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Armadillo Aero One Step Closer To Space
RobertB-DC writes "The folks at Armadillo Aerospace have taken another step toward the X-Prize, dropping their re-entry vehicle from 2000 feet with no major problems noted. As usual, the Armadillo crew documented the event with text, pictures and video, and the story is also covered by Space.com (though without as many cool technical details). It's a bumpy ride, though -- instruments recorded some 10 G's on touchdown."
Were their inertion dampening fields down?
Damn, like 3 comments.....
"Linux is not our destination, it is simply the open road to tommorow"
Perhaps they dropped their server from 2000 feet also!
Now they're getting somewhere. John Carmack finally quit trying to win the prize by running at brick walls and firing a Stinger missile at the ground.
...
I'm not sure how much it costs to put this thing up. But, at 10 G's per touchdown, a bunch of more of these and they may get close to breaking even!
It could be a very smooth, fast drop.
Lately, we've been hearing more and more about the X Prize and the amateur (and not-so-amateur) aerospace engineers taking part.
/might/ be different, but the goals are the same: Take something that you can't have general access to, make it your own, and make it better. Then contribute that idea to the general public.
I suspect that the recent projects are to the government-sponsored space programs as open source software is to commercial software. True, the fundamental ideas
In an era when people are becoming more and more concerned with manned space flight, I think projects and contests like this are the only way possible to get humanity into the heavens. Governments will always be under pressure to reduce spending; it will only be with enthusiasts that we make it to our proper place in space.
(This isn't to say, of course, that a non-government-sponsored flight will be the first to Mars. This is simply to say that it will be the space enthusiasts who shed the light on the important facts about space and its wealth of knowledge.)
What Carmack's choice in sneakers is.....
2 00 3-07-05_f.jpg
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2003_07_05/
From the website:
Too many users... blah blah blah
Probable cause: http://www.slashdot.org
Try again in a few seconds...
-xian@idsoftware.com
Is armadilloaerospace.com already down?
Here's the google cache
This links right to the video and the pics are here
..it'll be a while before any boyband rock stars make this trip. Sigh.
At least contests like this *slightly* increases the chance I'll ever see space travel for the masses in my lifetime.
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Ho me/Widget`s Corner?news_id=214
We finished up all of the prep work for the vehicle on Tuesday. We welded in strapping points to hold 600 pounds of passenger sandbags in the cabin area, and we mounted five 45 pound Olympic barbell plates on a peg at the end to simulate the weight of the final engines, plumbing, and backup recovery system that will be on the full size vehicle. We mounted four 2 throat engine shells as placeholders. Total weight is just under 2400 pounds. We use a combination of multiple chain hoists, a palette jack, and a forklift to move the full vehicle around and get it up on the trailer, but we did wind up breaking one of the castor wheels that we had mounted on our tank cradle. If we wind up having to use the 1600 gallon propellant tank (the current one is 850 gallons), we arent going to be able to stand the vehicle up under the main girder inside our shop, which will be inconvenient.
On Saturday, we headed out to our test site for the drop test. There were quite a few stares on the road in transit We had a few spatters of rain, and the wind occasionally gusted to 12 knots, but we were able to perform the drop in relatively calm 6 knot winds.
Anna rented a big RV for the day, which was very worthwhile. It was nice to be able to take a break in an air-conditioned space.
5 State Helicopters arrived with a big Sikorsky for the lifting. It was very convenient that they were based close by, and didnt have a problem with our unusual application (although they did have us contact the local mayor and sheriff for explicit permission). We were very impressed with the precision that they were able to do the lifting we were afraid that the vehicle might get dragged or bounced on the crush cone, which could buckle it before the test even started, but they were able to perfectly pivot it up on the nose, and gently lift it off the ground. If we had known they were that precise, we probably could have skipped renting the forklift truck for recovery and just had them lower the rocket back onto the trailer after the test.
We made several 18 diameter test parachutes that were weighted to drift at about the same rate that the full size parachute was expected to fall. We did the test drop from 1500 AGL, under the assumption that the big vehicle would fall several hundred feet before the main chute was fully deployed. The landing point for the test parachute was satisfactory, so we planned the full vehicle drop for 2000 AGL. Neil rode in the helicopter to do the parachute releasing, and Anna hung out the side of the helicopter (with a safety strap) to get aerial footage.
We had to abort our first attempt to drop the vehicle, because the line that we ran from the helicopter to the Sea-Catch toggle release above the rocket had wrapped itself around the chain so many times that Neil couldnt pull it hard enough to trigger the release. This was fixed by tying loose loops of plastic every few feet along the chain, which kept the pull-line in place.
On the second try, the release worked perfectly. You can clearly see the naturally unstable aerodynamics of the vehicle, as it starts to tip over almost immediately after release. We all held our breath as it started to fall, but the drogue immediately inflated and started pulling the main canopy out. It was nine seconds from release to full canopy inflation. The opening shock was negligible, barely hitting 2Gs. For high altitude flights, we are aiming for a 200 mph terminal velocity under the stabilizer drogue at the time of main canopy deployment, so opening shock will be much greater then.
