Slashdot Mirror

Here's some flight videos taken in preparation for the XPrize cup (not footage from the event, but some final runs taken the week before)

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Ho me/News?news_id=310

-everphilski-

You do realize that a checkers game written in Java running on a J2ME-enabled cell phone doesn't compare to any significant client application, correct?

Don't forget that John Carmack published an article discussing his dislike of J2ME.

From: jim_bow...@hotmail.com
Newsgroups: rec.autos.sport.nascar
Subject: X-Prize Cup
Date: 30 Sep 2005 12:11:18 -0700


John Carmack, author of the 3D first person shooter video games, Doom and Quake, has put his money to good use by funding a small group to build a reusable rocket. Is going to be running 3 flights an hour at the up-coming X-Prize Cup:

http://www.xpcup.com/index.cfm

You might want to see his latest test at:

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2005_09_24/200 5_09_27_hoverTest.mpg

So my question to the NASCAR guys is this:

Are you going to let this geek make you look like pussies or are you going to show him how power engineering gets done?

Why don't you talk to John Carmack ? he think its slow..

Quote from his blog http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc/Recent %20Updates ..
"The biggest problem is that Java is really slow."
"Write-once-run-anywhere. Ha. Hahahahaha."
etc..

Carmack could have been working for NASA or the US military, but instead he simply sits around coding violent computer games.

Don't worry so much. Carmack's talents are not wasted. He is already in the space business with his hobby: he's leading Armadillo Aerospace to work "on computer-controlled hydrogen peroxide rocket vehicles, with an eye towards manned suborbital vehicle development in the coming years".

I don't care how well/badly Doom 3 is faring in the stores... I think you can afford a measely $150.

Yeah, a pure F/OSS Mars trajectory solution would be nice, but once in awhile you have to bite the bullet, and splurge a little.

OTOH, you could probably justify a Phobos shot as R&D for Id,
if you can just keep those engines from burning out...

I don't care how well/badly Doom 3 is faring in the stores... I think you can afford a measely $150.

Yeah, a pure F/OSS Mars trajectory solution would be nice, but once in awhile you have to bite the bullet, and splurge a little.

OTOH, you could probably justify a Phobos shot as R&D for Id,
if you can just keep those engines from burning out...

I'm not sure if the timing is coincidence, but it just so happens to be Carmack's son's first birthday.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack

and here's a link to his blog:
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc/Recent %20Updates

I submitted this story about 7 months ago: Quake III Source Release Delayed Sunday January 02, @01:42AM Rejected

It's all available in his blog

From January:
Quake 3 Source

I intended to release the Q3 source under the GPL by the end of 2004, but we had another large technology licensing deal go through, and it would be poor form to make the source public a few months after a company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for full rights to it. True, being public under the GPL isnt the same as having a royalty free license without the need to disclose the source, but Im pretty sure there would be some hard feelings.
Previous source code releases were held up until the last commercial license of the technology shipped, but with the evolving nature of game engines today, it is a lot less clear. There are still bits of early Quake code in Half Life 2, and the remaining licensees of Q3 technology intend to continue their internal developments along similar lines, so there probably wont be nearly as sharp a cutoff as before. I am still committed to making as much source public as I can, and I wont wait until the titles from the latest deal have actually shipped, but it is still going to be a little while before I feel comfortable doing the release.

Dude, try the other link in the article.

Hey, here's a wild idea: why not RTFA and find out?

I tried but all I could find was TFP. There is no caption. It looks like a cheezy science project. Do you know something about it? What is disruptive about it?

From Mirror:
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/8f5373b24e35f5c45 3edf914cc953eff/index.html

Armadillo Aerospace News Archive

>
Servo regulator, Throatless engines, Hold down test

Aug 4, 2005 notes

Despite not having time to do an update for a while, we have been steadily working...

