Slashdot Mirror
1 Amateur Rocket Crashes, Another Explodes
prostoalex writes "A 23-foot-long space rocket carrying 3 dummies exploded in the Pacific Northwest after reaching about 200 feet. The team was competing for Ansari X Prize, offering $10 million to the team that successfully completes a low-budget private space rocket capable of carrying men into space. Google News offers more perspectives into the event, the team is saying the rocket, whose parachute malfunctioned, would have to be rebuilt." And AmiNTT writes "Everygeek's favorite rocketeers over at Armadillo Aerospace have suffered a fairly serious setback over the weekend - the crash of their 48-inch vehicle link in a test hop at their 100 acre test field. Of course there is video and pictures - 2 3...
This setback should keep them from flying for about five weeks, but will give them a chance to make some design changes. I'm sure they will be back better than ever.
(Armadillo have shown up on Slashdot many times in the past.)"
And this news comes just days after watching October Sky! codeus.sexybsd.org
It seems that nobody pays any attention to the dummies, they are the real victims here, but nobody cares.
What kind of world are we living? I say it's end of the world when we stop carying for dummies.
Best quote from the weblog about the incident:
"Amazingly, even though the on-board camera was destroyed, the tape did survive with only some scuffed sections. It's a good thing Doom 3 is selling very well..."
to the Union Aerospace Corporation...
That didn't set them back, and somehow I don't think this will set back these private experimenters either.
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
Sometimes I think you people actually take JOY out of directly linking to large JPGs and MPGs on /.
Ahh well, Armadillo Aerospace is down, but at least there is still Union Aerospace to look at. Err... wait.
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Fortunately for us, the three dummies were Bush, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft.
Good luck to John and the rest of the crew at Armadillo.
Less is more.
They want to put 3 real people in a 38 inch diameter rocket and then launch them into space?! Who in their right mind would agree to such a thing? It sounds about as much fun as riding out a hurricane in a freakin' barrel!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Sadly, it seems they have yet to learn from history. Or, perhaps, their bandwidth costs are being spent on new rocket parts.
Well, here's a copy of the news article from Armadillo, anyway.
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
course nothing can escape the dreaded slashdotting... its like the evil bunnies with fangs ^^.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Sounds like a lot of stupidity and/or hype.
More broadly, I believe there are plans for post X-Prize competitions in the future, where various teams would get together annually to compete for the highest launch, fastest turnaround, and so on.
Ultimately, it wouldn't surprise me, particularly if Scaled wins the X-Prize, if in a few years time we have the "Y-Prize" for orbital shots.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
In other news, webservers at Armadillo Aerospace crashed and exploded after their files have been directly linked on front page of /.
Hmm, looks like they've already redirected funds from web servers to the project.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
You'd have to be a dummy to fly on their XPrize attempt...
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
So you have a Loss Of Vehicle accident, and yet you are not convening an accident investigation board with six months of hearings leading to recommendations that require you to ground all flights for the next decade. You'll never become the next NASA with that attitude.
ed2k://|file|48InchCrash.mpg|4345860|c03ce17b98b49 c7a88621c721c33acb3|
As usual, you will need to manually remove the spaces that Slashcode adds.
May we never see th
Well, if they fail the X-prize in a live run, there's always the Darwin Awards. Either way, you get an award :-)
Table-ized A.I.
I've noticed too many slashdot articles in which the information is misrepresented, misquoted, or quoted out of context. This is yet another case... Slashdot claims that it exploded after reaching 200 feet, which is untrue. It exploded 200 feet horizontally FROM its takeoff point. If you actually had bothered to read the article, the craft approached nearly 1000 ft vertically. It was during landing that the chute failed to deploy and the craft was destroyed.
Of course, 1000 ft isn't that impressive. However, they did produce the craft very cheaply. And, it surely could have travelled farther than 1000 ft, they were merely testing their initial design.
My advice for the team is to attempt to test their next rocket without their dummy payload. It would be best to successfully launch and land a test craft safely before attempting to gauge their capacity for load.
