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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.'"
If we can't shoot it or drive it, what good is it ?
May we one day see a FOSS satellite in orbit?
Seriously, I think that this demonstarates the new power given to the (relativly) little guy by computers. Thanks to simulation we can all tweak ideas without blowing up prototypes.
I wish I had as much free time as some of these people.:E
May the Maths Be with you!
'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 hope he's not referring to the "simulator" about the space marine on Mars/Phobos/Deimos...
(especially not if the simulation behaved exactly the same)
It really is nice to see some of your more favorite programmers involved in their hobbies. It makes them more real in a way that "sitting behind a computer screen and doing nothing else to stimulate your mind" can. Not to mention he probably wrote the simulator, lol.
anyways, this is good news for J.C. congrats man
he'll have a deadline more precise than "when it's done" if he wants to win the X-Prize.
but they look a little behind the ball. SpaceShipOne is already carrying people into space(the official limit) and they are launching a small rocket. Even if they don't win I hope they keep going.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
'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 know not this reality which you speak of.
Is this the reason we still haven't seem Doom 3 yet?
100 km is nothing! It just makes the thing a high altitude plane. You can't maintain a stable orbit a that altitude, and the planes that get up there are nowhere near escpae velocity.
A rocket that can get up there will need more than just a few extra miles. It needs to travel at about 10 times the speed, have serious prtection for reentry, and have heavy shielding to protect it once it gets out of the Van Halen belt.
I wonder how have the experiences of programming things like the DOOM / QUAKE engine helped in this project? I mean, I am very sure that it is a great asset to be an all-around great programmer for the armadillo project, but I cannot relate how being able to squeeze frames and triangles out of a graphics card helps when dealing with rocket related... stuff; Maybe writing the physics engine and the collision detection code and being able to debug well helped? was there any direct relationships between the day job and the hobby? How did they help eachother?
/. should do another interview with J.C...
dammit
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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?)
Cant wait to see that BFG M-II, scaled up to blast some astroids.
"/Dread"
And, they aren't that far away. They've got the big rocket that carries three people built; they are just very - and appropriately - cautious. They are extensively testing all the algorithms and principles on the smaller rocket first. The main thing they think will take over 5 months is getting permission to make the shot.
I play Nerd-Folk!
Beware, geeks, maybe there is no light at the end of the tunnel...
Yeah... Fuck space flight, Doom 3 is a far more important achievement to humanity.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
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
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!
--
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.
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.
Holy smokes! that was a really impressive video. How in the world did they make it so that the rocket stabilized so well? I mean, gyroscopes only provides a partial answer. When the said that it landed within 1 foot of the launch pad, I assumed they meant that it *fell* within one foot of the launch pad. That thing sailed up and came down as if it was landing on an egg shell. Impressive!
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!
They stood close because they were hoping the exhaust would dye their hair blond.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Carmack's vehicle does.
That's one reason I chose 200km rather than 100km for my amateur rocketry prize. I'm pretty sure SC's and XCor's aerodynamically-limited approach would both lose in a race to 200km because they aren't really "space" vehicles.
Carmack's vehicle is.
I'm tempted to change my prize award to be private rather than amateur so that I can give it to Carmack's team. The problem is that my goal was, and is, to make space accessible to much lower levels of capital than even Carmack's group has expended -- which is already phenomenally low by aerospace standards.
Carmack's accomplishment, with his simplified fuel and system, is more profound than anything that has come along from the aerospace business since the hybrid rocket motor back in the 60s. Sadly -- compared to the golden age of aviation -- that's still not saying much. Carmack is, howeer, bound to inspire teams capable of running a modern day "Wright's bike shop" -- and that is saying much.
Seastead this.
As Jerry Pournelle said, reporting on the first flights of the Douglas DCX (a prototype SSTO,{Single Stage to Orbit} spacecraft: "it lands on its tailfins, as God and Robert Heinlein intended."
They got it to fly under guidance, hover briefly, and land (also under guidance) using its rockets.
This is a hell of a lot more impressive than an unguided model rocket.
You're trolling, of course, but it's a good troll because it exploits a gap in knowledge most people arguing this issue aren't even aware of.
