Maverick Rocketeers Pursue Space Access

Mad.Scientist writes "This article at Space.com is about mavericks who are trying to lessen the cost of going into space. One of the companies, Armadillo Aerospace, is founded by John Carmack, who is also a founder of Id Software, and the brain behind games such as Doom or Quake. I just have to say, godspeed to all." Carmack is only one of the people mentioned in this story, but see our previous story for more on Carmack's rocketry habit.

Comments

Should just buy the 6 million $$$ Russian Shuttle

[mestreBimba]

Then all they would need is booster rockets to put it orbit.

that would be way cheaper than anything NASA is doing.

Heck, NASA should just buy a few of those at 6 mil a pop!

Re:This is what I've been saying for a long tim

[Graspee_Leemoor]

"Private Industry should be allowed into space...imagine if the computer industry had worked on space travel---we'd already been to Mars and our space ship wouldn't be as old as my grandfather =)"

Yeah, and all the signposts would be like:

"Venus 200,000m.
Have you got a HOTMAIL ACCOUNT yet?
Presented by Microsoft."

graspee

Private space exploration the way to go...

[bc90021]

It is good to see stories like this. Since the government (and it doesn't matter which party it is) doesn't seem really all that interested in anything other than their "International" Space Station, it will take private sector people to get us where we should be in terms of the advancement of space flight.

And to see that there is at least one geek involved (Mr. Carmack) makes it all the more reassuring. Of course, I suspect that they're all geeks, but I don't know the credentials of anyone else in the story. ;)

mavericks, outsiders, rabblerousers, troublemakers

[tps12]

Whatever you call them, rebels have defined our history from Day One. The first to rebel against conventional wisdom? Eve. We're still recovering from the fallout from that ordeal.

Seriously, look at how many "rebels" have made their way into our history and into our hearts: Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi, Ford (the auto-maker, not the president), Darwin. The list goes on. At every major step in mankind's evolution, there has been someone who smacks us in the face and shows us something new.

It's painful.

But where would we be without it?

Maybe Linus, RMS...today's rabblerousers?

Think about it.

I don't know...

[TheAwfulTruth]

When Doom crashed it was just an inconvienience, but this...

Its just a joke, a hoax

[HanzoSan]

They will never actually put a man into space.

I dont think anyone is stupid enough to risk their life using the technology of game programmer john carmack!

I mean his quake software was so buggy, it left a backdoor open where anyone could remotely take over someones computer.

Lets not forget carmack knows absolutely nothing about real world physics, his games dont use REAL physics, sure he may know some calculus, but does this make him qualified to produce a rocket to launch a man into space?

First I want to see some simulations of the launch, I want him to find the most aerodynamic design for the craft so it doesnt break up into peices or burn up into dust. I want him to also tell me how hes going to manage to do this in a safe way yet be cheaper than NASA. NASA is expensive for a reason, they DONT make alot of mistakes!

Re:Its just a joke, a hoax

[_ph1ux_]

"so it doesnt break up into peices or burn up into dust"

Would that also be known as Fragging?

Great Big Guns!

[vkg]

Gerald Bull who shot to fame as the inventor of the Iraqi Super Gun did a lot of work on constant pressure launch systems - enormous cannons with explosives positioned along the barrel to keep the pressure behind the projectile constant for the full launch length.

Estimated cost to LEO? $1 per pound.

Because the shock was distributed along the acceleration, maximum G force on the load was 40G: fine for food and fuel and most construction supplies.

You can read more about his work at Federation of American Scientists Supergun pages, [2], and at NASA.

There really is more than one way to do it.

Re:hahaha is this a joke

[John Fulmer]

Might I mention that the Nazi's V1 and V2 were largely developed by rocket enthusists (including Von Braun) who, before WWII, were mostly considered crackpots...

http://www.space.edu/projects/book/chapter8.html

Straight from the horse's mouth

[dmccarty]

From previous /. comments, I've listed some of John Carmack's thoughts on space travel below:

• Plan of attack for the X-Prize
• Types of rocket fuel
• Thoughts on NASA regulations
• Calculations for parachutes
• Armadillo Aerospace project information
• Thoughts on thrust
• Manned rocket timeframe
• Information on FAA regulations

Re:Straight from the horse's mouth

[John Carmack]

>Anyone know if any of these milestones were achieved?
>Or if not, what armadillo's latest estimates are for the same things?