Servo regulator

When we last worked with it, the setup showed what seemed to be a valve lash problem - flow would begin when the high pressure ball valve reached 15% open, but it wouldn't shut off until it was closed all the way back to 5%. Since we had fabricated our own actuator to valve adapter, we thought we might have allowed too much lash into the coupling. We built a new mount using helical beam couplers with zero lash, but that turned out not to help. The coupling seems tighter, with the valve following every little jitter of the actuator, but the flow behavior seems to be an aspect of the seals in the ball valve, not the linkage between the actuator and the valve.

This cracking problem is only really an issue at very low flow rates, so we were able to do some flow tests at roughly the performance levels that our single-man space shot vehicle will use. With a single large nitrogen bottle feeding the servo regulator, we did the following test:

2700 psi initial bottle pressure

60 gallons of water at 230 psi and 215 gpm flow rate

1800 psi final bottle pressure

2" plumbing, 1" valve

The small fittings at the bottle valve became the limiting factor as the pressure dropped below about 2200 psi, with the servo valve eventually going wide open and still not quite being able to keep up. Our flight vehicle pressurant tanks will manifold directly out of bottle necks with a -10 fitting, so they won't become flow limited at all. When our new 36" hemispheres arrive, we will be welding up the full tankage and pressurization system for the big vehicle and doing water flow tests in preparation for testing a 5,000 lbf class engine.

Speaking of spheres, here are a couple pictures of the tear area on the burst one:

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2005_08_03/tor nSphere.jpg

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2005_08_03/tor nSphere2.jpg

Throatless engine

I was recently looking at the table in Sutton regarding losses due to small chamber to throat contraction ratios, and they weren't as significant as I had remembered them. A chamber with no contraction ratio at all will lose 20% of its thrust due to pressure losses from accelerating gasses in the straight section, but the Isp loss is only 1.5%. The text mentions "throatless rockets" being used in some missile applications to minimize chamber length and dry mass at the expense of Isp. The text doesn't say if these were liquids or solids, but I assume they were solids.

However, this does open up the question of building liquid engines like that. If L* remained constant, you would have an extremely long engine that would probably be impossible to cool, but I could imagine the accelerating, high speed flow could reduce required combustion stay times significantly. A 1.5% Isp loss is utterly meaningless for our purposes, so a configuration that traded that for fabrication benefits could be quite useful.

We fired a few crude throatless lox / ethanol chambers, and the results were surprisingly encouraging. With a very crude injector (a spray nozzle for the lox and four straight horizontal jets for the ethanol), we measured a 190 Isp from a 12" long straight pipe combustion chamber. It melted in a couple seconds, but this was still very impressive. With a 3:1 expansion cone added, performance should increase about 15% to around 220 Isp. That would be right at theoretical va

From Mirror:
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/8f5373b24e35f5c45 3edf914cc953eff/index.html

Armadillo Aerospace News Archive

>
Servo regulator, Throatless engines, Hold down test

Aug 4, 2005 notes

Despite not having time to do an update for a while, we have been steadily working...

Servo regulator

When we last worked with it, the setup showed what seemed to be a valve lash problem - flow would begin when the high pressure ball valve reached 15% open, but it wouldn't shut off until it was closed all the way back to 5%. Since we had fabricated our own actuator to valve adapter, we thought we might have allowed too much lash into the coupling. We built a new mount using helical beam couplers with zero lash, but that turned out not to help. The coupling seems tighter, with the valve following every little jitter of the actuator, but the flow behavior seems to be an aspect of the seals in the ball valve, not the linkage between the actuator and the valve.

This cracking problem is only really an issue at very low flow rates, so we were able to do some flow tests at roughly the performance levels that our single-man space shot vehicle will use. With a single large nitrogen bottle feeding the servo regulator, we did the following test:

2700 psi initial bottle pressure

60 gallons of water at 230 psi and 215 gpm flow rate

1800 psi final bottle pressure

2" plumbing, 1" valve

The small fittings at the bottle valve became the limiting factor as the pressure dropped below about 2200 psi, with the servo valve eventually going wide open and still not quite being able to keep up. Our flight vehicle pressurant tanks will manifold directly out of bottle necks with a -10 fitting, so they won't become flow limited at all. When our new 36" hemispheres arrive, we will be welding up the full tankage and pressurization system for the big vehicle and doing water flow tests in preparation for testing a 5,000 lbf class engine.