Without taking time to go into a long reply with many examples, suffice it to say that the Framers knew very well the difference between "arms" and "artillery." They specified "arms." Typical military rifles (a flintlock back in the day, an assault rifle today) are fine. Military weapons of serious, if not mass, destruction (a cannon back in the day, a nuke today) are not fine.
There can be some reasonable disagreement about where, exactly, to draw the line. In the old days, all artillery required horses to drag it and a crew to serve it. Nowadays, an RPG is a one-person weapon. Thus, the old criteria of "man-portability" may no longer be relied on to draw a bright line between arms and artillery. Where the line is to be drawn is a fine thing for politicians to debate into the wee hours, but it doesn't inform this discussion. FWIW, I think we do a very good job of drawing that line, today. Automatic weapons are very heavily regulated and taxed and the owners are seriously investigated before being given permission to acquire them. Less militarily-capable weapons get less regulation. More capable weapons draw more scrutiny. (Hell, if you want it and can afford it, you can, as a private citizen, own, operate, and shoot out of a fully-operational fighter plane with multiple functional machine guns. But you'd better be rich and have plenty of time and patience to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops.)
In summary, then:
There's a right to bear arms.
There's no right to bear artillery.
Simple, huh?
I like this quote from Canadian Arrow's website:
"Although there are many different teams competing for the X PRIZE, we are all fundamentally on the same team. When one of us wins the X PRIZE, we will all become entrepreneurs and pioneers in the eyes of the world."
I can't speak for the actual participants, but I know that if I were on one of the teams I wouldn't be doing it primarily for the prize, but because I want to go to space. After all, I suspect that most of the entrants that are getting somwhere will have spent quite a bit more than the $10 million prize money by the time they get into space.
"Why can't everyone just be straight with me?"
"Because we live in a bendy world, dear."
This is a surprisingly lame attempt at the X-Prize. A hydrogen peroxide engine is a terrible choice for propulsion. The propellant is dangerous and and has low specific impulse. It has been mainly used for thrusters in the past. It is not even the best choice for that. Bipropellant thrusters now predominate. Any high power rocket modeller can show better than this. One wonders why he chose to publicize the event, considering the upcoming flight of Burt Rutan's vehicle. That is what I call a serious attempt.
an ill wind that blows no good
They are indeed brothers.
If you had RTFA, you would know that what they present here is scaled down prototype to test some technologies, not the one they are attempting to use to get into x-prize altitude with.(And it's 62.5 miles, not 20).
For all practical purposes, you have the right to bear arms provided that those arms will not seriously impede the government when they decide to get rid of you.
Note, this is not what the founders intended, but they didn't forsee a gargantuan standing army and our modern militarized police forces.
Please note, I am a firm believer in the right to bear arms, but unless you also have the small, weak government envisioned by the Founding Fathers it is not a useful check on tyranny. (As the modern United States of America should prove to any doubters.)
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
preface: This is a joke
John Carmack always gets +5 when he posts something. It's not even a question, moderators are drawn to give up those points like a heroin addict looking to shoot up when they see his name.
I think one day JC is going to just put "I farted, it stanks" and hit OK by accident, and then see the following on the comment:
+1 Insightful
+1 Funny
+1 Interesting
+1 Informative
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
Maybe you can add an armadillo easter-egg into D3 somewhere :-)
Damn you, you just added another year to the release date.
From what I've seen, Armadillo definitely practices safe rocketry.
A theoretical conversation between John Carmack the astronaut and ambassador Zarvox of Omicron Persei 8
Zarvox: Greetings earthling. We come in peace. What is it that you do on your planet?
Carmack: I make computer games where you run around and kill aliens.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Carmack is a celebrity among geeks. We all have people we admire. Even geek tribes have leaders.
Obviously, Joe Schmo is not going to know him, but we do. It is fine that you may resent him, but you should also respect the fact that living the geek dream is something that we all aspire to doing... but for one circumstance or another, we haven't been lucky enough to do it.
So give Carmack some friggin' props for at least pressing a little bit of the envelope and being a pioneer. In a world where technology is everywhere, he is pushing the barrier. Respect that.
