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."
Coming soon... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Coming soon... (Score:5, Funny)
But grammar won't make you its bitch, will it?
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It makes sense. "It's" is a contraction for "it is", like "he's" for "he is" and "she's" for "she is". "Its" is an possessive pronoun, like "his". You wouldn't apostrophize "hi's", and you don't apostrophize "it's".
Re:Coming soon... (Score:5, Informative)
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Although, I would've preferred opening with a Quake "rocket jump" joke, but there's still plenty of posts to go; I'm sure someone will bring it up.
Current feelings: Conflicted (Score:5, Funny)
Must have turned on... (Score:5, Funny)
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Progress Comes At A Price (Score:4, Insightful)
Safety Advisory (Score:5, Funny)
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youtube link? (Score:2)
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John's forum post on the subject (Score:4, Informative)
We started out with a normal 90 second elevated / tethered hover test, but we ran into a problem with the actuator power. We initially thought it was a bad main power switch, but it turned out to be the lithium-polymer battery pack cutoff circuit incorrectly shutting down at 16 amps of load instead of 40. This was a new battery pack ( www.batteryspace.com HPL-8059156-4S-WR), and it had passed all the individual actuator checks, but when the igniter started firing with both high amp NOS solenoids, the battery shut down (went to 0.3 volts indicated) after one second and stayed there until it was physically disconnected. Russ made a fairly heroic field repair, cutting open the battery pack and wiring around the protection circuit while sitting on top of the rocket. The total time spent on this after three attempts was 90 minutes, and enough lox had boiled off that the vehicle hit lox depletion at 60 seconds of flight. We got a few good data points from this: the batteries need to be checked at full current load, with vents open we boil off about two pounds of lox a minute, and lox-depletion runs are benign, if a little flamey.
For the second flight we were going to do a ground liftoff (still tethered for runaway protection) to test the automatic ground contact engine shutoff code. We have had several reasons to want to automate this: We get a fair bit of bounce on touchdown, because the engine is essentially keeping the vehicle weightless during the terminal descent. A computer controlled shutdown would be at least a half second faster than my manual punching of the shutdown when I visually see ground contact. The quads will just safely bounce around on the ground a bit if the engine just goes to idle and doesn't shut down, but the module, with the gimbal below the CG, will try to tip itself over when a landing leg becomes a pivot point, so there is extra incentive to get it shut off fast. You can see that in our XPC '05 vehicle flight. We also need to handle the case of the vehicle landing in a situation where I can't shut the engine off promptly, either because there was a telemetry problem, or when we are doing high altitude flights, it lands out of direct sight. There is a separate shutdownTime parameter that will keep it from sitting there at idle for ten minutes, but a telemetry abort could still have it on the ground and cooking for the better part of 220 seconds. We could still shut the flight safety fuel valve, which would result in just idle level lox pouring out of the engine, but that has its own problems.
I have been very hesitant to put in ground contact shutoff code, because shutting the engine down for some incorrect reason would be catastrophic, and I would feel awful if that ever happened. We had some switch based ground contact sensors on the old VDR, but they never got tested. We have concluded that the landing jolt, as seen by the IMU accelerometers, is a good enough ground contact signal. There is always the worry that combustion instability, or a nozzle ejection event, might trigger the signal level, so there are additional guards about it only functioning when you are within three meters of the ground (we must leave some slop for uneven terrain or GPS innacuracy) and trying to descend.
We loaded up again, being very thankful that we now pack three six-packs of helium for each test trip after we were forced to cancel the second flight on a previous test session due to insufficient helium after troubleshooting a problem forced a repressurization on the first flight. Liftoff and hover was fine, and at the 45 second mark (no sense pushing it on a ground liftoff), I had it come in for a landing. It hit the ground, and I saw it bounce back up. My first thought was "That didn't seem to help at all".
Re:John's forum post on the subject (Score:5, Funny)
"hotwired the battery...we don't need no stinkin' ground shutoff code...Sensors - never got around to testing them...we left some slop...ya think something rated at 4G would work up to 6G?...we know the GPS receivers are vibration sensitive so we stuck some bubble wrap round them and hoped...we checked earlier telemetry and yup - they're darn vibration sensitive...hold on lads; I've got an idea...The rocket has gotta return to the ground at some point; if only we'd done some testing on this...John's doing some fancy flying - oh, sh*t, he's not...now the tanks are scrap we're probably going to do some useful tests on them that we wouldn't have done with usable ones - heck those things cost money, baby...some of the wiring harness is wrapped in leather so we're going to alienate the vegan customer base...flammable foam catches fire."
I think I'll walk.
PS: The captcha I had to type in to submit this was "Piloting" - BWAHAHAHAHAHA
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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.
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.
