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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.

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Ho me/Paraphernalia

Check the bottom for Armadillo Droppings.

A worst case scenario would entail the rocket blowing up at 80,000 feet because a valve got stuck or the fuel didn't flow quite the same way at 80,000 that it does at sea level when the rocket is steady versus swinging on the end of tether or the guidance mechanism doesn't work the way they thought it would and the rocket flies into the balloon instead of away from it.

Rutan and Carmack have already demonstrated why you test before you go for the big prize - way too many things can, and do, go wrong.

I doubt anyone is stupid enough to try to fly an untested rocket which is why I think the announcement is just a stunt.

Wow, not even a good troll.

First off, it's John, not "Jon".

Secondly, you mention that he could be working at NASA, well hey guess what? He's been working for the past 2 years on a rocket to put a man in space. I'm sure you have contributed so much to society. I bet people 100 years from now will look back and thank heavens that you just posted your comment to Slashdot. Now shut your pie hole and go back to sucking your mom's teat.

Close enough.

I have no doubt that Armadillo will keep on going, and even though it might take a while longer, eventually create a phenomenal product. If you have any doubts, just watch this video of a perfect test flight they recently had. In the video you can see the unmanned craft fly straight up, above the camera's view, and then land down in the same spot perfectly. It's simply amazing.

Actually, John Carmack has stated that they have a business plan that does not rely on them winning the X-Prize, or getting any other sort of cash windfall (I'm summarizing, so any mistake is mine and not his). Some great insight as to their plans can be gleaned from the Armadillo Aerospace Forum at XPrize.org.

Even though they are not as polished or well-funded as Scaled Composites, their openness with their processes, plans, trials, and tribulations makes them one hell of a lot cooler and several orders of magnitude more interesting, at least in my book.

The Scaled Composites team deserves huge congratulations for the 100km flight of Space Ship One on Monday. They probably have the X-Prize in the bag now, but just in case, I did go ahead and place orders for all the long lead time items we still need. If their flight had been flawless, I probably wouldn't have bothered. We can still have our final vehicle assembled this year, but it isn't clear that we have time to recover from the inevitable setbacks during testing.

The Scaled Composites team deserves huge congratulations for the 100km flight of Space Ship One on Monday. They probably have the X-Prize in the bag now, but just in case, I did go ahead and place orders for all the long lead time items we still need. If their flight had been flawless, I probably wouldn't have bothered. We can still have our final vehicle assembled this year, but it isn't clear that we have time to recover from the inevitable setbacks during testing.

Armadillo, well, they are tinkering with rockets, and writing a blog about it.

I think we can give Armadillo a bit more credit than that. Granted, they are not close to the X-prize. (Especially compared to Scaled.) But the work they've done really is very impressive. Just look at their "perfect boosted hop" video.

They have constructed, in their spare time, a VTOL rocket craft with very good autonomous control and capacity for a useful payload. That may or may not be a detour on the way to the X-prize, but it's a damned impressive feat in itself.

John Carmack is still a genius nonetheless.

This may very well be, but I wish he'd apply his genius to things other than FPS's.

Presumably, in the near future we'll be seeing a variant of the X Prize for orbital flights; perhaps in the interim we'll see things like X Prizes for transcontinental flights.

I'm curious though: How can contestants be able to deal with all the liabilities which that entails? With the test flights of Scaled Composites and Armadillo Aerospace, before being allowed to fly they've had to make various government official certain that in a worst-case scenario their craft would remain within the testing zone. With orbital (or even transcontinental) flights, their flight range will have to extend beyond the testing zone and into inhabited areas (even other countries). Governments are able to test things like this because they can deal with the liability, but what about private companies?

One other advantage to this scenario is that NASA only pays for the successful results, not the failures. In the unfortunate event that a returning cargo-laden lander drills into the center of a city, NASA doesn't have to bear the cost of the cleanup. In a simpler scenario, they don't have to pay for all the failed attempts at figuring out what sort of fuel combination to use, a la John Carmack and company, though I continue to be hopeful for their success either in the X-Prize competition or out of it.

From here:

The DC-X was a one-third-size experimental vehicle, built by McDonnell Douglas under a 22-month, $58 million contract. The DC-X prototype's goals were to verify vertical takeoff and landing, demonstrate subsonic maneuverability, validate airplane-like supportability and maintainability and demonstrate the rapid prototyping development approach. The DC-X suborbital prototype was to be followed by the DC-Y orbital prototype, three times taller, five times heavier (empty) and over twenty-five times heavier fully fueled and loaded. The goal of the orbital Delta Clipper was to put 20,000 pounds of payload into Low Earth orbit (LEO) or 10,000 pounds into polar orbit.