Speaking of spheres, here are a couple pictures of the tear area on the burst one:

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2005_08_03/tor nSphere.jpg

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2005_08_03/tor nSphere2.jpg

Throatless engine

I was recently looking at the table in Sutton regarding losses due to small chamber to throat contraction ratios, and they weren't as significant as I had remembered them. A chamber with no contraction ratio at all will lose 20% of its thrust due to pressure losses from accelerating gasses in the straight section, but the Isp loss is only 1.5%. The text mentions "throatless rockets" being used in some missile applications to minimize chamber length and dry mass at the expense of Isp. The text doesn't say if these were liquids or solids, but I assume they were solids.

However, this does open up the question of building liquid engines like that. If L* remained constant, you would have an extremely long engine that would probably be impossible to cool, but I could imagine the accelerating, high speed flow could reduce required combustion stay times significantly. A 1.5% Isp loss is utterly meaningless for our purposes, so a configuration that traded that for fabrication benefits could be quite useful.

We fired a few crude throatless lox / ethanol chambers, and the results were surprisingly encouraging. With a very crude injector (a spray nozzle for the lox and four straight horizontal jets for the ethanol), we measured a 190 Isp from a 12" long straight pipe combustion chamber. It melted in a couple seconds, but this was still very impressive. With a 3:1 expansion cone added, performance should increase about 15% to around 220 Isp. That would be right at theoretical va

Before.....


After.

Before.....


After.

This reminds me of the ZERO-G company, which offers commercial weightless flights on a specially-modified Boeing 727. Folks like Buzz Aldrin and Burt Rutan have flown on it, as well as everyone's favorite slashdotter John Carmack. Carmack posted a description of the flight, along with photos and a video.

I'd love to go myself, but I think it's still a little too rich for my poor grad-student blood.

Jeff Bezos, the Amazon guy, has a space company? That's plenty of revelation for me!

It may not be as surprising as you think:

The Blue Origin RLV would be comprised of a propulsion module and a crew capsule and would use hydrogen peroxide and kerosene as propellants.

The RLV would launch vertically from a concrete pad and would land vertically in an area near the launch pad.

The RLV would carry three or more passengers per operation.

Blue Origin proposes to locate its launch facility on privately-owned property in Culberson County, Texas.

Now maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't this sound a LOT like the Aramadillo Aerospace craft? And why Texas? Nevada or Utah are closer to Mr. Bezos and probably have cheaper land. Not to mention that the specs on this thing align perfectly with the X-Prize goals. Now I realize that Armadillo has officially moved on to LHOx propellant, but perhaps they sold off their old technology? And LHOx is only a necessary fuel if the craft is planning to go orbital. For suborbital flights, far less powerful rockets are required.

Mr. Caramack or Mr. Bezos, if you're reading this, how about giving us the 411?

John Carmacks thoughts on J2me

Why would I pay a programmer $1 an hour to code something for 10 hours on three different platforms, when I can pay him $1 an hour to code something once?

Because you'll end up coding 10 times anyway, at least according to John Carmack.

But then again, what the hell does he know, right?

Mobiles phones huh? Try reading this news item by Carmack on that.

they forgot to mention the other fallout: the one between the developers and the people who like text to appear as they type.

java is slow - John Carmack, Command Keen programmer.

John Carmack rips Java a new one here.

Yep. Read the only blog to combine details of rocket engine control vanes and "the inclusion of derivative instructions in fragment programs."

Yep. Read the only blog to combine details of rocket engine control vanes and "the inclusion of derivative instructions in fragment programs."

John Carmack tried this out, and posted an account here. They've also got a video available.

