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Cheap Launch Ends In The Drink
Baldrson writes: "Wired reports that the only scheduled rocket launch for the CATS Prize has failed. Since the CATS Prize has a deadline of November 8, the enormous hard work and enthusiasm that has gone into this competition will meet with a lot of disappointment. This is unfortunate, because in my original prize announcement, I specifically requested that many individuals put up small amounts of money for their own awards so that there would be no single point of failure. The bright side of all this is that others are now taking that meta-challenge seriously. See, for example the Stark Draper Open Source Rocketry Award."
It's a stark contrast that the ISS launch occurred in the wee hours of the morning, to the amateur spirit of rocketry. You might find they are strongly related. The first rocketry program - the V1 and later the V2, by the Germans, witnessed an incredible failure rate. NASA too has lost many, many professionally built and engineered rockets. This is a field where failure happens alot in the early stages, and is still not uncommon even in well-established programs.
I don't see this as a set-back. The fact that the CATS program managed to inspire people send something into orbit and to learn more about physics and the world is still a remarkable achievement. In America we still cling to a rather backwards convention that winning is everything... but in science the reverse is true - new discoveries are frequently ushered in with the words "That's odd", instead of "Eurika!" (I got it!).
Best of luck to all who undertake the endeavor to reach space. ~ A well-known, but for now anonymous, slashdotter.
You mean the X Prize (at http://www.xprize.org), a prize of ten million U.S. dollars for the first private launch of a three-person reusable spacecraft. Several teams have entries in advanced stages of development, including Dick Rutan, who built the first plane to travel all the way around the world non-stop.
I would agree that you shouldn't put something "experimental" in a production situation where people's lives are on the line. I also wouldn't put latest x.0 version of Red Hat, (choose your own distro or OS here) to operate a heart monitoring device in a hospital either.
(As a side note: It makes me really cringe when I see monitoring equipment in a hospital running in MS-Windows.... but I digress here)
This isn't to say that you could extensively test a system that would be very robust that you wouldn't mind putting your grandmother's life on the line, but that would take some strong testing before I would consider it ready.
On the same level or viewpoint, I think it would be possible to put together a volunteer group that would be working with "open" designs on components, that when fully assembled could become a rocket capable of human spaceflight.
What would this mean? Technology used to build something like this could also be transfered to other projects as well, and a unique opportunity to allow people to participate in "reaching the stars"
One of the problems with putting together something like that would mean that people who are not normally used to working in an open development group (like mechanical, aeronautical, and chemical engineers) would also have to be involved in order to put something like this together. That and a standardizing process to allow different components to come together, so if one component doesn't quite work that another can be relativly easily put in its place. Plus you would have to have somebody with one huge ego and a lot of free time (like Linus with Linux or RMS with GNU) who could organize something like this.
Impossible? No. Easy to accomplish? Far from it.
Right now non-governmental rocketry is at about the stage of the Home-brew computer club/Altair/Apple ][/TRS-80/Atari stage of development (to use an analogy with the computer industry). The very first practical commercial launches are finally getting off of the ground, but there is a long way to go.
When the contest was first announced (not here) my old impromptu rocket group looked into the rules, and decided against even considering a run for it [okay, we were paranoid about getting credit-- but it's a serious investment of work in a field where the "milestone that didn't count" is as common as the "one that got away" in fishing]
One of us was curious about the exact details of the CATS official payload, but could never seem to get a straight answer out of them. Obviously it is not a solid Aluminum cylinder, as one response seemed to imply (Al is 2.7 g/cc, or more than twice the density of the 100mm(r) x 200mm right cylinder specified) He joked that it was "a Semtex payload" designed to guarantee no one succeeded.
I'm sure my friend's irreverence could easily have rubbed CATS the wrong way. I am curious if anyone "more busineslike" than my friend managed to get a detailed spec from CATS.
"But, it is well known, what strikes the capricious mind of the poet is not always what affects the mass of readers." -
Extreme low-g conditions allow for the cheap manufacture of substances and devices that would be nigh impossible in the gravity well of the earth. Some processes could be managed on the much lower well of the moon, but some things will be done at one of the Lagrange points where it's essentially null-g conditions. The moon is a vast resource of metals that are actually somewhat rare on the Earth and are actually useful. The moon has enough Helium-3 trapped in the regolith to power the earth for hundreds of years.
Sounds like the conditions of the New World expressed in modern times with modern needs.
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I have been meaning to write an article about my involvement with, and impressions of the space community over the past year. Slashdot's space coverage started getting me interested in the field last year, and I wound up putting $34k into funding two of the CATS prize entries (JPA and SORAC). If one of them had won, they would have returned the funding money, but it was basically done as philanthropy.
From the outside, or with cursory knowledge, it seems so damn simple, and all the problems sound like they could have been prevented with a little thought. It's harder than it sounds. Feel free to help.
A lot of efforts came together in the last couple months, and none of them have been successful. After the fact, it's easy to toss off what should have been done.
Ky Michaelson's space shot got off better than most. It launched well, and went through it's full burn before losing a fin at mach 4+. If it had held together, it might have made it into space. Hindsight says he should have welded the fins.
The Wickman AN space booster static test CATO'd. Hindsight says he should have hydrotested the casing.
The HARC launch reached the full altitude for balloon launch (an achievement by itself), and the electronics all seemed to work, but the launch failed due to interference with the launch rail. Hindsight says they should have done a test launch from the ground with the launcher hung from scaffolding.
The SORAC team ran into some political and personal issues with the Bureau of Land Management, resulting in them being banned from black rock for a while, scrubbing their planned CATS launch. Being honest, it would have been a rush job if they had launched in the scheduled slot, but they still would have had a chance. Hindsight says they should have started cultivating the BLM bureaucrats at the start of the year.
JP Aerospace got fucked by the FAA. They have had licenses to try for 100km a couple times in the past, and they always turn everything in more than six months in advance and check up on the process constantly. Four days before they were heading to black rock, the FAA informed them that there were problems with their application. Hindsight doesn't say anything. There was still a pretty good chance JPA would have had problems with their new launch structure because they missed their last AWAY test run schedule, but they probably had the best shot.
Interorbital has a sea launch slot next week, but pushing for the last week of the prize sounds like things probably aren't quite ready to go.
The SORAC and JPA CATS rockets will still be launched when the proper permits are all in line again (the government agencies have turned around), so there is a decent chance that there will be an amateur rocket getting into space come spring, but unfortunately there won't be a payoff for them now that the prize is expiring.
John Carmack