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John Carmack's Test Liftoff a Success
brainstyle writes "Space.com is reporting that John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace (and who apparently has some game design hobby) has had a successful launch of the prototype of its entry in the X-Prize. From the article: 'I had tried several algorithms on the simulator before settling on this one, and it behaved exactly the same in reality, which is always a pleasant surprise.'"
I'm sure the Armadillo team would have loved to have won the X-Prize, but they don't seem to be too discouraged. They've built a rocket that flies and lands very neatly, and that uses a novel propellant mixture. I gather they're still going to try to build an X-Prize class vehicle over the next year or so. They've learned a lot about building rockets. And, judging by the celebration when they landed that test flight, they're still having fun. Sounds like a hell of a hobby to me, and I wish I had the cash to do something like it :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
They're not allowed to go higher by their current FAA licence.
The Van Halen belt? Someone spent too much time listening to hair metal in the 80's. You mean the Van Allen Belts
A simulator is just some code to stimulate input to your code. Simulator != a big box with a joystick and 3D-glasses and force feedback.
People tend to think of MS Flight Simulator when they hear the word 'simulator'.
Insert `fortune -o` here
Hydrogen peroxide is quite unstable and decomposes under the right conditions (silver catalyst). It's a fuel all by itself, although you can improve its performance by injecting other fuels, when it acts partly as a fuel and partly as an oxidiser.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
There is no need to launch anything from the equator.
The closer to the equator you launch from, and the closer to due-east your launches are pointed, the more benefit you gain from the Earth's rotation in making orbital velocity.
This applies to Aircraft launches too, since the boost is then: aircraft velocity + earth rotation.
The further your launch is from 0 degrees inclination, the less benefit you gain from earth's rotation, and the less the benefit from launching at the equator. This can actually be made up somewhat by launching from north/south of the equator due east (e.g. Kenedy launches are most efficient to 28 degree inclination launches, the same as the latitude of the launch site.
Launches into polar orbit - 90 degree inclination - by definition get no benefit from Earth's rotation, so it doesn't matter where you launch from.
Launches that are sub-orbital get no benefit from the earth's rotation other than - possibly - affecting the range achieved. For the specific case of the X-Prize, where most teams seem to want to land more-or-less where they launched from, there's no benefit from earth's rotation it's - at most - just another trajectory-affecting factor to take into consideration.
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
For those of you that are underwhelmed by the 310 pound vehicle, do note that the big vehicle (1500 lbs) that can actually carry people is also flying. Look back in the Armadillo updates around April 19 for testing video. We have since reworked the propulsion system to follow what has worked so well on the subscale vehicle, and should be testing it this weekend. If it works well, we will be repeating the boosted hop with the big vehicle next week.
The flight time is currently limited by federal law to 15 seconds of rocket burn time. We have a waiver coming to extend that to 120 seconds, but beyond that we will need a full launch license.
The significance of all this is that the vehicles are intended to fly up, come back down and land right where they took off from, all without ablating, expending, or seperating anything. It should be possible to have turn around times under one hour even for quite large vehicles.
BTW, Doom beta testing is going very well.
John Carmack
I think I speak for everyone by saying fuck you :P
also, the engine, which is the part he does, is most likly done, it's all the game content, the levels, etc that takes more time then the engine does, that's the stuff that's getting worked on.
EzRocket is a great, great testbed for a restartable, reliable, affordable, commercially available rocket engine.
And the flight test series they conducted really did push the state-of-the-art in rocket propulsion, in all of the arenas above
However , the EZRocket testbed - a converted Rutan LongEze homebuild aircraft - is in *no way* a suitable platform for development as a honest-to-goodness Space Rocket. It's not even got a pressurised cockpit, for instance.
XCor do have sub-orbital transport plans - the Xerus vehicle - but this is at the concept stage: it's not a complete design let alone having any bent metal!
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I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
I don't see Xcor on the list of X Prize teams:
http://www.xprize.org/teams/teams.html
Unless they're on there under a different name, they're not competing.