The estimate from day one was:

Year one: VTVL demonstrator
Year two: manned rocket ships
Year three: space shots

The VTVL demonstrator went faster than expected, and it looked like we were going to lift a person off the ground before the end of the first year. We had a couple crashes and redesigns that set us back a bit, and we were forced to make a major change in our catalyst packs to allow us to get enough back-to-back flights without changes before putting a person on it, so we haven't yet made that "milestone bunny hop".

However, while we were waiting for some things along that development path, we wound up developing some other technologies that weren't even in the original plan -- our recent work on biprop engines wasn't really scheduled until year three or later, and the rocket rotor work is looking like it will allow some big improvements in our upcoming designs.

The current goal of record is to set some of the manned aviation 3000 meter time-to-climb records before the end of this year.

John Carmack

Re:This is what I've been saying for a long tim

[HeghmoH]

Right, and during your three-day trip to Mars, your space ship would explode five times.

Re:hahaha is this a joke - have you read his code?

[victim]

carmack is not a computer programmer. Programming the computer can not be his goal. This should be clear to anyone who has read his code. I believe Mr. Carmack programs as a means to fulfilling his vision. You will find very little if anything in there that is done for the art of programming or to fulfill anyone's vision of how programming should be done.

What he does, and brilliantly, is bring his vision to reality.

I say he should follow his vision, where ever it goes and regardless what anyone tells him he can and can not do.

And no. I would not put my life in the hands of anyone's vision of a rocket ship. Show me the real rocket and then we can talk.

I should disclaim... I have never met the man, but I have read his code.

funny that game creators move their fantasies

[dario_moreno]

I saw this piece on TV about the Ultima
creator living in a medieval castle mockup,
and now it's Cormack, after tuning the
ubergeek Ferrari, trying to fly to space
by himself on a budget...

when the stuff they sold us only keeps us
in a virtual world, replacing all the REAL
things the 60's scifi writers had promised.

Re:Hes an overrated programmer

[wannabe]

Did Carmack steal your girlfriend or something?

SOmehow we've been conditioned to think that the only people qualified to do something of this caliber are Phds. It's bunk.

It takes desire, attention to detail, and tenacity to not listen to everyone saying they can't do it. If Carmack can lend himself to a project like this and be useful, more power to him and I hope he's successful.

Who was an expert in space exploration 50 years ago? 40? Space exploration has been castrated by the policies of NASA and largely our government. There are risks associated with going into space. Let people who are willing take them.

It won't be cheap

[mblase]

This article keeps talking about space flight as if it were something that should be cheap, that brilliance is the only thing keeping us out of orbit.

We wish.

Space flight isn't like air flight, where a couple of bicycle repairmen from Ohio could study the basic principles and build a device on their own. Air flight can be done with an ordinary gasoline engine and the right kits. Goddard developed the first successful rockets with a combination of basic physics and lots of chemistry, but those weren't manned or orbital.

On the other hand, sending a man into space for the first time took the combined financial and intellectual resources of an entire superpower. It still does, not because the principles are too advanced but because the raw materials are hideously expensive and because the margin for error is enormous. If you're trying to fly yourself into orbit, you damned well better have your engineering right because after a certain point, even parachutes won't save you from a miscalculation.

About the only thing that could make orbital commutes cost-effective would be a successful space elevator, a tether between a geosynchronous station and the ground along which cargo and people could climb and descend. High-tech planes won't do it, rockets won't do it, all of those take too much money and have too much risk. An elevator would have an initial cost and then be relatively cheap to run and re-run. And once you had one, you could send up parts for a second one again and again.

But I'm not holding out hope for a $200 ticket on a space shuttle anytime soon.

Re:It won't be cheap

[John Carmack]

I am going to have to save the parent post, because it is such a perfect example of the mindset that has made progress in aerospace so damn slow. I couldn't have said it better if I was trying to intentionally construct the stereotype. This ties directly in to the quote I had in the article -- "rocket science" has been mythologized out of all proportion to its true difficulty.

First, you are severely understating the achievements of the Wright brothers. They had to invent almost everything from scratch, including much of the theory, and there was no existence proof to show that it was possible at all. I'm really not an aviation buff, so I'm sure someone else can recount the challenges better, but it is worth noting that at the time the Wrights did their work, there was also a high profile, government funded effort underway headed by Samuel Langley. With the "best minds in the country" and government resources behind it, they still didn't make the breakthroughs.

I contend that building and flying an X-Prize class vehicle (100 km suborbital, three passengers, reusable) today is a much less daunting task than the original invention of the airplane.