They just want to appear as a real competitor to give their online casino sponsor their money's worth in attention. I bet they'll find some excuse not to fly.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
They should have read Rocketry for Dummies.
May we never see th
At least there was no one in there, lol.
The one that crashed was running Windows 98 and the one that exploded was running OS9.
I guess Armadillo Aerospace wasn't anticipating problems and thus a flood of slashdot traffic.
I see them on the local news, and as soon as I saw that chubby V1 knockoff, I knew the thing would fail. Even if the thing worked, who the hell wants to go into space in what looks like an oversized water rocket?
$20,000. Damn cheap. You're lucky to get a car for that much these days...I'd buy me a rocket instead any day! Although the running costs could be a bit high....
Your main point (and correction to the article is correct though - the rocket crashed during landing because the parachute malfunctioned. Lots of people will assume it exploded from the tone of the slashdot article. Which is not true - everything else seems to have been reasonably successful. The images (which I really wanted to see) seem slashdotted pretty badly. Here's a link to a small one in another story.
Here is a torrent for the 4MB video. I'll keep it up for 24-48 hours.
48InchCrash.mpg.torrent
Please seed.
the rocket, whose parachute malfunctioned, would have to be rebuilt
Usually one DOES have to rebuild after it EXPLODES!
Let's see how long my server lasts. {Sheepish-Grin}
VIDEO
(Thanks for the text-mirror earlier. It was nice to read about it, and see that they all kept their sense of humor about the situation.)
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
This is why the AC had a bit of a rant about Slashdot article vaugarities(sp?).
Again, check the link in my post below. It has the correct info, unlike the Slashdot article.
Not my favourite X-Prize team, so speak for yourself. They will be back better than before of course, but not in time to win the xprize.
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Ho me/Paraphernalia
Check the bottom for Armadillo Droppings.
The article says "after shooting less than 1,000 feet in the air." Less than is not the same nearly. But anyhow, in order for the craft to reach 1000ft in altitude it must first pass the 200ft mark. Therefore, Slashdot is correct in saying that it exploded "after reaching about 200 feet."
Wow, for once Slashdot is correct.
It's a shame that no one else is in a serious position to compete (though Ansari claims they are) but it's pretty cool that Scaled is there. The prize was going to expire this year, so if they hadn't entered the running it wouldn't even be claimed.
48-inch vehicle
This is your captain speaking, please remain remain in a seated position.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Of course the amateur rocket failed -- they're not professional rocket scientists after all ;)
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
The private rocket project barely alive...
Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology.
We can make it better than it was before.
Better...
For the $10 million dollar X-PrizeRecycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
Why'd they say it exploded at "less than 1000 feet" if they really meant "about 200 feet"? That would just be really crappy writing. Saying it was less than 1000 feet would imply that it did reach somewhere close to, but still below, 1000 feet. If it was actually much, much less than 1000 feet as you suggest, they wouldn't have mentioned the completely arbitrary 1000 feet number anywhere; it would have had as much relevance to the actual explosion height as saying ten miles or three million light-years.
Besides, you wouldn't describe a rocket as "crashing 200 feet from takoff" if it malfunctioned and blew up at 200 feet. Crashing generally involves hitting something, like the ground. Yes, it did hit the ground later, but it certainly did not crash at 200 feet altitude.
Guess that should have been playing more Lander and less Doom III
Carmack, that's what you get for flying the rocket in complete darkness, without a helmet-mounted flashlight!
Will North Korea be allowed to enter?
It seems as if there's a lot of cool stuff being developed by the impetus of the prize.
....
Looking at SpaceShipOne, I have to agree. But on the other hand, looking at Armadillo
This had also happened on the previous 12" engine after a few runs (you could see a couple red hot catalyst rings fly out in one of the static test videos). It didn't seem to be progressive last time, so we went ahead and left it alone, expecting the test run to squash the rings down into an interference fit again.