Personally, I have always been dissappointed my whole life that I couldn't wake up, suit up, get in the airlock, and go out and weld space stations with my hands for a living. I think all of us geeks are upset for not being born in a more advanced civilization than we already are, or not having been born with enough money to get all the education we want.
He is at least using his cash for a useful hobby. Some day there will be normal use space travel. Damn if I can't wait for those days. Think, modern commerce in space... instead of spy sattelites and weapons platforms. It sounds a whole lot better than what is going on now.
Damn you innovators! Damn you all!
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?"
In related news, the Mesquite Sheriff's department took a report from Little Billy Shumacker who's model rocket was stolen by a man with glasses who tried to offer him the cheat codes for 'god mode' for doom 3 in exchange.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
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
Does your supersonic rocket land itself back on the blunt end, within a couple of feet from where you launched?
Less is more.
Please note, I am a firm believer in the right to bear arms, but unless you also have the small, weak government envisioned by the Founding Fathers it is not a useful check on tyranny. (As the modern United States of America should prove to any doubters.)
I don't think this is entirely true. While it may not have been envisioned by the framers, even with a very powerful military, weapons in the hands of the people can help keep politicians in line, somewhat. The reason for this is that one person, with a gun, and enough drive to kill a politician, is probably going to get the job done. If the politician has done enough things to piss more than one person off, to the point of wanting to kill them, then that politician should probably be very sure he has a current will. To me, the idea of revolt being the prime deterent to tyrany has shifted to the threat of being killed by one determined person with a gun. Even in recent history the president, arguably the most protected person in office, was shot (Regan). Granted the shot wasn't fatal, but it was still life threatening.
Also, this type of argument assumes a couple of things:
1. The revolt isn't started in the military. If this were to happen, things would just get messy, quick.
2. The revolt is not on a massive country wide scale. For this, look at Vietnam. Its very clear that the US had a very clear technological advantage. However, the US military was fighting the whole penesula. People from both North and South Vietnam didn't want the US forces there, or at best didn't care. Identifying the enemy was very difficult. Also, the Vietnimesse were very determined to push the US out, they would take huge losses and not let up. I tend to think that the same could happen in the US, if the government got bad enough. Granted, the likelyhood of it actually happeneing is very low. But, if enough people are willing to fight and die for something, they can overcome a technologicly superior force.
3. Consider who the military would be killing, US citizens. If the revolt is a popular revolt, the US government would absolutly cripple itself by putting the revolt down. Also, this always begs the question of how the soldiers in the military would react to having to kill US citizens. Though, the military does do a good job of keeping its soldiers from thinking about such things.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
> 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
Thanks for your reply. This is something I've been really curious about since first reading about your design.
My intuition was wrong: I'm stunned that so little propellant is used for landing. Nevertheless, you still need lots of propellant to schlep around your landing propellant through the boost phase. About how much "extra" propellant would you estimate is required? By my back-of-the-envelope thinking, it'd be about 800 lbs.
Does your site have specs on the big vehicle's fuel consumption and thrust estimates? I'd like to play around with your numbers. Just to keep my hand in, you know...
Impressive work. I can't wait to see more.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You're splitting too fine a hair.
"International arms dealers" don't confine themselves to rifles. The term predates firearms -- consider "coat of arms" -- and means merely "weapons".
The phrase you're looking for, restricted just to man-portable firearms, is "small arms".
Dictionary.com says:
arm
A weapon, especially a firearm: troops bearing arms; ICBMs, bombs, and other nuclear arms.
Lest you object that the modern usage is different, I'll note that the Federalist Papers include such phrases as "Hannibal had carried her [Carthage's] arms into the heart of Italy", referring to the entire offensive force of a nation; or "the dangers to which we should be exposed, in a state of disunion, from the arms and arts of foreign nations". I somehow doubt the "arms" of foreign nations in this case meant just the muskets, and not the "artillery" or, for that matter, sabers.
More evidence of "Founder usage" can be found in Federalist No. 29:
It seems fairly clear here that "arms" is not some subset of weaponry, and also fairly clear that the "large body of citizens" is expected to be equipped in a manner essentially the same as the standing army.
The "gap in knowledge" would appear to be on your side. You've manufactured a distinction which does not, in fact, exist.
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