X-Prize Progress Update

savuporo writes "The X-Prize organization has released a summary document (PDF), detailing the recent progress and immediate plans of 13 different competing teams, of those who have publicised information of significant hardware development (there are a total of 27 officially listed competitors from seven nations by now). Some details: quite a few teams are expecting to do full-scale or subscale powered flight tests soon, some as early as January 2004. Burt Rutan can still be considered as leading the pack, but others are not too far behind, and the winner is far from certain. Armadillo Aerospace states that some US teams are hindered more by regulatory hassles, than technical issues. Speaking of Armadillo, the team has just released a very special video, commemorating tomorrow's 100th anniversary of powered flight."

Comments

Rutan is ready to flight-test the rocket motor

[Bruce Perens]

I've been following the test updates on the Scaled Composites site. It looks as if they are ready to flight-test the rocket motor. On the last flight, they tested the entire propulsion system with nitrogen flow. It sounds to me as if they could be ready to fire on the very next test flight.

I guess the first firings would be short, and would be designed to test the vehicle in the powered and high-speed-glide speed and dynamics envelopes rather than the lower-speed glide one which is now reasonably well characterized.

This is all very exciting.

Bruce