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.' "

Comments

Its about the testing methodology

[mattgreen]

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.

Re:Cost

[John Carmack]

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