Rings fly out of the engine and they aren't too worried? They think rings may be loose but they expect them to squash down to interference fit again? Words fail me.
There's good engineering and there's also appalling engineering covered in wishful thinking and viewed through rose-tinted spectacles. The X-Prize has very worthy goals, but it's sad that by setting a date and making it a race, it necessarily attracts also those who are totally out of their depth in the kind of engineering discipline required for such an endeavour.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Check out the pic of the dummy head detached from its body from this article.
Poor, poor dummy.
I mean, its not rocket science... oh, hang on.
In Soviet Russia, rockets explode YOU!
etc.
I wonder how well it would have fared if the same amount of time spent on building the fright simulator would have been spent on their flight simulator.
Rocket science is not easy, but almost all of Armadillo's mishaps were due to easily forseeable problems, such as:
*battery connectors coming off
*no protection against inductive kickback(essential around any combination of electromechanical and electronic devices)
*not restricting allowable user inputs (ie joystick)
*underrated power transistors for drive unit (this is very basic stuff)
*finally, not setting minimum fuel level for takeoff
When you are dealing with a field as complex as this, you can't afford to make such stupid mistakes.
Yes, that's it.
- Build and crash crappy rocket
- Raise more money from investors
- Profit!!!
Wish I'd thought of that.I looked at the video and thought of previous videos which had shown the Armadillo crew standing a mere 50 feet from the pad.
I wish they'd stand further off; their rockets are good, they are cool, but they are also (provably) dangerous!
Makes me nervous every time they test something.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Can someone explain what is amateur about these enterprises? Just because they're not government funded or making a profit doesn't mean they're not professional.
:]
Maybe it's the fact they crashed?...
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
Moon cannot be terraformed.
Don't be discouraged by the fact that the Moon can't hold onto its atmosphere for very long, that's not a problem if the materials are continually replenished. Since the supply of politicians and lawyers is inexhaustable, as long as we keep dumping them onto the surface there shouldn't be any problem with maintaining good levels of hot air and organic compounds.
I hoped someone tried to catch them..
Because, hey... free dummies.
AH the power of the deep thought
These events speak for themselves. It's frightening to see launch tests take place.
NASA spent such a rediculously large amount of money testing and building rockets, as did the russians. Some might say that's exactly the problem. But both agencies had a number of spectacular failures. To this day there is no rocket in existance that has a 100% success rate.
That should be an indication that it's extremely difficult to build and launch rockets. I'm just worried about when someone actually gets in one of their own personal roman candles, hoping to make it to the edge of space they will find themselves going home in a body bag.
I'd say in general that the X-Prize should have some rules around who and how people compete. The real key is having A) Money B) Talent. The foundation should at least provide talent, expert guidance and such. Money, can come from sponsors etc. I just think the foundation has an obligation to ensure the safety of the teams competing.
Hope and optimism can be very dangerous, especially in the context of engineering.
38" diameter
23' length
3 dummies
The only thing I can picture is that they bought a big piece of metal conduit, stacked three dummies in it vertically, welded on a nosecone, and packed the bottom with solid fuel.
This is interesting. The Estes Rubicon model rocket can go higher (450 ft) than the actual one did before it exploded (200 ft).
1 70/
"Mighty D powered 1:11 scale model of the Space Transport Corporation entry for the X-Prize will fly to 450 feet!"
http://www.discountrocketry.com/prod.itml/icOid/1
The interesting/expensive satellites (i.e., direct droadcast) are in Geosynch orbit, that is along way above where the shuttle can go. Unless the satellite has a builtin deorbit capability, this would be very difficult to repair.
See my journal, I write things there
From their website:
/. needs $$, they can always stress test servers for a nominal fee)
"Too many users... blah blah blah
Probable cause: http://www.slashdot.org
Try again in a few seconds...
-xian@idsoftware.com"
(if
Does it bother anyone else that Armadillo's efforts seem to go strictly by trial and error for each and every little step and part involved?
They won't have that luxury once they got off the ground... (as evidenced by the crash of THEIR rocket).