The "official" blame for killing DC-X was that they couldn't build a composite fiber fuel tank big enough, but the real problem was the $billions that Boeing and Lockheed (or Rockwell, at the time) would have lost in support contracts for the Space Shuttle, which probably weighed heavily on the consciences of some Alabama, Washington and Florida congress critters also.

You are here confusing the X-33 program, which was run by NASA and built by Lockheed, with the DC-X program. DC-X died because NASA didn't like it. The X-33 program was indeed killed partly as a result of their inability to build a "conformal" composite propellant tank, as well as severe cost over-runs and a growing realization that it would never carry any significant payload. However, the X-33 design was significantly different than the DC-X/Delta Clipper design, and in many ways pushed the technological envelope much further (which was a major cause of their later over-runs). Why NASA picked the Lockheed design (which was essentially just some marketing material at that point) over the Delta Clipper (which had flight-tested actual hardware) as the winner of the X-33 contract has always been a mystery to me.

Speaking of next week... I think Space Ship One has good odds of success in the single-person-to-100km flight. I only see two real issues they may hit: The extended burn above the atmosphere may run into some control issues as the nozzle ablates, which will be hard to correct with only cold gas attitude jets. This would be a fairly benign failure, with the pilot just shutting off the main engine if he can't hold the trajectory.

Interesting video: Armadillo Aerospace test of pouring the h2o2 on various materials ... shirts, shoes, etc. to see what the effect was.

Speaking of next week... I think Space Ship One has good odds of success in the single-person-to-100km flight. I only see two real issues they may hit: The extended burn above the atmosphere may run into some control issues as the nozzle ablates, which will be hard to correct with only cold gas attitude jets. This would be a fairly benign failure, with the pilot just shutting off the main engine if he can't hold the trajectory. The dangerous part of the test will be the reentry with a significantly bigger drop than the previous test. At this point, I hope Burt has everything work out and he is able to make the X-Prize flights soon, because our prospects are pretty dim for getting everything working perfectly in the big vehicle in five months and having permission to fly it. I certainly don't want the insurance company to keep the prize money. If Space Ship One crashes, we will probably throw ourselves at an attempt, but it will be a long shot. No, I don't think any of the other teams are close.

It's not really Open Source, but the development of Armadillo Aerospace's ship has been thoroughly documented at their site complete with a lot of information about their weekly progress, photos, and movies.

If you had the time and money, you could probably reconstruct their ship. The hardest part would be writing the stabilization/guidance software. That part of the development appears to be closed source.

Armadillo is doing rather well. They are the only real competition to Space Ship One. They just had a very successful launch of a test vehicle. But the engine is nearly dead from all the tinkering the did with it. They will need to create a new engine as well as the final ship before launch. John estimates it will not happen by the end of the year. They still seem to be in good spirits. I am still hoping they win, unlikely as it is now.

Read the updates at the Armadillo Aerospace site. John discussed this in his most recent post there. If his assessment of Scaled's effort and chances is your sole interest, search for the words "I think Space Ship One has good odds".

Read the updates at the Armadillo Aerospace site. John discussed this in his most recent post there. If his assessment of Scaled's effort and chances is your sole interest, search for the words "I think Space Ship One has good odds".

I imagine (and I'm just guessing here, I don't speak for anyone else) that Armadillo goes on the "RTFM" theory of publicity. They have an excellent website that posts detailed test reports just about weekly. Pretty much everything you'd want to know about the project is there.

Their project is much more open than Scaled's; Mr. Rutan played his cards pretty close to the vest all through the testing phase up to now. Carmack's team has been very open about both successes and failures.

I suppose it might be nice for them to have some sort of overall status summary on the website for people who don't have time to read the test reports, but it's probably better that they devote that time to things like getting rockets to fly. :-)

Speaking of... how cool! The latest boosted hop video is flippin' freaky. You just don't see many things in the real world doing what their rocket does. Straight up, straight down, and very much in defiance of gravity the whole way. Congratulations to the whole Armadillo team!

From what I've seen, Armadillo definitely practices safe rocketry.

December 20, 2003 notes

The reason being that parachute has failure mode (premature deployment) which may possibley cause damanage on the ground in much wider area. But comparing to landing parachute, it is such a dynamic control that it MUST be landed by computer. How many of you trust your programming enough to put your life solely depending on it? Me? Hell no.

I'm seriously thinking about flying my Long-EZ (another Rutan design) to Mojave to see the magic. This is going to be so cool.

Might better plan ahead. From the FAQ:

Q: Can we fly our own airplanes in?
A: Due to expected congestion, the airport will be closed to transient aircraft starting several days before the event.

That said, though, I'd probably take a day off work to see it with the kids, if I lived within 300 miles. As it is, 1500 miles each way is a bit much for a long-weekend road trip. I'll have to wait for the Texas folks to try it.

Wow, where's the in-flight video? One great thing about Armadillo is that they have a ton of detail online, including lots of pictures and videos.

