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."
Bad comparison (Score:5, Interesting)
Or, put another way... within 20 years of the Wright Brothers the airplane industry had far better safety records than the space industry does after 50 years.
How funny (Score:5, Interesting)
Another group thought that we had no business going to the moon and swore that LLM would simply sink into the moon. I suspect that these same ppl believe that we never went.
Just so that you know, Carmack and his rocket are real.
Re:to boldly go.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's see.....
NASA death toll = 10 (3 Gemini astronauts, plus one space shuttle full)
Armadillo death toll = 0
You, sir, are a buffoon.
It is not for real (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:John's forum post on the subject (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been lurking on the rocketry group for a while now and it's great to see the open discussions about everything from rocket design to safety. I've learned more in a few months that I ever did watching all those NASA shuttle launches over the years.
GPS for a lunar lander? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would a candidate for a mock lunar lander be designed to depend on GPS? There won't be GPS service on the moon in the foreseeable future.
Too much reliance on GPS? (Score:4, Interesting)
John goes on about the use of GPS in the control for acceleration for a bit. Understanding that where you have no nearby reference points, such as in space, this may be a good solution. At the same time, you usually don't have anything nearby to worry about crashing into (such as the ground). Although GPS can be very accurate, it often takes more datapoints that can be obtained in a very short timeframe to get that accuracy.
I wonder if there's a reason why they aren't using some means of LASER or RADAR rangefinding when in close proximity to landing for obtaining positioning (altitude) and velocity/acceleration information. The update rate could easily be several orders of magnitude faster than GPS could ever provide...especially since you need two position reports from GPS to find velocity and three to determine acceleration.
article tags are ridiculous (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bad comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
It kinda reminds me of cleaning things up. The fastest way is not always the best way. Sometimes you have to take your time to do it right. In this case, it could be argued that NASA by having high-speed re-entry is doing it the fast way, and needs to take some time and re-evaluate it to slow down and make it safer.
That does, incidentally, also require a re-design of the space vehicles that are used.
Re:No kidding (Score:2, Interesting)
What Carmack just discovered is that "fail safe" means one thing when you're designing a battery pack for a laptop, and another thing entirely when the application is a rocket control system.
In this case the controller saw a condition it didn't like, possibly a transient or spurious one, and opened the circuit at 16 amps instead of 40. Chances are, the battery itself was fine.
Re:to boldly go.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually if you want something that is more akin to the airline industry, a "space tourism/transport" type thing with certified pilots and strict regulations regarding maitenance schedules and such, then you should be looking at Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic. They are the ones trying to turn this into industry.
Armadillo is more like the cowboy spaceman notion of Star Wars or Firefly, where a few skilled amateurs operate and maintain their own space craft much like a street racer would maintain their own car, cruising around space as they please. Not very surprising that cowboy space craft made by even wealthy amateurs in their spare time is a more distant dream than large corporate conglomerates creating vessels for space tourism.
Carmack's work is fantastic from that standpoint. The amount of knowledge he is creating for the amateur rocketry field is astounding. And yes, the amateur's way is going to involve more explosions than the careful, highly-financed corporate way. Of course the amateurs are careful too, knowing their way is more explodey and not wanting to die more than anyone else. This is why Armadillio haven't actually had anyone sit on one of these things while they're testing it.
Given that, I don't think he's asking anyone else to ride on it any time soon.
On another note, I have been very impressed with the safety methodologies of Scaled Composites. It's epitomized to me by the design of Space Ship One which causes it to automatically (as in aerodynamically) orient itself correctly for reentry, even if it begins reentry in the worst possible orientation. Burt Rutan -- who man years ago (X15 project?) saw a test pilot die in reentry due to incorrect orientation -- is very much into the "safety by inherent design" and I applaud that.
Re:You know what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Carts are pretty much the same all over too.
Maybe the space thing needs to be rethought as it has with the elevator. Maybe re-entry should take a week instead of minutes.
Hundreds of years ago, it took months to cross the Atlantic. We figured out how to do it faster.
The past 30 years of space travel seems to have been on a downward slope from the first 20 years and this 30 years is based on the science discovered of the first 20.
Re:Cover the basics (Score:3, Interesting)
But what he is doing isn't groundbreaking, at all.
I don't know what your definition of "groundbreaking" is, but cheap access to space qualifies in my definition. Has anybody done that before? No. If no one has done it before, then it must be ground breaking, by definition.
also not ground breaking or original idea.
No one said it was original, but again, no one has done it successfully, unless you happen to know of someone. In this area especially, Carmack is getting a lot of "it'll never work" from the usual suspects.
Re:Bad comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
The stuff the new companies are using is more from Goddard or the Nazis - but they didn't spend billions either.