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well (Score:4, Funny)
So (Score:3, Funny)
Why Ebay when you can buy directly from armadillo? (Score:2)
Next time..... (Score:3, Funny)
X-Prize Cup (Score:4, Insightful)
Most likely, there will be a winner (Score:2)
Nevermind (Score:2)
One of several Armadillo vehicles (Score:5, Informative)
They're also working on a set of new vehicles they call Modules, of which I gather they have one essentially complete and five in production.
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That was just one of their vehicles. They still have Pixel. From Carmack's post:
We still have Pixel and Module 1 in flyable shape at the shop, so this doesn't have a critical impact on us, but it does change our testing plans for the next two months before the X-Prize Cup. We are cancelling the untethered 180 second flights for Pixel at OKSP. We will plan on doing two sets of back-to-back 180 flights under tether, but if we are going to risk a crash, it might as well be for the money at XPC now that we don't have a backup. We are going to finish up Module 2 in the next couple weeks so we have a backup for level 1. Modules 3 through 5 should also be at least frame constructed by XPC, but whether we get them wired and tested will depend on how our flight testing goes. If we manage to destroy a module in the next two months, we can crunch hard and get an extra one put together if necessary.
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!
Re:Harsh (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, it is. Bikes and airframes are VERY similar. You are trying to get a very strong structure with as little weight as possible. With a bike, as with an airplane, you can't just slap a factor of safety of 9 on the thing. You have to really design it, and pay attention to materials science. (Hint: Bikes, like planes, take advantage of lightweight aluminum alloys, carbon fiber, high torsional rigidity, etc).
Then there is knowing how to use the right materials in the right places for minimum cost/weight, or for rigidity / flex.
Today's bikes are what they are mostly from Aerospace research.
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.
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No, the resentment comes because he's largely the Keystone Kops of the alt.Space community - constantly blundering about and making b
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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.
For this to be something worthy of criticism, we need to know how many other calls of the type "X is too expensive and probably overengineered" he has made and which turned out to be true. If Carmack had successfully debunked 10 different high-cost items as unnecessarily expensive and found that aerospace harness is the one exception, then that is an excellent result and probably worth a few failures to figure out. It is not reasonable to expect that he should have been able to reason his way into such kno
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.
Article title incorrect (NITPICK) (Score:2)
UAC (Score:5, Funny)
article tags are ridiculous (Score:2, Interesting)
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: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:Cover the basics (Score:4, Informative)
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what, exactly, new grounds are they breaking?
How many VTVL rockets do you see hovering and flying around these days? None, and of the couple that have flown in the past, none have done it as cheaply.
The other ground they're breaking is in the area of modular rocket systems, the idea of using clusters of cheap, mass-produced rocket modules that will lead directly to an orbital vehicle.
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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
FYP (Score:3, Funny)
YES!
Re:to boldly go.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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).
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True, but at the same time they don't help themselves on re-entry. If they performed slow re-entry (ex: SpaceShip One), then one of their two failures would not have occurred as the heat would not have built up. And the design t
Re:Bad comparison (Score:5, Informative)
SpaceShip One is sub-orbital with a maximum speed of about Mach 3. I don't understand how you can compare the two. A "slow" re-entry would require a whole lot of fuel to slow the vehicle down from orbital velocity to a safe entry velocity. Fuel you would have to launch with. You'd have to burn the fuel relatively quickly to ensure you don't enter a highly eccentric orbit that intersects with the atmosphere before you've finished your maneuver. If anything goes wrong here, you're toast. You'll burn up in the atmosphere.
Re:Bad comparison (Score:4, Informative)
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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
Re:Bad comparison (Score:4, Informative)
1. That's because the rest of the western industrialized countries decided that manned spaceflight (or suborbital slingshot) was not worth pursuing. Certainly the UK and France would have been able to do it, not just their governments but their private aerospace firms. It's just that manned aerospace ventures in or near space were basically publicity stunts performed by the US and Soviets, as is the X-Prize for companies. Because they have very little in scientific or economic returns, the rest of the west decided to build other "prestiege projects", like a supersonic airliner or supercolliders.
2 & 3 - ??? You have to be a musician to claim the White Stripes are the best rock band ever. Users must have coding experience & their own news site before commenting on the quality of Slashdot. That's about the quality of your arguments there.
I do know amatuer rocket builders who have gotten their rockets to 10,000 feet, who are really psyched about the SS1/X-Prize stuff. But even they would not consider it to be impressive in terms of historical comparisons with NASA. What's impressive is not how far they went, but how little resources they used to get there.
Re:Bad comparison (Score:4, Informative)
Re-entry using retro-rockets and aerodynamic braking (or would it be thermodynamic braking?) currently makes the most sense at least partially because your options are pretty limited by how much stuff you can carry up into orbit to begin with.
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.