Here's a paste:

Since I got involved with the X-Prize, Peter Diamandis has been talking to me about his other project, http://www.nogravity.com/ . Like most people, he was hitting me up to invest in his company, but I said that I would rather be a customer than an investor (where possible, this is a better way to support companies). It took two years for it to go from "We are going to be starting flights in a couple months!" to actually getting the airplane to Dallas, but today I took all of the Armadillo crew and some of my partners from Id Software up on a chartered flight, "beta testing" the experience.

It was awesome!

We had 14 people, so it was only a little over half the full capacity, giving us plenty of room to bounce around. Doing the martian (1/3) and lunar (1/6) gravity parabolas is a really good idea, as it lets people get a little used to the movement before completely floating around. Many people thought the lunar gravity parabolas were the best part.

We did a total of 17 parabolas, the normal 15 and two extras at the end. At least half the people thought that was plenty (or two too many), but a bunch of us were like "Ten more parabolas!"

Nobody puked, although we did have one person staring solemnly at his barf bag at one point, and a few people had to go sit down for a bit. They gave recommendations for prescription medication that a couple people went and got filled, but the rest of us just took over the counter dramamine pills that they provided. One of the crew mentioned a promotional flight they had recently flown with a bunch of unmedicated journalists that had been hitting the cocktail bar, resulting in fully one third of them losing it.

The time went by so quickly that you completely forgot half the things you planned on trying. A couple of us were doing low gravity judo throws, and I took a shot at the worlds first flying armbar in zero gravity (didn't work out too well). Most of us that were doing fairly aggressive bouncing around landed on our heads at least once, so I have some concern that they will eventually have someone test the liability waiver.

The bottom line is that I highly recommend the experience, and I am almost certainly going to do it again at some point. Peter said most of their bookings are for corporate incentive programs, which is probably the most fun way to do it, but grabbing a friend and getting tickets for one of the passenger flights that will be starting soon out of Florida would still be memorable. The current individual price is $3k.

The take home lesson is that we need to add a lot of cabin volume to our first consumer suborbital spacecraft. Adding an extra 63" by 12' of cabin volume will only cost us about 250 pounds. You won't get much more total zero-g than on the parabolas, but it will be contiguous, and combined with the view, the boost burn, the reentry acceleration, and the exclusivity, I do think it is going to be a ride worth $100k. Zero-G is almost certain to stir up a lot of excitement about manned space flight in general.

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/zg/pic1.jpg

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/zg/pic2.jpg

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_09_26/zer o-g.mpg

John Carmack tried this out, and posted an account here. They've also got a video available.

Here's a paste:

Since I got involved with the X-Prize, Peter Diamandis has been talking to me about his other project, http://www.nogravity.com/ . Like most people, he was hitting me up to invest in his company, but I said that I would rather be a customer than an investor (where possible, this is a better way to support companies). It took two years for it to go from "We are going to be starting flights in a couple months!" to actually getting the airplane to Dallas, but today I took all of the Armadillo crew and some of my partners from Id Software up on a chartered flight, "beta testing" the experience.

It was awesome!

We had 14 people, so it was only a little over half the full capacity, giving us plenty of room to bounce around. Doing the martian (1/3) and lunar (1/6) gravity parabolas is a really good idea, as it lets people get a little used to the movement before completely floating around. Many people thought the lunar gravity parabolas were the best part.

We did a total of 17 parabolas, the normal 15 and two extras at the end. At least half the people thought that was plenty (or two too many), but a bunch of us were like "Ten more parabolas!"

Nobody puked, although we did have one person staring solemnly at his barf bag at one point, and a few people had to go sit down for a bit. They gave recommendations for prescription medication that a couple people went and got filled, but the rest of us just took over the counter dramamine pills that they provided. One of the crew mentioned a promotional flight they had recently flown with a bunch of unmedicated journalists that had been hitting the cocktail bar, resulting in fully one third of them losing it.

The time went by so quickly that you completely forgot half the things you planned on trying. A couple of us were doing low gravity judo throws, and I took a shot at the worlds first flying armbar in zero gravity (didn't work out too well). Most of us that were doing fairly aggressive bouncing around landed on our heads at least once, so I have some concern that they will eventually have someone test the liability waiver.