Maybe I misunderstand your post, but NO plane can fly at 100Km. You must have it confused with 100K feet, which some high-altitude planes can reach.
A blog like any other.
When hydrogen peroxide is passed through screens of silver and stainless steel (and sometimes other metals and elements, like potassium permaganate), a hot steam is produced, which propels the rocket forward. The Germans used this in the V1 rocket (to spin the turbo pumps) and in the ME-163 rocket plane.
A blog like any other.
That's 62 miles, not 20.
A blog like any other.
The V1 was, in fact, not a rocket at all. It was a pulsejet. Hence it's nickname, the buzz bomb. I think you mean the V2.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
It apparently never dawned on them that their device could malfunction and explode, spraying them with shrapnel. Or, it could have gone off course and landed on them.
Sheesh!
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I believe you DO misunderstand him, he's describing a sub-orbital flight, as opposed to Low Earth Orbit which is 300-1000km. Anything below 250-300km altitude will be sub-orbital due to atmospheric drag.
It's the difference between the X-2 (they lost a couple due could have gone higher than 38kM, but would need attitude jets) and the Titan (which could take Carmack's vehicle into LEO)... But the X-Prize isn't about LEO, so that's okay. The X-Prize target is 100kM, because they want cheap commercial ICBMs, not rocket-planes.
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They are indeed brothers.
I dont know many model rockets powered by Peroxide. I also dont know of many that are capable of going to 131 feet and returning to within 1 foot of their launch point vertically (VTOL), meaning full flight control on takeoff, hover, and landing, and all with the click of a button. This rocket demonstrated the control authority they have now with their vane controlled engine, and their flight control system software. Basically he clicked his mouse, the computer flew the rocket to a pre-determined altitude and returned it to the ground under power.
Sorry, but this is advancement. NASA tried something similar (DC-X/A), but way bigger, took them several years to get it to even take off, and eventually blew it up, all at a much much higher cost ($40mill?). This "Large freakin model rocket" has been developed by a much smaller team, for what Im sure is alot less investment, and proves that their approach to a re-usable rocket can work. This is also their small scale vehicle. They have a larger one using the same technology and systems that they are testing as well. Rather than risk damaging it, they test everything on the smaller one until it works correctly. Read their website (once /. effect wears off), you might actually learn something.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Yeah, you see the national spelling bee once and realize those losers who just run around and jump and stuff have _nothing_ on the intensity and dedication of those kids.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
And you know they will, because the people behind
.plan is regular reading material for many) -- one of the main things that OSS adherents want to see in the software world.
these outfits are the same types behind SCO and
Enron.
John Carmack has written some of the most groundbreaking entertainment software out there.
He has donated his old engines to the world, GPLing them.
Id has stayed small and privately-owned deliberately, and avoided the problems with "shareholder short-term return issues" that so many people complain about.
He has spent extensive amounts of time and effort doing volunteer code on 3d drivers for XFree86, allowing Linux and BSD folks to enjoy 3d games. He used his influence to help get Linux and BSD folks the games that they have today.
He has pushed hard for technological improvements in the GPU arena, and has done consumer education on GPU features. He is famously open about what he is working on and his thoughts (the Carmack
And you call him one of the same types of people behind SCO and Enron? That is not only absurd, it's an attack on one of the better men in the software world. I question whether *you* have done as much for society.
May we never see th
weather permitting - hop in your winnebagos and drive on down to Mojave to see it yourself:
m
http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/index.ht
So as I understand it he has to fly twice in two weeks to claim the prize?