Try armadillo aerospace.

They're making some really neat progress with the jet vane concept, but until they get site and vehicle clearance they won't be coming close to catching up with the Scaled Team.

That's ok though, each team: Scaled, Armadillo, XCor, DaVinci, etc. is approaching things differently, so who knows we might end up with a heterogenous and competitive rocket industry.

Heck, there's even JP Aerospace with their airship/ballon platform to orbit method!

They've done tethered hover tests which I believe have been fairly successful. See their page for more details.

Teams competing for the X-Prize ARE starting out small. The spaceship required to win the competition only needs to carry 3 people. The competition can be won by a ship carrying only one pilot and ballast representing the other two passengers.

As far as I know, Scaled Composites is the only team carrying out manned tests of their vehicle so far. They're following a careful test program, slowly expanding their flight envelope, and are taking no unnecessary risks.

For another team's perspective, check Armadillo's website for a great log of all the testing and refining they've been doing while developing their rocket.

Bottom line: The teams with a shot at winning are not jumping into rocketry without careful attention to safety. No one wants to see fatalities or explosions of any kind - they're bad for business.

As far as the organisers are concerned, I can't recall them ever posting here, but the plan after the X Prize is won by somebody (probably Rutan, at this stage) is the X Prize Cup, an annual festival/competition where teams will compete to launch their craft as high and as fast as they can.

If they are successful with that competition, I imagine that sooner or later they will propose a private orbital shot.

speaking of which, he has some nice tests up of the big engine. still looks like a ways to go, but it's nice to see progress. the sheer amount of parts issues he goes through is insane.... click the news for the video...woooo wouldnt i like to have one of those to play with. the site

Adding fuel also increases the exhaust temperature, and if you're already in danger of cooking your legs with superheated steam this could be a problem. The system might require modifications to keep the pilot cool.

Propellants containing N2O4 or N2H4 are right out; you'd presumably like to survive an impact which bends the plumbing, assuming that you live long enough to get the thing fuelled up and launched in the first place. Both substances are extremely poisonous.

To really get long flight times you have to increase the performance well above what rocket propulsion can give you. You can go from rocket to venturi-assisted rocket, to rocket-driven turbofan, to straight turbofan, to helicopter. Each one represents an increase in lift*time per unit fuel, by moving more mass (in this case, air) at a lower velocity and thus decreasing the energy (proportional to v^2) per unit momentum (proportional to v). However, by the time you do this you're not really a "rocket man" any more, you're something else.

<a href="http://www.armadilloaerospace.com">John's toy</a>

<a href="http://www.armadilloaerospace.com">John's toy</a>

Still...they're doing it for the sake of commercial interests, not simply for the sake of exploration and gathering knowledge

There is at least one team doing it for exactly those reasons. Go John Carmack!

Apparently, Scaled Composites is one of two teams to have applied for a permit from the FAA to launch a spaceflight. The other is Armadillo Aerospace, run by John Carmack of Doom fame. It's interesting to compare and contrast the two companies. Rutan has a sleek ship with lots of cool round windows that launches from a funky big plane, and they have some good solid live testing. The Armadillo team's site really shows you the nitty-gritty of building something that flies in your spare time, with pictures of them welding engines together, making a crew capsule out of whatever they could find, and building a landing gear with some thick cable springs. I'm guessing that Rutan will win, but I'll hold out hope that the garage engineer can pull off at least some type of flight to give courage to that old entrepreneurial spirit....

I've been following the X-Prize work at Armadillo for the last year or so. If nothing else than for the John Carmack factor. They seem to have stalled lately, always reengineering their rocket motors and such. I'm still cheering them on anyway though I can't see them surpassing Scaled Composites at this point.

I have no intention of letting you get your white elephant Mars mission on my credit card. You want manned space exploration ? Buy it on your own dime. These NASA programs are nothing more than handouts to defense contractors that lost the juicy bids, and a form of idolatry and techno-whorship. We don't hire Halliburton to build statuary for the Catholic Church, so what is NASA for ?

I hate to beat a dead horse, but seriously: Why do you ridicule the efforts of the x-prize contestants?

At least they are making attempts at going into space. By far and away the most difficult aspect of private attempts for getting into space (and even government attempts for that matter) is the sheer bureaucracy of people who are trying to stop you at every step of the way.

Check out the Space Access Society website for further details, but I find it rediculous that if you had one of those Slaver-designed bio-engineered rocketships described by Larry Niven (a great SF story about bio-engineer rockets as powerful as a Saturn V... just add water and the plant makes you a personal rocketship for just the price of the water and a little bit of sunshine) it would still cost you over $1,000,000 just to file the paperwork to get flight clearance.