You know what? (Score:5, Funny)
You know what, this is one area where I prefer intelligent design!
(I know, I know, I have sacrificed my principles for a cheap joke..)
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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 sam
Re:You know what? (Score:4, Funny)
Then explain Microsoft and Windows!
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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 f
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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
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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:5, Informative)
Ummmm....not exactly. First, I'm just barely old enough to remember a lot of this, so no doubt a lot of the
Nevertheless, your point about the approach taken by Armadillo Aerospace and the like is entirely accurate -- it's an evolutionary approach with a lot of iterations. There's still a long ways to go before commercial orbital and suborbital flights are as common as airline traffic is today.
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Sorry, but no. I only wish the Shuttle had been designed with an evolutionary approach.
Yes, there was a lot of evolutionary work in the ear
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The stuff the new companies are using is more from Goddard or the Nazis - but they didn't spend billions either.
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Re:to boldly go.... (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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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.
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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.
If I may, doesn't anyone remember the recent explosion [slashdot.org] at Mojave that claimed 3 lives? While rocketry related, it wasn't a flight test. It was also a team with vastly more resources. Testing new technology has it's dangers, especially when highly combustible materials are involved.
John and his team have an excellent track record thus far, and have continued to make safety a main issue. I'm sure that this experience will teach them even more, helping to make the next flight even safer.
Re:to boldly go.... (Score:5, Funny)
You mean even safer than a huge orange fireball?
I don't know, that's a pretty high bar.
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Frankly, it surprises the hell out of me that they're using GPS as the primary guidance system. Any amount of radio interference and you'll end up with problems. It might be ok once you get up in the air enough to correct for temporary loss of signal, but near the ground, yer screwed.
It is not for real (Score:3, Interesting)
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The bigger part to me is where they replaced a part without checking whether it was a suitable replacement. 10G != 4G.
Seems to be a simple mistake.. He purchased the newer IMU which, one would expect, built upon the previous one. Instead, it reduced some of the specs, causing a problem. A pretty easy thing to understand.
:)
For instance, one expects that an upgraded OS would include all of the features in the current OS, plus some additional ones. Instead, one winds up with Vista.
Re:to boldly go.... (Score:4, Informative)
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I lurk on an amateur rocketry mailing list where a few AA personnel participate, and it's interesting to read about their opinion of lessons learned. Between this and the Scaled accident I think they'll be a bit more cautious and deliberate for a while.
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!
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Could they have deployed a parachute or something to prevent such an obvious destruction of said vehicle? The worst part, they might not be able to analyze the cause of the failure if the machine is toasted.
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Would NASA cut corners like this and end up killing someone? Hell no.
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Let's see.....
NASA death toll = 10 (3 Gemini astronauts, plus one space shuttle full)
Armadillo death toll = 0
You, sir, are a buffoon.
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I'm with you. I'm with you 110%. This is EXACTLY why I have long opposed private spaceflight. Long story short, profit = cut corners = death. We saw it at the composites factory, and we'll see more of it.
Scaled has *NOT* released a detailed report on what happened. It could have been anything from human error to a bad part that caused that explosion. NASA has had plenty of human error problems, and I believe it was faulty parts (damaged o-rings) that caused Challenger to explode back in 1986? The Columbia accident seems to be a combination of both, but that's also debatable.
Private interests just do not have the long term perspective necessary to take the appropriate caution to prevent deaths. This is why space colonization should always be a government function.
Would NASA cut corners like this and end up killing someone? Hell no.
How do we know that NASA isn't cutting corners? It's not like they publish information like this...
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.
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.
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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 main
Re:that's unfortunate but (Score:5, Informative)
We have video that we will be releasing, but Matt had to leave for Germany the next day, so it won't be digitized for a week and a half.
So, it's coming, just not released yet.
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Re:that's unfortunate but (Score:4, Informative)
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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 descri
Re:that's unfortunate but (Score:5, Informative)
You see, we're all volunteers at Armadillo, and therefore all have day jobs. My day job required me to come to Germany for the Leipzig Games Convention to promote things entirely unrelated to Armadillo. This is the job that actually provides a salary, so it kind of takes precedence over Armadillo sometimes.
Could I have left the video with the others so that they could capture it and get it up on the web page? Well, no one else on the team has any experience with that -- their expertise is in software design, electronics, manufacturing, welding, etc. So I'd have had to train them to do it. And again, why would I do that when, as I understood it, John's not going to post the video till the next update anyway?
But you go and believe whatever you want. Just know that we WILL post the video when I get back.
Matthew Ross
Armadillo Aerospace
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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 P
Re:The carmack (Score:5, Informative)
This year, there may be a few other challengers, but I think John and company will walk away with it. John and his team have taken this challenge in directions that the "big guys" have never tried, and it's working.
We'll see! Only 65 days left!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
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