We have existence proofs of what is being attempted. There is no question that it is possible, because it has been demonstrated in many different forms. The only question is how cheap it can be done.

There is a massive amount of information available. Today, anyone can go read up on things that NOBODY knew back when they were building the early rocket systems.

Obviously, computers and electronics are vastly better. Our current electronics box has all the necessary sensors and actuators for flying a spaceship, and it cost less than $15,000 to put together (yes, it runs linux).

It isn't as blatant, but other manufacturing areas have also made great progress. I had a batch of a dozen small motors made at a CNC job shop for only $1000. Even counting everything that goes into them, the total cost including valve is less than $300 each. These may well be better than the peroxide thrusters used on the Mercury capsules. It was amusing to hear the NASA pad manager tell stories about having to go bang on the Mercury thrusters with a wrench to get them to stop sputtering. Don't think that all NASA hardware performs as designed.

Pressure vessels are significantly improved. A common all-carbon-fiber tank for natural gas vehicles has a better compressed volume to mass ratio than anything that could be built in the sixties. Filament winding can make large structures that are both stronger and cheaper than the classic welded structures.

There are direct spinoffs from government rocketry development. To drill the tiny, high aspect cooling passages for the Agena upper stage engine, they had to invent brand new machining technologies. Today, you can get the same techniques done at standard industrial job shops. As far as expensive materials go, the Agena engine was made out of aluminum.

The general industrial infrastructure is also a heck of a lot better. I can order damn near anything I need for our work from McMaster-Carr at 4:00 in the morning, and it shows up two days later.

NASA spent $50 million to set up the tracking and telemetry networks for Mercury. You can get far, far better results today with a GPS and satellite modem. There are billions of dollars of space based assets already at our disposal.

I could go on for quite a while on why we would have an easier time today just replicating the efforts of the past, but that is only part of the issue. What we are aiming for in the near term is far smaller in scope than any of the projects that the public normally associates with space. Even with all the advantages of today, it would be absurd to think that we could put together a space shuttle or a Saturn V. I hesitate to make analogies, but we are effectively working on building little microprocessors instead of big mainframes. 100 km straight up and down (that gives a 5G reentry, which, while not for your grandmother, doesn't take a superhero) is just not all that hard.

Yes, there are lots of challenges to be met, and we will doubtless run into all sorts of things that we haven't even considered. We will solve them as we go. People do hard things all the time, in many different fields. The reason "rocket science" looks so much harder is just lack of familiarity.

Because the existing way of doing things in space costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a shot, there just isn't an opportunity for radical experimentation. The optimization problem is slowly trending towards a stable local minimum, with little chance of getting out to the global minimum. Imagine trying to develop software if you only got to compile and run your app four times a year. Imagine how much that would slow down progress, and what contortions you would go through if $100 million was riding on each run.

Build fast. Test often. Stay flexible. Mind the critical path.

John Carmack

Re:It won't be cheap

[costas]

Well, I am a rocket scientist and I couldn't agree with you more.

The "two guys from Ohio" were way, way ahead of their time. They were among the first to do actual experiment-based airfoil testing. They developed light-weight internal combustion engines. Their biggest breakthrough was realizing the importance of control: they developed twistable wings (the ailerons were invented later) to maneuver the airplane. It's not like major military powers were not trying to do the same thing; it's just that the two bicycle shop owners persisted and had the insight and ingenuity to do this.

Space travel has a much lower threshold today than air flight did for the Wrights: we know how to get there, we know how to survive, we know how to spread the risks. The difference is cost: it will take more than two dedicated hobbyists to build a space vehicle. And it will take a market demand to amortize the costs and make space travel possible; I think that's a bigger obstacle than technology or cost.

Rockets to space, or guns?

[hotgrits]

While rockets may be useful for putting people into space, don't miss the story of Gerald Bull, the genius Canadian engineer who planned to put satellites into space using a "supergun."

To quote from the website mentioned above:

By the time he was done, he could launch a 180 kg projectile at 3600 m/s, which is about a third of escape velocity. He could hit altitudes of 180 km. That's not orbit, nor is 3600 m/s nearly enough to get things into orbit, but it showed what could be done. The whole project cost in the area of $10 million, chicken feed by missile standards.

He lived an unusual life, to be sure, working for various shady governments, mostly in a simple effort to make his vision reality. His work for Iraq, however, apparently cost him his life. He was assasinated in 1990.

Bull's dream of cheap satellite launches was left unfulfilled. And so the world still pushes all that heavy fuel into space.