The bottom line is that I highly recommend the experience, and I am almost certainly going to do it again at some point. Peter said most of their bookings are for corporate incentive programs, which is probably the most fun way to do it, but grabbing a friend and getting tickets for one of the passenger flights that will be starting soon out of Florida would still be memorable. The current individual price is $3k.

The take home lesson is that we need to add a lot of cabin volume to our first consumer suborbital spacecraft. Adding an extra 63" by 12' of cabin volume will only cost us about 250 pounds. You won't get much more total zero-g than on the parabolas, but it will be contiguous, and combined with the view, the boost burn, the reentry acceleration, and the exclusivity, I do think it is going to be a ride worth $100k. Zero-G is almost certain to stir up a lot of excitement about manned space flight in general.

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/zg/pic1.jpg

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/zg/pic2.jpg

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_09_26/zer o-g.mpg

John Carmack tried this out, and posted an account here. They've also got a video available.

Here's a paste:

Since I got involved with the X-Prize, Peter Diamandis has been talking to me about his other project, http://www.nogravity.com/ . Like most people, he was hitting me up to invest in his company, but I said that I would rather be a customer than an investor (where possible, this is a better way to support companies). It took two years for it to go from "We are going to be starting flights in a couple months!" to actually getting the airplane to Dallas, but today I took all of the Armadillo crew and some of my partners from Id Software up on a chartered flight, "beta testing" the experience.

It was awesome!

We had 14 people, so it was only a little over half the full capacity, giving us plenty of room to bounce around. Doing the martian (1/3) and lunar (1/6) gravity parabolas is a really good idea, as it lets people get a little used to the movement before completely floating around. Many people thought the lunar gravity parabolas were the best part.

We did a total of 17 parabolas, the normal 15 and two extras at the end. At least half the people thought that was plenty (or two too many), but a bunch of us were like "Ten more parabolas!"

Nobody puked, although we did have one person staring solemnly at his barf bag at one point, and a few people had to go sit down for a bit. They gave recommendations for prescription medication that a couple people went and got filled, but the rest of us just took over the counter dramamine pills that they provided. One of the crew mentioned a promotional flight they had recently flown with a bunch of unmedicated journalists that had been hitting the cocktail bar, resulting in fully one third of them losing it.

The time went by so quickly that you completely forgot half the things you planned on trying. A couple of us were doing low gravity judo throws, and I took a shot at the worlds first flying armbar in zero gravity (didn't work out too well). Most of us that were doing fairly aggressive bouncing around landed on our heads at least once, so I have some concern that they will eventually have someone test the liability waiver.

The bottom line is that I highly recommend the experience, and I am almost certainly going to do it again at some point. Peter said most of their bookings are for corporate incentive programs, which is probably the most fun way to do it, but grabbing a friend and getting tickets for one of the passenger flights that will be starting soon out of Florida would still be memorable. The current individual price is $3k.

The take home lesson is that we need to add a lot of cabin volume to our first consumer suborbital spacecraft. Adding an extra 63" by 12' of cabin volume will only cost us about 250 pounds. You won't get much more total zero-g than on the parabolas, but it will be contiguous, and combined with the view, the boost burn, the reentry acceleration, and the exclusivity, I do think it is going to be a ride worth $100k. Zero-G is almost certain to stir up a lot of excitement about manned space flight in general.

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/zg/pic1.jpg

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/zg/pic2.jpg

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_09_26/zer o-g.mpg

John Carmack tried this out, and posted an account here. They've also got a video available.

Here's a paste:

Since I got involved with the X-Prize, Peter Diamandis has been talking to me about his other project, http://www.nogravity.com/ . Like most people, he was hitting me up to invest in his company, but I said that I would rather be a customer than an investor (where possible, this is a better way to support companies). It took two years for it to go from "We are going to be starting flights in a couple months!" to actually getting the airplane to Dallas, but today I took all of the Armadillo crew and some of my partners from Id Software up on a chartered flight, "beta testing" the experience.

