel/launch/re-rentry. I'm not saying the safety record is stellar (yukyuk), but getting off the ground is a little less complex than getting off the planet (and back).
Harsh (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no opinion on Carmack one way or another, but tagging this story with 'haha' and 'hesnorocketscientist' seems a tad mean.
So he's a game designer dabbling in space exploration. It's not like he ran a bicycle shop [wikipedia.org] or something. Now *there's* a logical starting point for a career in aeronautics!
Cover the basics (Score:5, Insightful)
Now it's one thing to make an engineering mistake, but it couldn't have taken them an hour to rig up a simple test rig they that they could drop onto the ground, or tap with a mallet, or something similarly simple, to see if the computer could register a landing.
I just can't imagine strapping something new onto an entire rocket assembly, going to all the risk and expense to actually launch the thing and fly it around, hoping that all the new circuitry and software will work perfectly the first time.
It makes me wonder about the whole process NASA has in place with these contests. Even if a craft can meet various flight goals, does it result in anything of worth to NASA? For example, take a piece of software. Say there is this program that really does something impressive (game engines come to mind). So you take a look at the source, and find it is a total and complete mess. Maybe it is full of memory leaks and other bugs, so it just can perform a specific task right, but given other scenarios it crashes. Maybe the code is insecure, or is not scalable, or cannot be extended, or is not maintainable, or is not portable to other platforms. Any of those things could practically render the sources useless. But yet the program does a specific task and does it really well. For some reason I feel that NASA is going to end up with crafts with similar engineering caveats.
Dan East
Re:Bad comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
Space launchers have never done that. They have always tried to leapfrog to a "complete solution". Most of the launchers active today have their heritage in ICBMs. Apollo program got started by replacing the warheads with men in tin can. Thats not how you build a reliable and safe transportation device.
Or take shuttle. It was designed on paper, and the very first hardware iteration was declared operational configuration. Thats just nuts. You try to take and build worlds first ever reusable space transport, and you try to do it in one hardware iteration ? Try more like something between ten and hundred to get it right.
The trouble is, space industry has always been run by governments across the globe, due to certain historical circumstances. It never undertook the normal evolution of hardware and technologies that has happened with other, commercial transportation markets.
And thats exactly what Armadillo and their kin are trying to do now. Build stuff from the ground up, fly a bit, crash a few times, build it better and so on. Enter the competitive pressure of marketplace, and you will get the right incentives to build affordable, safe and reliable space transportation.
We dont know what these will turn out to be, whether its VTOL rockets like Armadillo and Masten are building, or XCOR HTOL approach, or something else entirely. This evolutionary path is yet to be walked down.
Re:Cover the basics (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that I'm not a fan of NASA. I am. I own the Space Shuttle Operators Manual, and when I was 11 (when I got it) I probably
could have flown the shuttle, or at least co-piloted that darn thing.
Point is, mistakes happen. That's fine. What's great about Carmak and co. is that they tend to not only admit, but they also
learn from them. Because only half the fun in building rockets is watching 'em blow up.
Re:John's forum post on the subject (Score:3, Insightful)
But anyway, the post is not flamebait in any way shape or form. Someone with mod points, please correct this.
Re:Bad comparison (Score:1, Insightful)
There is no application for manned space flight and manned space flight will not get any better until there is one. The applications for the airplane were immediately obvious. Early air planes were used to scout during wars and deliver mail. Even if you could travel into space cheaply what would you do? There are no military applications for manned space travel. Its much cheaper and less risky to just use radio control. The only reason to be in space is to conduct experiments that require micro gravity. Even if space travel was much cheaper and safer then it is today, what exactly would you do with it? Space tourism is not exactly a compelling reason to pour billions of dollars in R&D into space travel
Re:Harsh (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no opinion on Carmack one way or another, but tagging this story with 'haha' and 'hesnorocketscientist' seems a tad mean.
