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?"

Comments

Blast off thong

[morcheeba]

I've got to give them credit for creative funding!

Re:Blast off thong

[AndroidCat]

Could be worse, they could have sponsorship from the Jackass movie people.

"Do you have anything in a delta-V style?"

Re:Blast off thong

[Feanturi]

I've got to give them credit for creative funding!

Disturbing claim found in your link:

This product is designed to fit juniors.

I've also heard you can get "Porn Star" brand t-shirts in 10 year old sizes. There's something really wrong here.

Re:Blast off thong

[morcheeba]

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)

Carmack

[stratjakt]

Carmack should just strap someone into his space ship, and plow em into the side of a mountain or explode them off the pad or whatever.

End this spaceman nonsense once and for all, and get back to work finishing Doom 3.

Re:Carmack

[__aagctu1952]

Couldn't Carmack just rocket jump someone into space? :D

Re:Carmack

[thebatlab]

Holy crapoly. Insightful? Mods sniffing glue again or what? It's funny. Laugh. Don't take it as a life altering statement. "Dude, that idea is so...what's the word....oh sweet there it is in the dropdown man....in..sight..ful. Sweet man. *sniiiiffff*"

Re:Carmack

[SmackCrackandPot]

Getting the rocket to work is easy; it's the development of the armour which is holding things up.

Huh?

[Iscariot_]

One has to wonder, with launch dates being set, will some projects step up and attempt a flight without being fully ready for it?

Will any of them really be ready for it?

Re:Huh?

[Carnildo]

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.

Re:Huh?

[twostar]

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.

Don't worry too much

[AKAImBatman]

Rutan still has a *long* way to go. His craft has only made it up ~20km. That leaves him with about 80km to go. When he has more km behind him instead than ahead of him, then we'll talk.

Re:Don't worry too much

[pe1rxq]

On the bright side, he is one of the few to have an actuall live size vehicel flying....

Jeroen

Re:Don't worry too much

[AKAImBatman]

True. His primary competition is from Armadillo. Armadillo could probably launch tomorrow, and maybe even be lucky enough to complete the flight. But they're taking the wise course, and getting the bugs worked out of their system first. :-)

Re:Don't worry too much

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Don't worry too much

[second class skygod]

Not far at all really. The powered flight to 20km was flown with essentially the same hardware (engines, tanks, airframe, etc.) as they will take to 100km. It seems to me that the only major step remaining is to fill the tanks to the top an let 'er rip. Of course, they are easing into to it for safety's sake. My money is on Rutan's team.

-scsg

Re:Don't worry too much

[peacefinder]

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.

Re:Don't worry too much

[AKAImBatman]

It seems to me that the only major step remaining is to fill the tanks to the top an let 'er rip.

You're making a key assumption here: That the tanks, engines, and airframe are all proven for an 80+ kilometer ascent and 100 km descent. So far these tests are trying to determine whether that assumption is correct or not. Applying Murphy's Law, they'll probably need to build a new version of the craft before they'll be able to fly the craft.

Re:Don't worry too much

[mikeee]

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.

Of course!

[Midnight Ryder]

One has to wonder, with launch dates being set, will some projects step up and attempt a flight without being fully ready for it?

Of course - this sort of venture always comes with risk, and one of 'em is pushing your timetable up because the other guy looks like he's about to win. Given what happens when you screw up with space flight, I'd expect to see a fatality or two occur in the next couple o' years.

And one should keep in mind: It's all fun and games until someone gets killed. Then it's a SPORT! :-)

Re:Of course!

[sploxx]

For this reason, in germany there is the proverb "Sport ist Mord" which translates to "sport is murder".

Cue the Thunderbirds theme!

[AndroidCat]

X-Birds are go!

All these various projects gearing up is excellent, hopefully with one successfully taking the prize. (I only hope the rest don't just pack it in when one team wins.) Woohoo!

The answer is obvious

[nizo]

with launch dates being set, will some projects step up and attempt a flight without being fully ready for it?
Only once.....

Launching from Saskatchewan?

[capz loc]

I understand the impracticalities of leaving Canada to launch, but it is my understanding that the reasons that NASA has headquarters in the south of the U.S. (Florida and Texas) is that the rotation of the earth, especially close to the equator, has significant velocity that the shuttles use as a "boost."

Re:Launching from Saskatchewan?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but this is the beauty of the XPrize. You aren't required to reach orbit, just a certain altitude.

Hence, launching anywhere works!

Re:Launching from Saskatchewan?