Something is definitely wrong here when this is the situation. The X-Prize folks are making some very real progress, and they are following an incremental design and engineering approach that is going to be very sustainable in the long run. If you check out Armadillo Aerospace you will see that they are planning for not if but when their spacecraft crashes/dies/blows up, and they are just going to take lessons learned and move on from there. With NASA's approach they are so paranoid to lose a vehicle that they are completely unable to even launch anything, and refuse to take any risks even after they eventually plan on any launches.

That and the approximately $500 million per launch is really quite overkill, but that is still another point to be made. NASA is doing a lousy job of lanching people into space and it is so obvious now that even a typical congressman can figure it out for themselves.

Actually, there are certain "consessions and compromises" that I would've like to have seen in the design. Other posters have pointed out some, but my pet peeve is that I really would've liked to have seen consistent use of metric measurements.

I worked for a company that worked on some of the life support components of the ISS. All measurements were done in English (American, Imperial, whatever you want to call them) measurements. This means that there are not only redundant components of the ISS, but even redundant toolboxes -- metric and English.

I spent my three months at this company having flashbacks to the movie "Apollo 13," then bailed to a different company the first chance I got. My time there was enough to give me a lifetime's worth of "stupid engineer" stories. I suspect most aerospace companies have similar practices. This, in my opinion, is the biggest reason aerospace is so expensive.

Give me private companies (Armadillo Aerospace, Burt Rutan's projects) any day. They're the ones who'll finally get us into space reliably.

I think the point of your argument is that since NASA is the only one that currenly flys into space in this country they are the only game in town?

What about the fact that a geek close to our hearts, John Carmack, has his own areospace co. or the Russans are always willing to send up a rocket for some cash. (With ppl in them even.)

The Hubble is American and as of right now it's NASAs responsability, however if they see fit they could give the responsability to a set of insititusions. With letters like MIT, GT, UCLA (Sorry, I'm east coast. Drawing a blank on what west coast schools do rocket science.), and then add a few other schools in there and you have one powerful set of heads working there.

It could work...but again, it's up to NASA.

Remember Id? Came out of nowhere, provided something that the heavy hitters didn't. Now they are a heavy hitter. It's not rocket science. (Ok, mabye it is in Id's case).

I think it will be the private sector that will actually accomplish these things. Take a look at the X-Prize competition for an example. Several teams are ready for suborbital launch this year.
Personally, I can't wait for John Carmack (of id fame) to start working on a moon mission.
Looking at these private people and corporations' budgets, you can see that this sort of thing, if handeled properly, by skilled people, can cost far less than overpriced government programs.
So, I say "Yes, let's go to the moon, but let's fly Jet Blue!"

Lighten up dude. Do you feel proud of your accomplishments wrt any of your hobbies? This guy is using his spare time to do something he is interested in. Any time a milestone happens in such projects, congradulations are in order. He should give himself a pat on the back.

Sure it's not rocket science but most hobbies aren't.

I'm personally rooting for Armadillo Aerospace

Me too, because they're the local boys (and girl). But the SS1 folks are breaking the sound barrier while Armadillo is still working on their fuel mixture. It just doesn't look too good for Carmack & Co, at least not for the X-Prize.

Hopefully, though, they'll still be in the running for future commercial applications. Sometimes, it's better to be second or third...

I'm personally rooting for Armadillo Aerospace, which has John Carmack's involvement. He's got some great comments on his news page - feels much more open and less corporate than some of the other X-Prize contenders.

That's probably not true. Check out Space X for example. Or Armadillo. The illusion needs shattering.

There's nothing inherently expensive about space (the fuel costs for putting something into space are under $50 per kg of payload for example)- it's just that right now there are so few launches that it's cheapest to throw the whole rocket away after each launch. Because it's so expensive, practically nobody goes. Catch 22.

Aerospace. There is a photograph over at Armadillo Aerospace of the electronics inside of their vehicle. Does anyone know the name of the manufacturer of the black box in the back - it begins with ESTE????

Aerospace. There is a photograph over at Armadillo Aerospace of the electronics inside of their vehicle. Does anyone know the name of the manufacturer of the black box in the back - it begins with ESTE????

I did a quick Google on the first time humans passed the "sound barrier" in 1947. 50 years later, every school kid knows^W should know Chuck Yeager's name.

50 years from now, will the class of 2060 recognize the name "Brian Binnie"? If this works out, they darn well should... especially if he's the one who gets to fly the craft "for real", twice in two weeks.

* 1903: Orville & Wilbur Wright achieve controlled, manned flight (but birds fly on a regular basis)

* 1947: Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in a military aircraft (but ordinary people fly on a regular basis)

* 2003: Brian Binnie breaks the sound barrier in a home-built spacecraft prototype (but ordinary people fly faster than sound on a regular basis)

* 2050: What's the next big advance when ordinary people fly to space on a regular basis?

I was sure rooting for the local boys (& girl), but I don't see how they can catch up to Scaled Composites' entry.