The wake of the main canopy is so great that the deployment drogue just rests on the canopy during descent, without any inflation at all. The real deployment system will have a much longe
Good luck on not crashing and burning, Armadillo Aerospace!
If their rocket is anything like their webserver the passengers will be dead at the first sign of trouble.
That's not bad at all. That's about what you get when you plop down in a chair.
TODO: Something witty here...
I've seen a dead armadillo, but I've never seen a dead armadillo cooked in rocket fuel. That would be new.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
apparently on their webserver.
Is the site slashdotted already or did they drop the vehicle on their web server?
Crash rated seats for military helicopters are rated to take 50G down to 20G so I wouldn't think 10G would be a problem to deal with.
When is that going to be the headline?
Why isn't NASA coming out with a new orbiter. Shouldn't there be one by now?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
post links to the slashdotted site? The fuck?
Good thing they only recorded some 10 G's. If those 10 G's had been present all over the craft, who knows what kind of complications could have arisen. I'm sure the design team will find a way to spread those 10 G's throughout the craft, reducing the overall readings to a manageable 2 or 3 G's.
I for one hope their aircraft holds up to the rigors of space flight better than their site holds up to a slashdotting. :)
I suppose they're spending all their money on the project and not their website though
Anyway, my money is on Burt Ratan and the crew at Scaled Composites. They seem to have a solid idea and enough backing to actually get this done. Not to mention they have a cooler name (who ever heard of a flying armadillo?).
..The problem with these people is that their movie clips are waaaay too large. They could reduce their movie file sizes by a factor of 5. I am sure that would alleviate some of the pressure on their server... Has noone pointed this out to them?
John Carmack is a semi-regular poster to sci.space.policy on usenet; he's posted several times today with details of his test plans and schedules. Even if the company site is slashdotted, go do a Google Groups search on him and the sci.space.* groups and you'll get all his publically-available info, straight from the source.
The freakin thing is powered by hydrogen peroxide and crash lands on it's nose. Are you goin up in it? Rutan has the X prize wrapped up.
Good Grief. - Charles Brown
Stop playing with those rocket thingys and go finish your job!
It should actually be written "10 g's", with 'g' in lower case, as this refers to 10 times the normal acceleration, while "G" the capital letter refers to something entirely different.
Isn't that pretty low? Pilots can sustain 9G while flying (not very easily, but they can do it), and Colonel John Paul Stapp took 40Gs in a rocket sled in 1951! I wouldn't be too worried about 10...
Anyone else think this is wrong? When touching down 10 G's? The most G's would be on lift off, not touch down, and 10 is just plain nuts. Come on. If you think of a plane, and touchdown, you are going in the same direction of gravity, not against it.
I mean conceptually, the article doesn't make sense, and I hope people will realize that.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Visit www.scaled.com and you'll see who's going to win the X-Prize. Burt Rutan designer of the famous Voyager, the plane that made the first non-stop flight around the world.
This guy has been engineering exceptional aircraft for years. Father of one of the most radical and popular homebuilt aircraft designs ever.
J.C. has an interesting background and obviously the mind of an engineer, but no one is going to catch up with Rutan's design which resembles the X-15 project of the 1960's.
If someone at Scaled Composites is reading... Can I have a job? Yeah, like that will happen...
Put Carmack on the controls, and try a rocket jump move to reduce the g's.
...are trained to cope with up to 9G's in combat dogfighting. Above that, pilots start to pass out.
However - as pointed out elsewhere, *duration* is also important. If you have squishy seats, for example, they can easily reduce the force of a brief jolt (say, touching down) - but after a fraction of a second, they compress and the occupant has to take the full force themselves.
In other words: 9G's isn't too much, especially for a first flight. It's perfectly survivable (unless you're like 600lb - you'd burst) but I'm sure they'll soften it out a little by the time they fly for real.
The X prize is about paving the way for paying customers to get to space. It's about developing a cheap re-usable space craft to do it. Lighting off hair chemicals for launches and crashing for landings? You gonna pony up for that? Go ahead. I'll call Rutan for my flight, thanks.
Good Grief. - Charles Brown
it run linux?
That X-15ish engineering may be Scaled's achellies heel. Remember that the well financed front-runner for the Orteig prize crashed the day before Lindberg took off.
I'm hopeing that both teams get their first launch within days of eachother, so that a media frenzy occurs before the winning launch.
parachutes work.
RocketForge had a link to this posted 3 days ago! So I got to see the video before you guys slashdotted the server :-)
Energy: time to change the picture.
I choose to base my logic on the movie Armageddon where people can cheerily pull 18 G's on the backside of the moon.... before landing on an asteroid... and blowing it up...
perhaps i need to find a new base for my logic...
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
BitTorrent of the Video here:
p Test.mpg.mpeg.torrent
http://www.bytemonsoon.com/download.php/11286/Dro
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
no comment
their project seems scientificly suspect.
It could be a very smooth, fast drop.
As the old saying goes about leaping off a bridge, it's not the trip down that sucks- it's the ending.
The joke among some pilots, after a hard landing, is the term "unintentional ground contact."