Re:Harsh (Score:3, Interesting)
No, the resentment comes because he's largely the Keystone Kops of the alt.Space community - constantly blundering about and making bonehead mistakes because he charges ahead without a great of thought and often making mistakes that common good practice would have prevented.
And the hell of it is - a competent engineer (with Carmack's money and like Carmack unfettered by bureaucracy) probably could do better on the same amount of money. Why? Because John spends a lot of money, time, and energy reinventing the wheel and losing vehicles due to bonehead mistakes caused by failing to follow good practice. (No fewer than *three* in this instance - failure to practice configuration contral and ensure the backup matched the flight hardware, failure to perform hardware validation against software requirements/expectations, failure to perform basic testing of new functions in the hangar rather than in the field.) He suffered a lot of failures early on because he didn't use aerospace grade wiring harnesses ("They are expensive and probably overengineered" was his reason as best I can recall) for just one example.
Re:You know what? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it's not. Sure, it's still a watertight hull that displaces a certain volume of water to make room for crew and cargo, but that's pretty much the definition of boat, unless you also count rafts. But the evolution in boats has been amazing. The first being the invention techniques to build your boat completely from planks, instead of e.g. a wooden frame and an animal hide. This allowed larger boats, rowing instead of paddling, and better sea-worthiness. Then sails, which has pretty much been continually refined since the stone-age until the 18th century (and still is, but not for economic reasons). Adding keels allowed sails to be used even against the wind, and also increased stability. Sails were replaced by steam-engines, and then diesel-engines. Wood for construction was replaced by steel or plastic (and the evolution in building-methods using wood before that is simply staggering). Luck (or eyesight) was replaced by compass, sextant, and accurate maps, which was again replaced by satellite- and radio-navigation. Open boats were replaced by boats having a roof, and eventually ballrooms, oil-tanks, and other specializations. The hull has evolved too, from simple displacement, to planing, hydrofoils, and hoovercrafts.
Re:Bad comparison (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Harsh (Score:3, Interesting)
Likewise, if the aerospace industry is bogged down with 1000 different "best practices", 950 of which are unnecessarily complex and expensive, then Carmack finding out that "do a drop test in the hangar before testing the automatic switchoff in an actual field landing" is one of the 50 may be worth losing a vehicle over since he's saving time and money on the other 950 he is happily ignoring.
As I haven't followed Carmack I don't know to what extent the above holds true, but I do understand he is trying to do a "hands-on" approach rather than a big-design-up-front one. It is to be expected that he will make a number of mistakes along the way since he's practically forced to invent the entire field. Some of the mistakes will be seen as obvious in retrospect, and practically all of them will be seen as avoidable if you'd just followed NASA guidelines (and poured $5G into the project in order to do so). This should not be seen as a failure of Carmack but rather as a necessary cost of trying to find a cheaper way.
Re:Harsh (Score:2, Interesting)
> alt.Space community - constantly blundering about and making bonehead
> mistakes because he charges ahead without a great of thought and often
> making mistakes that common good practice would have prevented.
Really? Compared with a lot of the competition, especially for the X-prize Cup, he is by far the most credible contender, and somewhat more rigorous it would seem. Yes, things have gone wrong, but he is openly presenting the failures. You know full well large companies lack this openness and make similar errors, they just are not open about it.
Compared with some of the former X-prize contenders who are still crawling around and were only ever PR exercises for ego aggrandisement, again, Armadillo comes out remarkably well, and way ahead of those who've just presented paper studies or launched clusters of HPR motors and claimed they're building manned rockets.
> And the hell of it is - a competent engineer (with Carmack's money
> and like Carmack unfettered by bureaucracy) probably could do better
> on the same amount of money.
So where are they then? Not all competent engineers are penniless, so if they really were into space in the same way as John Carmack is, then why haven't they put their money where their mouth is to prove their approach is better. I'm sure you'll argue that it is because to do it properly it costs a lot more money, but that isn't always true. The majority of aerospace engineers I know are very good at talking the talk, but when it comes to actually doing anything practical, they can't even do the bolts up on a rocket motor nozzle plate properly.
Also, they seem to have chips on their shoulders the size of Olympus Mons when it comes to anyone who isn't from the old boy big aerospace network doing anything that makes them look foolish.
> He suffered a lot of failures early on because he didn't use
> aerospace grade wiring harnesses
And?
He learnt.
I remember working on a spacecraft payload a while back where some aerospace engineers went nuts that we weren't using aerospace qual components. Strangely enough, the payload worked.
I'm overseeing a propulsion related project right now, where a lightweight, yet effective Skunkworks approach has proved to work. I'm sure it wouldn't meet with the approval of such an esteemed expert as yourself, but the company is happy.
Your dislike of John Carmack is evident in all your posts, but there are plenty of us out there working in the space industry who are very supportive of what John and his team are doing.