It was awesome!

We had 14 people, so it was only a little over half the full capacity, giving us plenty of room to bounce around. Doing the martian (1/3) and lunar (1/6) gravity parabolas is a really good idea, as it lets people get a little used to the movement before completely floating around. Many people thought the lunar gravity parabolas were the best part.

We did a total of 17 parabolas, the normal 15 and two extras at the end. At least half the people thought that was plenty (or two too many), but a bunch of us were like "Ten more parabolas!"

Nobody puked, although we did have one person staring solemnly at his barf bag at one point, and a few people had to go sit down for a bit. They gave recommendations for prescription medication that a couple people went and got filled, but the rest of us just took over the counter dramamine pills that they provided. One of the crew mentioned a promotional flight they had recently flown with a bunch of unmedicated journalists that had been hitting the cocktail bar, resulting in fully one third of them losing it.

The time went by so quickly that you completely forgot half the things you planned on trying. A couple of us were doing low gravity judo throws, and I took a shot at the worlds first flying armbar in zero gravity (didn't work out too well). Most of us that were doing fairly aggressive bouncing around landed on our heads at least once, so I have some concern that they will eventually have someone test the liability waiver.

The bottom line is that I highly recommend the experience, and I am almost certainly going to do it again at some point. Peter said most of their bookings are for corporate incentive programs, which is probably the most fun way to do it, but grabbing a friend and getting tickets for one of the passenger flights that will be starting soon out of Florida would still be memorable. The current individual price is $3k.

The take home lesson is that we need to add a lot of cabin volume to our first consumer suborbital spacecraft. Adding an extra 63" by 12' of cabin volume will only cost us about 250 pounds. You won't get much more total zero-g than on the parabolas, but it will be contiguous, and combined with the view, the boost burn, the reentry acceleration, and the exclusivity, I do think it is going to be a ride worth $100k. Zero-G is almost certain to stir up a lot of excitement about manned space flight in general.

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/zg/pic1.jpg

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/zg/pic2.jpg

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_09_26/zer o-g.mpg

John Carmack tried this out, and posted an account here. They've also got a video available.

Here's a paste:

Since I got involved with the X-Prize, Peter Diamandis has been talking to me about his other project, http://www.nogravity.com/ . Like most people, he was hitting me up to invest in his company, but I said that I would rather be a customer than an investor (where possible, this is a better way to support companies). It took two years for it to go from "We are going to be starting flights in a couple months!" to actually getting the airplane to Dallas, but today I took all of the Armadillo crew and some of my partners from Id Software up on a chartered flight, "beta testing" the experience.

It was awesome!

We had 14 people, so it was only a little over half the full capacity, giving us plenty of room to bounce around. Doing the martian (1/3) and lunar (1/6) gravity parabolas is a really good idea, as it lets people get a little used to the movement before completely floating around. Many people thought the lunar gravity parabolas were the best part.

We did a total of 17 parabolas, the normal 15 and two extras at the end. At least half the people thought that was plenty (or two too many), but a bunch of us were like "Ten more parabolas!"

Nobody puked, although we did have one person staring solemnly at his barf bag at one point, and a few people had to go sit down for a bit. They gave recommendations for prescription medication that a couple people went and got filled, but the rest of us just took over the counter dramamine pills that they provided. One of the crew mentioned a promotional flight they had recently flown with a bunch of unmedicated journalists that had been hitting the cocktail bar, resulting in fully one third of them losing it.

The time went by so quickly that you completely forgot half the things you planned on trying. A couple of us were doing low gravity judo throws, and I took a shot at the worlds first flying armbar in zero gravity (didn't work out too well). Most of us that were doing fairly aggressive bouncing around landed on our heads at least once, so I have some concern that they will eventually have someone test the liability waiver.

The bottom line is that I highly recommend the experience, and I am almost certainly going to do it again at some point. Peter said most of their bookings are for corporate incentive programs, which is probably the most fun way to do it, but grabbing a friend and getting tickets for one of the passenger flights that will be starting soon out of Florida would still be memorable. The current individual price is $3k.