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
should your life be allowed? (You don't control your own right to die in the USA anymore)
should you be able to say what your saying without the Gestapo executing you? or holding you criminally culpable for saying certain things (Dmitri Skylarov, ROT13 - that wasn't screaming "fire!" in a movie theater)
should we search your home without a warrant and look for illegal arms, drugs, porn. should we just plant it there and nail your ass anyway? (Most warrants are issued for "probable cause" or various loopholes that allow people to be storm troopered Elian Gonzalez style, Waco, ruby ridge)
should we electrocute and drug you to confess (typical police tactics are to "befriend" the criminal and to make you feel like its "okay" to talk, they even wanted to get rid of Miranda rights reading)?
should we turn your house into an army barracks for no reason for no compensation (this doesn't happen because the army is huge - so do we need it anymore?)?
should we force you to waive your rights to a jury trial? should we have juries (jury selection is a rigged farce most of the time, but its better than a tribunal. we should try fucking paying jurors)?
should we have hidden accusers (rape trials are a joke right now)?
did you know a dispute of $20 or more grants a right to trial by jury? its in the constitution. how about that? next time Verizon fucks you, you'll see that that right is fucking WALKED ON AND PISSED ON AND WE GET FUCKED. We cant take down Verizon over a $20 dispute. Because constitution has been treasonized.
i think the death penalty is cruel punishment. but people want revenge. another constitutional right redefined. (i take it that means the government should never be able to kill your or hurt you, and killing is the ultimate for of hurt)
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. Diane Feinstein should be imprisoned forever for treason against this. California and others have assaulted the constitution and used public office to commit treason, and while the death penalty is still on the books, hey should be hung by gallows in a public square by patriots in a militia!
1934. Tommy Guns banned. Why? Because a total of two officers were shot and the country lost its rights to FA gun ownership.
1968 Spurious gun classification is born, foreign made guns banned.
1986. Reagan regrettably signs your right to purchase what the police purchase into oblivion.
1994. Clintoon and his roving band of socialists commit treason on the highest level by allowing capricious gun categories that have no regard to function.
2020. Guns banned. Free press banned. Free speech banned. Warrants no longer needed. Megacorps can murder civilians (now known as plebeians) without recourse. RFID, chips and tracking devices implanted in all people. Cameras everywhere. Cars banned. Extensive travel banned.
You see the hippies hated nuclear power and created the oil mafia.
The hippies hated guns and created precedent to take a Inalienable Bill of Right away.
Now the leftists have opened the door for both Communist and Fascists and Radical NWO/UN socialists to take everything from us. All hail our new masters, including George Soros.
The founding fathers would have wanted one of us to murder George Soros. Now we can't, we are all unarmed pussies subjected to his treason-treacherous ways. Pretty soon echelon, NSA and all sorts of carnivoring internet bots will register my hatred of him and report me to the gestapo. And I'll be unarmed and sodium amatoled to speak. And I will die with a needle in my arm!
Point: All lines fuck you, and serve the masters of you.
A variety of responses:
We don't expect to win the X-Prize, both because Burt probably has it in the bag, and we are behind schedule. We still plan on continuing our development, because our designs are nearly an order of magnitude cheaper to fabricate and operate than Space Ship One, and orders of magnitude matter. If SS1 crashes on Monday, we will throw more time and resources at an attempt, because there really is no other contender, but it will be a long shot.
We could have flown an unguided rocket to very high altitudes a long time ago, but we have instead concentrated on control systems, which is where the important work needs to be done. A team that was busy flying rockets to hundreds of thousands of feet altitude, then decided to add a guidance and control system to their rockets would be in for many rude surprises at high energy levels.
This isn't immediately obvious, but an X-Prize class vehicle pretty much requires an active control system (a trained pilot with appropriate controls is also an active control system). A short burn time rocket, like the recent CSXT 100 km shot, can live with just aerodynamic stabilization (note that it also landed 20 miles away), but the G forces are far too high for people. As the burn time lengthens with lower acceleration forces, the vehicle will gravity turn away from vertical, making it almost impossible to keep a 60 second burn time even accelerating upwards.