He was a true hacker.

Re:Rockets to space, or guns?

[Edmund Blackadder]

There was an HBO movie about him.

It was pretty interesting(for an hbomovie). Seems like he got killed by Israelis. Not hard to believe.

Re:What does Carmack know about space travel?

[anzha]

Read the webpage.

They build a little and test a little.

They have had failures and will do so in the future. It's a part of building *ANYTHING*. Doubly so for something that's a bit difficult.

Their model is more like the early aircraft builders than NASA...and that's a compliment!

Re:hahaha is this a joke

[PhantomHarlock]

Carmack is extremely intelligent and knows what he's doing. He's following a good process of build a little, test a little. He's been absorbing a huge amount of information from people who have built and flown things in the past, and does have a clue. I'd suggest listening to him speak at next year's Space Access conference before passing judgement on him. Coming from an unrelated industry does not disqualify him and his team from building flight hardware. It's like anything else, if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.

I wonder...

[cr0sh]

If it would be possible to build a "super spud gun" using PVC fittings, etc - in this similar manner? Get a long piece of PVC, attach booster chambers using sewage drain "down spout" connectors, a load of JBWeld, some sensors and electronic ignition, etc.

Maybe make the thing out of steel and weld all of the connections - would be an interesting porject for "backyard" high-altitude experiments.

Possibly even "x-prize" level experiments...

Re:Should just buy the 6 million $$$ Russian Shutt

[Ooblek]

The only problem I see is that in Carmack's games, a rocket shot up in the air never comes back down. I wonder if he sees this as a challenge.

I feel sorry for the flight testers that work for Carmack's company.

Ram Accelerator

[gizmo_mathboy]

If you really want a big gun then you want a Ram Accelerator. It will subject a projectile to about 25,000 G's of acceleration.

The beauty of it is its efficiency. The fuel (gas) is stored in the barrel. The projectile is fired to have it travel fast enough to cause its shock wave to ignite the gas in the tube and therefore propel it even more. Basically, it is just ahead of the detonation wave it creates.

The University of Washington has a good bit of info about them.

Cool stuff.

Re:hahaha is this a joke - have you read his code?

[Winged Cat]

Show me the real rocket and then we can talk.

Low bandwidth: http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/sff_low.mpg and http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/sas02_low.mpg

High bandwidth: http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/sff_high.mpg and http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/sas02_high.mpg

And just to plug my own group's rockets: http://cube.erps.org/movies/.

I'll comment later...

[John Carmack]

I am helping a hardware vendor optimize the E3 build of Doom right now, but I'll make a pass of replys and comments later on tonight...

(yes, the Id net connection is slashdotted at the moment)

John Carmack

Re:I'll comment later...

[John Carmack]

>Are you now using an inertial guidance system or is there a better alternative?
>I assume that GPS does not provide enough accuracy for low speed guidance

We are currently using a Crossbow inertial unit with fiber optic gyros for the fast attitude stabilization.

We have flown GPS on a couple flights, but the update rate is too slow for active control. I do feel that in the longer term, carrier wave interferometry GPS sensors will offer the most cost effective attitude sensors, but right now they are $15,000+ system. If I was doing this on a much tighter budget, I would consider trying to build a fast updating CW GPS system from available cheap GPS cores, but that is a project of significant complexity all by itself.

I have integrated a new laser altimeter with the electronics box, but we haven't flown it yet. I am looking forward to this, because it will allow us to begin working on auto-hover and auto-land control software.

John Carmack

Technology cannot be divorced from society...

[jerryasher]

Screw Bull, there were many other ways for him to keep his research and projects alive than by whoring himself to Hussein.

His lack of morals, judgment, his illegal selling of arms to South Africa, his building of a delivery mechanism (artillery pieces, supergun, improved scuds) for weapons of mass destruction for Hussein, .... This guy was begging to be assasinated, and I am glad that someone tossed him the alms he was asking for.

Re:RocketGuy!

[John Carmack]

He came to Space Access to meet with us, and it was interesting talking with him. He is certainly not an engineer, but he is actually building a lot of hardware, which is more than can be said for most folks in the space crowd.

The abject stupidities in his original design that got him a lot of flack (Fins at the top! 1.2 T/W ratio without guidance!) are now gone, and he has decided to have a testing plan before launching himself, so I think he has a decent shot at flying something and living to talk about it. I wish him luck.

An interesting question: is it easier to motivate a learned individual that never does anything, or educate an ignorant individual that actually produces things?

John Carmack