[Tool Man]

The answer is simple, really. They don't want to hit anything! *duck*

Re:Launching from Saskatchewan?

[elsilver]

The other advantage of launching from south east US, is that if anything goes wrong, the craft is likely to crash into the ocean, rather than a populated area.

Although devoid of oceans, Saskatchewan is fortunately also devoid of populated areas too.

E.

Re:Launching from Saskatchewan?

[saskboy]

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.

If the location sounds familiar to people...

[saskboy]

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.

The question is the risk worth it?

[randall_burns]

I personally feel that a lot of pressing problems would be solved if humanity gets into space in a serious way. Quite simply, existing growth of energy and raw material apprears unlikely to continue without utilization of non-terrestrial materials. IMHO it is also likely that the type of sacrifices necessary to create an economically viable human presence in space is far less than the sacrifices that would be involved if a war is fought to settle the issues here(i.e. given the technological level of weaponry).

I personally see humanities choice as between creating an economically viable presence in space-and gradually moving industry there-as Gerard O'Neill at Princeton proposed-or facing the probability of nuclear war or worse. In light of that, I _do_ think that a lot of risk is warrented to create a human presence in space.

Even if I'm wrong here, people risk their lives for far less worthwhile objectives(i.e. look at the folks that die after drug overdoses, drunk driving accidents or of AIDS).

The folks that say the risk here isn't warrented are generally envious, cowardly whiners that know that noone like them has a shot at ever winning a competition of this nature--and are afraid that if someone else gets a little bit of increases status it will be that much less left for them. Such cowards have taken the earth to the brink of disaster. Playing it safe-and avoiding the search for poritive sum technological solutions to humanity's major problems is a major root of the enormous decimation of species and genocide of entire peoples--folks don't even put sigificant effort into conceiving of truly positive sum approaches to humanity's future they are so stuck in a narrow way of looking at the world.

Re:The question is the risk worth it?

[peacefinder]

Quite simply, existing growth of energy and raw material apprears unlikely to continue without utilization of non-terrestrial materials.

Well, sure. Population growth can't continue indefinitely without running short of raw materials. (And room.)

But what raw materials are we talking about here? If I'm not mistaken, the only materials available in abundance in near space are metals, and we're pretty well set for them. Our future resource shortages are more likely to be along the lines of fresh water than iron ingots.

Given the energy expenditure involved in extracting additional raw materials and bringing them safely to Earth, it seems to me that the same energy would be better spent recycling the contents of our landfills, cleaning up watersheds, and slowing population growth.

(Besides, who said indefinite growth is even desireable? If we end up in a position where population pressure is forcing migration up the gravity well, a few rockets ain't gonna cut the mustard anyway.)

It's not that I'm not a space enthusiast; I am. I hope humanity does colonize off-planet one day. But I don't see how space is a necessary or sufficient component for positive-sum approaches.

Re:The question is the risk worth it?

[mosb1000]

It's true that it'd take a lot of energy to do anything in space using rockets, but that's not really the idea is it? The idea is that this kind of R&D will produce technologies capable of doing space travel efficiently. Moreover, they might lead to technologies that make every day life more efficient. You're right that we don't need infinite growth (population wise) as a species. In fact, as nations become industrialized, their birth rate usually drops (perhaps due to chemicals? work related stress? not wanting kids?). Whatever the reason, in maybe a dozen more decades overpopulation probably won't be an issue and the world's population will level out. Japan and (a lot of) Western Europe are already to the point where they no longer replacing their population (except through immigration). The real point is advancement. Perhaps as we develop space travel it will lead to a greater understanding of nature and the universe in general. More over, hopefully it will inspire people to increase their own understanding of the universe. Most important of all, perhaps it will allow people to put all their insignificant problems in perspective, and allow people to work together toward a better human society rather than merely squabbling about petty differences. Sadly these are all just the pipe dreams of a foolish young idealist, but I can dream, can't I?

Re:The question is the risk worth it?

[uberdave]

Quite simply, existing growth of energy and raw material apprears unlikely to continue without utilization of non-terrestrial materials.

Bunk and Hogwash! We have an entire planetful of resources right under our feet with a "class M" environment surrounding most of it. It will be decades, perhaps centuries, before we import more material from space than we export Space will not economically viable as a source of resources for at least a millennium. By that time we should have proper recycling in place, and have tempered our wasteful ways a little.

Re:To far North for Intra Orbit Trajectory...

[eutychus_awakes]

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.

Re:To far North for Intra Orbit Trajectory...