I've noticed that Carmack gets a lot of flack whenever Armadillo stumbles, and it's an interesting psychological phenomena. You'd think that especially on Slashdot, there would be a lot of people who like seeing smart people succeed, but in Carmack's case, there seems to be a lot of resentment about a "mere" video game programmer daring to learn something like rocket science. Not only learn about, but actually be *serious* about it! And doing it without any sort of engineering degree! The gall!
This seems to be especially true of amny "real" engineers, who seem jealous that an outsider with money is trying to do what they can't seem to do, which is produce very low cost access to space. "Yeah, if I had Carmack's money, I could do what he's doing better than he could do it..."
Never mind that Armadillo is one of only a few VTVL ships to actually fly.
Carmack is an incredibly smart guy, and he's not given near enough credit for raw intelligence, rather than just being a good game hacker.
Re:to boldly go.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit.
Advancing the state of the art is a noble cause no matter who pays the bills -- whether it's the taxpayers as a whole or a few millionaires who want to go on expensive vacations, working on spaceflight is a just and honorable vocation. To the extent that this research -- whatever the immediate funding source -- helps to bring down the cost of launching payloads into orbit in the long term or leads to the use of less expensive, reusable launch vehicles, the people involved in it are doing something they can legitimately decide is an activity worth risking death over.
Legislatively restricting spaceflight to governments in the name of protecting those people who may otherwise voluntarily choose to work in a field which they know has more risk than some desk job is an example of the worst sort of "mother-knows-best" nanny state bullshit governance. You can have your safe office job if you want it -- but don't you presume to speak for my interests when you lobby against letting me choose to work on something more interesting and useful to humanity as a whole than 99% of the population has any opportunity to be a part of.
Exploration for profit has a long and proud history -- what do you think brought Columbus out of Spain? The profit motive makes the work itself no less worthy of respect.
Re:You know what? (Score:3, Insightful)
The result, as expected ( regardless of individual talents ) is something that is horribly expensive, costs billions a year whether you fly it or not, is notorious for killing astronauts seven at a time, and goes nowhere particularly useful.
Had someone done the same anno 1900, gobbled up all talented engineers into one agency to design and develop the one and only National Aero Shuttle, dirigibles would probably still be the dominant mode of air transportation and the total aviation would be limited to a handful government employees flying a few circles each year. Maybe there would be an International Aero Station too by now, manned by two men whose only useful function, apart from fixing the station, would be to have a few live interviews on TV to tell us how great it feels being up there.
are you sure you prefer "intelligent design" ? evolution and market forces can be cruel, but one thing they tend to guarantee is that only the fittest designs survive.
Re:that's unfortunate but (Score:3, Insightful)
Boeing mostly loses a couple of $100-plus-million satellites due to a leaking valve and we have a couple of relatively small press releases from them and the DOD about the valve issue. They all time things and restrict things up down and sideways.
John gives us good images and in many cases video, within short times of the accident, and a technical description of the failure and root causes that's first-class. Within a couple of days.
It takes a special kind of petty mind to see malign intent in a one-week delay because someone's on a trip...
Re:Bad comparison (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:that's unfortunate but (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do you think Armadillo needs good PR anyway? They are not a commercial venture. And the X-Prize Cup that they are competing for doesn't consider your success/failures before the actual prize attempt either, much less your PR spin on such, they only care about success or failure in an official attempt.
The word "Translation" in your post should be translated as "Blindfolded Rectal Extraction".
Re:Bad comparison (Score:3, Insightful)
The principles of aircraft, in comparison, can almost run on human power, and in a few cases, it does work on such little power.
Re:Bad comparison (Score:3, Insightful)
2. You use all of those infrastructure pieces yourself. You can't build a rocket that can make 100 feet, much less 100 km. You lose.
3. You can't make a glider out of paper that can make 100 fucking feet. much less any rocke except for an Estes model. YOU LOSE.
Whine some more. I find it entertaining.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)