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X Prize and John Carmack
Anonymous Coward writes "ABC News is running a story ostensibly about the X Prize but in reality they only talk about John Carmack and his teams efforts to win the prize (or at least compete). Quote: 'Some people have commented that I am trying very hard to make aerospace like software, and that's the truth," he says. "If we looked at what we do in software, if we could only compile and test our program once a year, we'd never get anything done. But that's the mode of aerospace.' "
Read the article for once people instead of knee-jerk reacting to an analogy.
Carmack merely wants to improve the method by which rockets are constructed. He says he starts small and builds his way up, rather than constructing the rocket and control system and then working for six months to work out the problems.
This is a well-known software development technique, and I don't see why it wouldn't be generalizable to other fields. If anything it should inspire more confidence in the creator at least.
I don't think that FAA will let John launch if there is a house in the flight-path. Besides, John will be launching pretty much vertically- he's not going for orbit (which means going sideways very fast); he's only going for 100km (which means going straight-up very fast).
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I admire and respect Carmack's space program. He is doing a number of innovative things.
His program of building control systems and then big rockets is mentioned in the article. It's unfortunate that so far whenever they've tried to launch a rocket the computer has immediately crashed -- but they seem to have a handle on why this is happening and the current computer construction and mounting system is far better than the previous ones. He also has a tremendous amount of telemetry, and analyzes the inevitable failures exhaustively.
They is now using a fairly innovative mix of medium-strength hydrogen peroxide and some fuel to power the rocket. Other people (and Armadillo, previously) have used highly purified hydrogen peroxide, but that is hard to get (and expensive) in the quantities that they need. This mixed monopropellant has a higher specific impulse, too.
They are using a innovative final recovery system -- the ship lands nose first on a long aluminum cone that crushes to absorb energy. Unique, cheap, and innovative -- if funny-looking.
The thing I like the most, though, is his website http://www.armadilloaerospace.com (it will surely be slashdotted for the next couple of days.) Carmack is religious about posting the results of the last weeks efforts, warts and all. It appears that he receives substantial insight from people responding to these progress reports (apparently the mixed monopropellant research was instigated by somebody posting results of German WW2 torpedo experiments.) This kind of openness is quite rare in aerospace research.
Anyway, all the best to Carmack et al. I think that Rutan's Spaceship One project may win the X prize, but maybe not -- his system depends on a lot of planning and simulation being accurate, whe re Armadillo can respin the project many ways if things don't work out the first (or second) try.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Just building the vehicle costs less than $100k, most of the money is in building multiple iterations of everything as you figure out exactly how you actually need to spend the money:
$ 6k 850 gallon fiberglass tank
$ 2k High pressure carbon fiber pressurant tank and regulator
$ 1k Honeycomb composite panels
$ 5k Aluminum fabrication for cabin
$15k Redundant parachutes, drogues, drogue cannons, releases
$13k Fiber optic gyro based IMU
$ 8k Unrestricted (supersonic / high altitude) GPS
$ 2k PC104 systems
$ 5k video, audio, and data communications
$20k Engine machining, catalysts, laser cut plates
$ 5k Plumbing, valves, etc
$ 5k Fastblock external insulation
For powered landings instead of parachute landings, delete the parachutes and add:
$ 4k Laser altimeter
$ 4k Wire rope isolator landing gear
You could trivially spend an order of magnitude more by just using "space certified" versions of everything, but the important point is that standard industrial versions of many things are perfectly adequate. In many cases, todays standard industrial practice is far ahead of the best that could be done at any price in the early sixties.
This is all with free labor for assembly and testing, but that is still only a couple hundred man hours for a full vehicle. We are expecting to destroy the first vehicle in some (unmanned) testing mishap along the way, and build another one mostly from scratch. That will take less than two months, depending on lead times for some items.
John Carmack