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Canadian X-Prize Entry Gearing Up
lommer writes "The Globe and Mail has a piece up about the Canadian Da Vinci team which is making a bid for the X-prize. The team has finalized a launch location (Kindersley, Saskatchewan) and will announce a launch date this month. Meanwhile, Burt Rutan and Co. over at Scaled Composites appear to be back on track with a succesful test flight on March 11 after their December crash. One has to wonder, with launch dates being set, will some projects step up and attempt a flight without being fully ready for it?"
For this reason, in germany there is the proverb "Sport ist Mord" which translates to "sport is murder".
It is because Saskatchewan is an ideal spot for landings from space.
Large parts are grassland plains, with very little water obstacles, and the road networks are about 1/5th of the total roads in Canada.
It also helps to have a Redneck population, in case of alien landing. Kidding, kidding, I kid because I love...
Russia has designated SK an emergency landing zone for cosmonauts. And a rich guy who circled the globe in his baloon landed in SK too.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Ah, but this is the beauty of the XPrize. You aren't required to reach orbit, just a certain altitude.
Hence, launching anywhere works!
Will any of them really be ready for it?
I think Scaled Composites could launch tomorrow if they wanted to. They've got the full system working, they're just going slowly to make sure nothing unexpected crops up.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I thought Armadillo was still stuck in the "testing the motors" phase.
Do they have a spacecraft at all?
Spoken like someone who hasn't been paying attention. Right now, they're testing the *big motors*. i.e. The one's that are going on the full sized craft. And they're testing them both bolted to the ground, and with captive tests of the craft. Once they get some of the engine kinks worked out and finally work out a control board they can rely on, they'll be ready to fly. Go check out the videos on their site. You can see the big armadillo craft in some of them.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Ya don't have to orbit to win the X-Prize. Ya just have to blast off and land, and do it again in two weeks.
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
The storys inaccurate, its not Bill Gates funding Spaceship one, its Paul Allen. Microsoft connection yes, Gates, no.
Don't believe everything you read. Paul Allen is a big sponsor of SpaceShipOne... Not Bill Gates so far as I know. Also, I'd hardly say that SpaceShipOne crashed. It has a successful flight and had an incident with the landing gear that was cabable of being repaired. And during that flight, SpaceShipOne became the first ever privately funded plane/spaceship to break the sound barrier. SO what, they had a landing gear issue. Earlier in flight they lit up a rocket engine after being dropped from a jet at 47,000 feet.
Although you may have said that tongue in cheek, a great many /. readers might take you at your word. 2 cities of over 200K people is hardly an area devoid of population. It is only the northern half of the province that is covered with lakes and trees that is really deviod of all but a few hundred or thousand humans.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I've been paying more attention to Scaled than to Armadillo, so any comparison I make of their relative capabilities should be taken with some salt. That said, it looks to me that Scaled is currently closer than Armadillo. Their 20km is about 19.99km higher than Armadillo, so it's nothing to sneeze at.
Scaled has flown their vehicle under power, and to supersonic speeds. Apparently all non-propulsion systems are fully flight-qualified. They have ground-tested their rocket for the full duration necessary for an X-Prize flight, and fired it in flight for a short duration. The initial supersonic flight of SS1 appears to have been a complete success, except for the scrape they got on landing. That damage is now repaired, and they have flown again since, albeit unpowered. They're not nearly as open about what they're doing as Armadillo, though. They may well have taken another flight or two and not announced it yet. It wouldn't surprise me much if they actually accomplish a 100km flight before announcing that they're ready to fly for the prize.
Armadillo, on the other hand, does not yet have reliably relighting engines, which is kind of a big deal for them. (Or they didn't have 'em a couple weeks ago, anyway.) Given that their vehicle design makes this a life-safety issue, I expect they're gonna need many tests to validate their operation before they do a manned flight over 50 feet. Once they're ready to do that, they will still need to do enough test flights to ensure they understand the vehicle enough to try for the prize.
I think Armadillo's got an excellent shot at making a 100km flight, but I don't think they're going to beat Scaled. It's too bad about their previous fuel difficulties; that cost them a lot of time, and it looks to me that the delay may have cost them the prize.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Good flying weather; clear cloudless skys, most sunshine hours in North America (1), and a little less atmosphere the closer you get to the poles, gives a nice, wide launch window.
Same reason why 80,000 US pilots trained there in WWII, and many NATO nations train there now.
(1) Note; there are a few places with comparable or perhaps a bit more sunshine over 12 months, due to less sun in winter as you go further north. For the summer months, with even longer days, it's way more than anywhere in N America.
Evidence suggests that he was murdered by Isreali secret police because, and I'm not making this up, he was building a super gun in Iraq that could shell Isreal at will.
The motto of this story? Consider the source of your R&D funding, it may come back to haunt you.
I think he meant that Paul Allen is funding the project, NOT Bill Gates. And besides, Paul Allen is NOT the CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer is ... Paul Allen was a co-founder. But this is Slashdot, so nobody cares about MS, right. ;)
They're not ready or they would have flown already. They're slowly adding equpiment and testing new parts in each flight. They added the heat shielding right around the time they went supersonic. They'll keep testing systems right up until they make an attempt. I wouldn't expect to see more then one or two full system flight tests before an attempt. Alot of the equipment can't even be fully tested onboard until they make an attempt or at least make the max altitude with or without two people onboard.
They did.
Yep, that is disturbing, but marketers apply the term "juniors" very broadly. It's not really an age range or a size range (these thongs range from 2-12, which is an adult-sized 160 lbs). Instead it's a term for a style of fashion that is supposed to represent teenagers - and a thong fits that "ideal". Of course, there are 40-year old womem that think they look good in the stuff, and there are sizes to fit them. Marketing of women's fashion is a pretty ugly business.
IANFBIAAF (I am not female but I am a feminst)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Armadillo's last two updates have been huge progress on the engine front; they seem to have the problem (mostly...) solved, although it's not clear they have enough thrust/fuel to make it with their current exact design, if they indeed have to abandon parachutes for powered landing.
OTOH, I don't think they have a full-scale vehicle even started, though a close-to-that flight tester is mostly ready for the engines.
I'd guess they're a couple months away in the absolute best case scenario.