[Carnildo]

Who picked Saskatchewan as a launch site??

Don't they understand that the closer to the equator they are, the greater the natural velocity of the vessel? By picking a trajectory so far North, they will have to burn more fuel to get the vehicle up to a speed which they would've gotten for free if they started somewhere closer to the equator.

This only applies if you're going for orbit. For an up-and-down suborbital flight, no place has a particular advantage over any other. (Slight exception: Launching from a mountaintop will reduce the height you need to reach by a bit)

We're 106km from outer space, eh?

[billstewart]

We've got full tanks of kerosine and Lox, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing spacesuits built by the lowest bidder. .... hit it! ....

Re:What is the X-Prize?

[cptgrudge]

What is it?

What is it? Read a few links to inform yourself. What I really want to know is why this conspiracy keeps continuing. You know the one I'm talking about. Canada. Canada doesn't really exist. Want proof? Let me show you.

A few questions about Canada:

But I can see Canada! It's on our maps!
Ah, yes. You have been brainwashed by the governments of the world with their lies. Without the help of so called "map experts", would you really know what you were looking at? It could be Alaska for all you know. It could have been imposed on a gullible world at many times in history. From the beginning of the so-called "New World", people have been convinced that Canada exists.

Don't all of these experts agree that Canada exists?
Yes, they do, but should one be suspicious of such overwhelming agreement? Obviously they are trying to hide something. Would an individual student that talks of such a topic in a school be awarded a degree for talking such "nonsense"? No, he/she would be ostracized by classmates. And so, the groupthink makes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Who would ever want to perpetrate such a hoax?
It's hard to say how many have played a part in this conspiracy over time, but the primary players are easy to spot. The US government, of course, has played its own role in the hoax. They even invaded "Canada" at one point in their history to build nationalistic pride, even though the US "lost" that war. Imagine how easy it was to start the hoax back then, with no TV or radio, only newspaper articles that were hopelessly out of date! People all over the world simply assume that Canada exists now, and that is something that governments, both official and secret, can hold over the people.

And so, now that you know, can anyone come forth with proof that Canada exists?

(This post was based loosely on this website.)

Not quite

[Simarilius]

The storys inaccurate, its not Bill Gates funding Spaceship one, its Paul Allen. Microsoft connection yes, Gates, no.

Re:Something's going on at Scaled

[second class skygod]

I believe that most of the 3 month delay was for the repair of the landing gear and airframe after the first powered flight. If anything is holding them up lately, it's probably the other projects they've got going (like the GlobalFlyer).

-- scsg

This won't be the first time

[Anonymous Coward]

Canadians have put something in space. A guy called Gerald Bull used to routinely shoot things 100 km up. If he hadn't been murdered, probably by a spy, he probably would have put a satellite in orbit.

I'm suprised that no one has made a movie about him. The following link is definately worth a look:

www.astronautix.com/articles/abroject.htm

Re:This won't be the first time

[Chairboy]

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.

Re:This won't be the first time

[DeeKayWon]

I'm suprised that no one has made a movie about him.

They did.

Re:Crashes

[bwy]

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.

Bullwinkle

[falsification]

I think they should name their ship Bullwinkle, or Rocky. There was a great cartoon about a flying Canadian squirrel a long time ago. The graphics are like completely stupid, but it's funny sometimes in a geeky kind of way.

What do you say, Canada?

Fully Ready

[Apostata]

Quote: One has to wonder, with launch dates being set, will some projects step up and attempt a flight without being fully ready for it?

Apparently only those run by NASA.

Re:To far North for Intra Orbit Trajectory...

[gordguide]

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.

I'm there!

[qualico]

Being close to Saskatchewan, I'll go for the launch.

Using my Celestron 9.25" Telescope with video camera, I'll give Slashdot a good update at www.spacecanada.org

Re:Crashes

[AeroIllini]

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.

You're right, it was Paul Allen, not Bill Gates. And the "crash" was just a landing gear strut buckling on landing. No big deal. The part and the problem were fixed in a matter of days.

In my opinion, Burt Rutan is not that interested in the $10 million. I think he's taking his sweet time about it because he would like to start a space tourism company once the craft is fully qualified. After all, that's the other half of the X-Prize: not just to build the hardware, but to also build an infrastructure for the space tourism industry and make some money. Create a generation of barnstormers (spacestormers?) who will tweak and adjust their craft and slowly, evolutionarily, bring about cheap and reliable access to space. Not every vehicle has to be a revolutionary new multi-billion-dollar NASA design. It's the bottom-up approach to space.