The take home lesson is that we need to add a lot of cabin volume to our first consumer suborbital spacecraft. Adding an extra 63" by 12' of cabin volume will only cost us about 250 pounds. You won't get much more total zero-g than on the parabolas, but it will be contiguous, and combined with the view, the boost burn, the reentry acceleration, and the exclusivity, I do think it is going to be a ride worth $100k. Zero-G is almost certain to stir up a lot of excitement about manned space flight in general.

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/zg/pic1.jpg

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/zg/pic2.jpg

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_09_26/zer o-g.mpg

Does it strike anyone that, given Carmack's open blogging about his trial-and-error development of a vertical takeoff/vertical landing rocket, as well as software (at the bottom) for some of his control functions, that Bezos may be throwing some high-grade engineering talent at a proven concept? If I had a pot of money and a big plot of land, I might do the same thing. For that matter, he could be padding a nest for Carmack and crew to incubate their eggs in.

Here's the reason. In brief: Games are still being released using the Q3 engine. Carmack doesn't feel it's fair to release the source until after those projects are release, which is understandable.

Carmack Envy.

Ok, so we learned that it's VTVL. But we still know virtually nothing about it.

Compare it to John Carmack's space effort where you get updates with intimate details about every bolt, valve and crash.

Have you not heard? Sir Richard Branson has signed Rutan up to make him some space planes, in his latest venture: Virgin Galactic
Stories:
Virgin Atlantic Licensing SpaceShipOne (27/09/04)
Sir Richard takes Virgin into Space (10/01/05)
Yahoo: 2004, The Year Space Tourism Finally Took Off

Plus, Armadillo Aerospace don't seem to have lost all hope yet either - Almost ready (06/01/05)

Indirectly you are saying the same thing I did. As I said before, DrLZRDMN's comment talks about nVidia (a hardware developer) helping an already existing engine (Crystal Core) in order to make their hardware more attractive. By the way, didn't Id open the Quake engine, too? And the Quake II engine? Even not opening the Quake 3 engine right now has more to do with respecting current licencees than anything else.

If so, you may want to consider to book a parabolic flight with ZERO-G.
John Carmack has taken the ride and seems to have liked it a lot.

these guys

It will be quite interesting to see what developers will squeeze out of the D3 engine, such as Quake 4 being developed by Raven.

Anyway it shouldn't be long now until Carmack releases some tech previews of his next engine. According to his site , Armadillo Aerospace, the engine has already gone into production use. He is like some sort of coding machine!

John Carmack no longer "simply sits around coding violent computer games." Nor does he need to work for NASA. He has his own spaceship company!

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/

Now, instead of teaching kids to blow up people one at a time, he's trying to blow up Texas all by himself.

. png

References:

• Wikipedia DC-X page
• Astronautix DC-X page
• Astronautix DC-Y page
• Armadillo Aerospace's DC-X page (with videos)

It's all about weight.

The reason our spaceships are tin cans is because nobody can afford the weight for shielding. When 99+% of your mass is thrown away, carrying an extra kilo at the end means an extra hundred kilos at the start.

But, if you have a good enough fuel that you only need 10 times your ultimate mass in fuel, suddenly you can carry shielding. The better your specific impulse (I_sp = pounds of thrust per pound of fuel used per second), the better your chances for shielding. An I_sp of 200 (about what http://armadilloaerospace.com/ hoped to achieve) means you're just barely cutting it. An I_sp of around 300 makes life a lot easier, but that pretty much requires liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen.

Anything higher than that is just pure nirvana for the rocket guys. I have heard of I_sp of over 1000 from a cesium ion drive, but that had just a teensy thrust, making it useful only for satellite station keeping.

So, in conclusion, if you can get a high I_sp and a high thrust, then shielding is a piece of cake.