People that harp on about propellant specific impulse in the context of suborbital rockets are like programmers that obsessively optimize a function that isn't a hot spot. The goal of a rocket ship is not to deliver specific impulse, it is to move a payload reliably and cost effectively. Isp can always be traded away for mass fraction, and quite often you can improve operability or reliability by doing so. With our new vehicle designs using a single engine and jet vanes instead of four differentially throttled engines we are more likely to consider trading some engine and system complexity for performance, but issues like the requirement for deep throttling still make it a complex decision.
I do Armadillo work on Tuesdays, weekends, and late at night. At Id lately I have been working on next-generation rendering technology while the rest of the company manages the Doom beta process.
I don't issue press releases. I just publicly write about what I am working on, and other people find it noteworthy enough to talk about. All of our development work, including the dead ends and mistakes, is fairly well documented on the Armadillo Aerospace website.
John Carmack
Read the website. Although this test was conducted with a monopropellant engine, they have been testing bi-propellant mixtures for some time, exactly for the reasons you specify (although, what kinds of propellant with sufficent energy to give you a good weight to lift ratio AREN'T dangerous to some degree?)
BTW, he publicizes what his group does every week on the website. I think the only difference is that, in the week leading up to the SpaceShipOne launch, there's been more commercial media coverage of what Rutan's competitors have been up to.
> I figure you need about four times as much fuel at liftoff for a vertical rocket-borne landing as you would for a parachute- or wing-borne landing.
No, not even remotely close.
You only need enough propellant to kill the terminal velocity of the vehicle to land it safely. A vehicle that is stable reentering base first has a Cd right around 1.0, and any high performance rocket vehicle is going to be coming in pretty light after it has burned most of the propellant. The V2 impacted the ground still supersonic because it was aerodynamically stable nose first, so it maintained its 0.15 or so Cd on descent. A reasonably stubby base first reentry will have a terminal velocity of only 200 mph or so.
Killing that speed with a comfortable safety margin takes about 400 pounds of propellant in our vehicle, compared to 8000 pounds of propellant burned on ascent. A higher performance rocket engine could do it with propotionately smaller amounts. A parachute / drogue / ejection system for this weight vehicle is indeed lighter, coming in at about 100 pounds, but that brings a number of disadvantages with it, like coming down tens of miles away and still needing final impact attenuation.
We wanted to use parachtues as a quick hack for the X-Prize, but the test range where we were planning to fly was going to require a half million dollars of "engineering support" and wanted us to carry a thrust termination system (bomb) on the vehicle to satisfy themselves that it won't drift out of the range.
Long term, there is no question in our minds that powered landing is the way to go. We just were given a pretty strong incentive to go there earlier than we were planning.
John Carmack
Actually, you underestimated this one.
Since the "payload" of an X-Prize vehicle is three x 200 lb people, needing 400 pounds of landing propellant turns our 850 gallon tank vehicle from a three person vehicle into a one person vehicle.
In the most negative light, you could say that powered landing (with a low performance propellant like we use) takes away two thirds of our payload capacity, but that is a poor metric to base decisions off of, because operational issues have historically been orders of magnitude more important to cost effectiveness than propellant consumption.
We can get the 400 pounds back by either going to a carbon fiber tank instead of a fiberglass tank (cost: $40k up front design fee, then $25k per tank, compared to $9k for the fiberglass tank), or by upsizing everything to a 1600 gallon fiberglass tank (cost: $17k for the tank plus more for bigger engine plumbing, catalysts, and nozzles).
Upsizing the tank is lower risk, because it only uses suppliers that we already buy from, while the carbon fiber tank job would be custom from ATK, and I have already had two other vendors back out on me for big tank work. We already have a 1600 gallon fiberglass tank on hand.
Our mixed monoprop has a measured sea level Isp of 145, with normal increases with altitude. Our big vehicles have a mass ratio of about five, takes off with somewhat under one positive G of acceleration, and has a somewhat regressive thrust profile from partial blowdown pressurization. That combination is sufficient for suborbital flights. A 200+ Isp biprop can do it with a mass ratio of three, but the vehicle gets a lot more complicated to build and operate.
John Carmack