Please help metamoderate.
seems like a lot of trouble to squach an armadillo. Usually speeding cars do just fine.
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
I'm not flamebaiting here, I'm generally curious:
/.'d with this website that they keep hi-res pics and videos on?
/.-hit might cause.
With John C's cash, don't you think he could afford some bandwidth?
I mean, seriously, how many times has he been
He doesn't have to have a monster monthly bill to suffice, but at the very least you would imagine he could utilize a hoster who could provide the type of bandwidth a
I love the work, the ideas, the sheer gall of the project, but damn, why is it everytime something interesting is added I have to wait days to see any of it?
"10Gs" isn't really that informative. In addition to meters per second squared, the key units to report for the landing are meters per second cubed or "jerk". That tells you how much destructive load is imparted by the acceleration. If they published the accelerometer output it should be easy to figure.
Seastead this.
I get that all the time playing computer games!
If teh Carmack stopped playing rocket hobbyist maybe doom3 wouldn't take back seat to HalfLife 2 for best game.
idbeholdv
Others are simply pie-in-the-sky.
Rutan is trying to do things in the hardest way possible and you know what that means... However there are rumours there could be a possible government money source behind this interest by Rutan. Remains to be seen.
BTW a suborbital flight is nothing fancy. The problem is getting something in orbit or returning something back to Earth in one piece. Cheaply.
attached in flight
The first ones were definitely doctored, but that doesn't mean they don't have the goods. See picture of the two planes attached and in flight. There are more on the site.
It seems that most voters at XPrize believe that the SCALED COMPOSITES, LLC have a better chance to take home the XPrize than Armadillo Aerospace.
With shock absorbing crash couches and a reclined position, higher vales should be possible. The issue is failed parachute depolyment. Single parachutes may deploy incorrectly or not at all increasing the G load. Normally a cluster of parachutes are used hence the margin needed for error. Without access to the web site, I can't see how many chutes were being used.
See my journal, I write things there
Carmacks going for the best roller coaster award!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
It should actually be written "10 g's", with 'g' in lower case, as this refers to 10 times the normal acceleration, while "G" the capital letter refers to something entirely different.
Actually, you shouldn't be using apostrophes at all for plurals. "10g's" refers to something belonging to 10g.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
There are roller coasters where you experience up
to 7G in a sitting position.
Have a look at the pictures. The added nozzle
is bright red, and it's obvious that it was
added.
So I think of the pictures as some kind of
mockup. They were doctored, but Scaled did
not try to hide it.
when they released the footage.
Lucky slashdot is a little slow sometimes.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
The thing about G's that is important is the amount of time which you are subjected to it.
Which is proportional to the energy you need to absorb in your body.
A modern rollercoaster will peak at around +3.5 or -1 G when averaged over say a 10th of a second, but at higher resolution the noise on that signal might reach +5 and -2 G enough to blackout/redout most people if it were sustained. This of course is in the vertical direction.
My spelling isn't bad, I'm evolving the language
At ultra high G's (say 100+) what kills you is the different strengths and densities within your body. And also the difference between you and the environment your in.
For example the brain gets squashed and bruised when it is accelerated by the solid skull around it, however if you were to put the brain in a solution of a similar consistancy and accelerate that it would be far less damaged.
My spelling isn't bad, I'm evolving the language
Fighter pilots in a G-suit can take 9G loads for a few seconds at a time (or maybe longer) without blacking out.
If the 10g load occurred for only a fraction of a second, it's probably not much worse than going past that sign by the road that says "Dip" a little too fast.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
This triple loop roller coaster was
present on a fair in Germany. It was quite a few years ago.
The website talks about more than 5g's.
On the fair, it was advertised as offering up to 7g's.
I experienced no discomfort at the ride.
His aerodynamics seem backwards, since drag forces are less when the thin end points backwards. For reference, see airfoils (e.g. airplane wings), GM Sunraycer, and Mercury through Apollo capsules.
It seems whenever there is an article linked within a gaming community which states that video games cause violence, this happens: "Video games don't cause violence. I'll kill whoever says that!"
Could someone give us a mirror? Anything in the *.mil domain is inacessible from Brazil (their DNS servers seem to be firewalled from the rest of the world)
...For the July 5 test, the rocketeers welded in strapping points within the vehicle to hold 600-pounds (273-kilograms) of "passenger" sandbags in the cabin area. Also a set of five Olympic barbell plates were mounted on a peg at the vehicle's end to simulate the weight of the final engines, plumbing, and backup recovery system that will be on the group's full size vehicle... (from space.com)
Did they also simulate the crushable nose cone with a giant beer can, and the ground with a giant forehead?
Good explanation. Yeah, the fellow who suffered red-eye was exposed to high G for at least several seconds, long enough to start rupturing capillaries. Diff between eyes and the rest of the body is that in the eye, the released blood has nowhere else to go, so adds to the cellular debris that floats around in everyone's eyes. I expect he had some retinal damage as well, but that might not be visible without an ophthalmic biomicroscope (which didn't exist at the time).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Roughly the equivalent of SITTING DOWN.
BeDoper.com
Another group building a rocket to space is:
http://www.asa-houston.org