Since you brought up team Overbot, I'll take this opportunity to ask if you'd consider publishing a bit more info on your page. A blog along the lines of John Carmack's at Armadillo Aerospace would be awesome for those of us who have to settle for experiencing the whole thing vicariously.

basically gave up on winning the X Prize. According to this press release, they were dogged by two things: 1) they had pinned their hopes on using 90% peroxide as their fuel, but it wasn't available to them, and 2) a test flight crash on August 8th.

They are continuing work, albeit at a slower pace.

Did you know that Scaled Composites supplied the aeroshell for this rocket?

It certainly appears as though this was the seed for a lot of what is around us at the moment.

Heres a link with lots of info, pics and a movie for the DCX

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/DCX/

It would be a shame to award the prize to some old technology that doesn't build on the inherent economies of the reusable first stages being developed by the Ansari X-Prize contenstants.

As Robert Truax told me, people keep studying what the optimal number of stages for an orbital launch vehicle should be and they keep discovering the answer is "2". The first stage is always lower exhaust velocity and cheap per kg. The second stage is always higher exhaust velocity and more expensive per kg.

The ideal first stage derived from the Ansari X-Prize entrants would be one that is cheap to:

1. scale up
2. refuel
3. relaunch

Rutan's technology doesn't really fill the bill here because fabricating hybrid rockeet motors is expensive compared to refueling. Also its unlikely his aerodynamic body scales up as cheaply as does simple tankage with vertical takeoff.

As it turns out, John Carmack just reported his team has reached probably the most critical milestone for such a first stage by demonstrating a scaled up version of their methanol/H2O2(50%) mixed monoprop engine.

This could be the really big deal -- not just for manned spaceflight but for cheap access to space generally.

I know the booties are for traction, but i'm sure they're differently coloured not only to let the minders keep track of their charges but also to appeal to a certain kind of nerd. I didn't see any red members - perhaps it's so as not to make them uneasy on their first 'mission'.

this image he posted looks like it could be a promotional shot for a new sitcom about the wacky misadventures of the world's first private, zany space company.

And i think i just saw cnn's thing from that promotional flight. There was indeed at least one holding the bag to her face, being lead away and looking a tad more than solemn (thank god the minders do that - eeww! float over there!) Miles O'brien (sp) says he kept it down.

Hmmm. Maybe it's a market niche for Armadillo Aerospace?

"It'll just eventually lead up to colonization via the Union Aerospace Corporation. "

Don't you mean the Armadillo Aerospace Corporation?

There doesn't seem to be a mention of Armadillo Aerospace here, and since Carmack runs the company, I think it should be mentioned in a "what we're up to" story, even if the story is basically about id Software. So, here it is:

Armadillo Aerospace is based in Mesquite, Texas, and is a rocketry research firm that is one of those trying to win the X-Prize. The Armadillo prototype crashed during its last flight test and it doesn't look like they'll be able to compete for the prize because of what it will take to get their vehicle rebuilt and flying again (in terms of money and time), but they'll keep going and see what they can do to reach the point where they're ready to launch manned flights.

Armadillo Aerospace's X Prize Prototype Crashes

And there's a video available of the crash in MPEG format.

I'm still expecting the Scaled Composites team (led by Burt Rutan) to win, but I'm still intrigued by AA and the Canadian Arrow team; I'm still dubious about the DaVinci Project, which has yet to actually fly anything.

This is exactly what the X-Prize is meant to do, though: spur the development of a new industry by providing an incentive for privately held teams and individuals to step in and make space accessible to the public.

I applaud Carmack for not being afraid to try. It's amazing what ingenuity can do even when you don't have the deep pockets of government-funded space efforts. Or maybe especially when; necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.

And yes, I bought the game; I'm proud to say that I, no matter if it was not done directly, helped to support an effort to put civilians into space with civilian launch systems.

Being electrical engineering student, when I see http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_08_08/200 4_08_07_i.jpg and http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_08_08/200 4_08_07_k.jpg, I say this is really a amateur job : I would have done the same.... This must be a nightmare to debug: even my 70's dryer is better wired than this I hope they are not seriousely competing with Tier One for the price... This is must a Carmack toy than anything else.