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

I can empathize.

[grub]

"Effectively, I stopped buying Ferraris and turbo-charging them and started building rocket ships," Carmack says.

Yeah, I hate it when I have to put off buying Ferraris.

Cost

[Brahmastra]

The team is spending between $1 million and $2 million to build its craft.

How on earth do they intend to build a spacecraft carrying people for $1-2 million? Even an extremely used Learjet costs a few million! Am I missing something?

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

That quote

[jandrese]

The quote about making rockets the same way we make software reminds me of another quote:

"If we built houses the way we build software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization."
- U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary John J. Hamre, in testimony before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, June, 1998 (Attr Gerald Weinberg)

Unfortunatly, unlike software, you can't just reboot rockets that crash.

Making aerospace like software...

[fmaxwell]

Some people have commented that I am trying very hard to make aerospace like software, and that's the truth

Gives a whole new meaning to "blue screen of death", doesn't it?

It's not an entirely stupid process

[heironymouscoward]

Indeed, conventional rocket design is pretty brute-force. Big engine, hunking mechanical control systems with minimal intelligence.

Given the capabilities of modern IT, it makes much more sense to use software as the core of the system, in the same was as software is the core of a device like the Segway, or the stair-climbing robot, or the telescopes that consist of a thousand small mirrors, not one large one.

Rocket science has not changed significantly since 1950, and needs a rethink. I believe this project is a solid approach that has good chances of succeeding, and if so, will redefine the way we conceive of this kind of engineering project in the future.

Can you licence Ship Design?

[Ducati_749S]

If he wins, I wonder if the ships' lifecycle will resemble those of his games?
I can see it allready:
1) Carmack devises a ship that excells in performance, but requires very costly componenets in order to deliver on its full functionality.
2) After a years' worth of excellent operational records, other countries license the engine design and build their own ships off of it
3) 2 years after launch a thriving Spaceship MOD community is launching new ships into space every couple of months....

Counterpoint

[ThePyro]

No matter how good your software is, you're going to need brute force to get the vehicle into space in the first place. Putting three men into space is going to require a significant amount of energy, and no amount of programming genius will change that fact. More importantly, you're going to need a good bit more brute force than Armadillo Aerospace has been testing with so far.

The tricky part is that I don't think tests done with small rockets will necessarily give you a good idea of how the big rocket will perform. If that were the case, all we'd really need is to buy a model rocket kit from Wal-Mart and just build it 20x bigger.

"this holy war"?

[blunte]

You call it a holy war, I call it English. The English language is being eroded gradually by ignorance.

There's a reason for having two words, then and than. It's preferrable to have exact words that aren't dependent upon context. If we just toss out "than", and exclusively use "then", our language will become even less precise.

Some other common mistakes that really suck:
confusing "your" with "you're"
confusing "their" with "they're"
adding unnecessary apostrophes to plural words - Dog's and Cat's...

Just because some people have forgotten or were never taught how to write the language they speak doesn't mean that we should just dumb it down completely. Taken to the extreme, we could just back all the way up to grunts and growls.