I thought the real science to building rockets was engineers who could plan things out accurately on paper first...
There is no stipulation that it has to be low-budget, it just has to be privately funded.
They favor less government not more
I have four words for you, son:
Department of Homeland Security.
If that ain't big government, I don't know what is.
Remember children, spend and don't tax is worse than spend and tax. Anyone with a credit card can tell you this.
3 lesbians and a video camera onboard with live feed.
Who else thinks of that cheesy horror flick The Gate When you see all of this amateur rocketry stuff show up on slashdot/etc.
:)
In the movie the kid/main character fires off a Saturn V model rocket to vanquish the big bad guy. A memomorable moment and certainly one that must have gotten tons of kids into model rocketry
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
A 23-foot-long space rocket carrying 3 dummies strueth i thought they said 'dunnies' for a minute and i thought to myself, jesus christ 3 dunnies on one rocket - that's a bit rich. no wonder the bloody thing blew up.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
SpaceShipOne Flights are planed for September 29th, 2004, October 13th, 2004 at the Mojave Airport, Civilian Aerospace Test Center in Mojave,
California.
Press release
I just went up to Mojave this weekend to see what was around and there was almost nothing to see and all was closed.
I Don't think they are in any way prepared for the turnout they are going to get for this next flight.
Rutan's team has a very good chance success being he's already done it with one test pilot. No matter this outcome these will be a historic event.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
How many "pioneers" are going to die until some level of oversight is installed on the private attempts.
The X-Prise is modeled after the "successful" contests that promoted aviation around the turn of the 20th century. However, back then people really did not respect safety to the degree we do now. Life was comparatively cheap.
I like the spirit of engineering and advanture, but I get a sort of "mad scientist" feeling from these engineers who think that a crash is just a "bug" -- those dummies represent lives!
Well, there is this minor difference that you can die in the process, so I would rather-- oh, I just remembered how I almost choked to death with cappuccino the other day. Not to even mention how I fell asleep waiting for a "make test" to finish and fell off my chair, only inches from a razor sharp pencil laying on the floor. You're right, no difference.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
OK, I've seen the movie. I must say I was really surprised that they have somehow managed to survive, let alone want to fly in few weeks. These people are true heroes. No question. I wish them to get out of the hospital in even less than five weeks and be back better than ever. Good luck!
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
First Armadillo crashes a test vehicle, and THEN you link a video off their site directly on /., ultimately crashing their server.
You sick 'dillo.
The FAA wasn't pleased with their "crush-cone" design, forcing them to reengineer for a powered landing.
It seems like they should have had a crush cone, and make the thing, in the event of a power outage, flip onto it....
Being electrical engineering student, when I see http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_08_08/200 4_08_07_i.jpg and http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_08_08/200 4_08_07_k.jpg, I say this is really a amateur job : I would have done the same.... This must be a nightmare to debug: even my 70's dryer is better wired than this
I hope they are not seriousely competing with Tier One for the price...
This is must a Carmack toy than anything else.
If you think there are fewer terrorists targetting the domestic U.S., I have to conclude one of us is deranged. Do determine which it is, we can ask a few questions:
a 120298.htm
1) is there an upper bound to the number of Islamic extremists? I conclude, yes. The human population is probably an upper bound. It may be reasonable to reduce the upper bound to the population of current muslims. This lower figure is not less than 1 billion. This ignores the effect of conversions such as John Walker underwent. Or we can consider them "current" muslims.
http://islam.about.com/library/weekly/a
2) is the proportion of potential vs. actual Islamic extremist terrorists 1 ? I conclude yes.
3) do the actions of the U.S. (occupying a predominantly Islamic country, killing thousands of non-combantants in the process (even granting that the U.S. military is using unprecedented restraint), torturing and sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners) affect the proportion in #2? I conclude yes, and that its effect is to increase the proportion of actual to potential terrorists.
4) The nub of the issue: does the effect of #3 completely overwhelm the effect of killing terrorists on a retail scale in Iraq? Remember - that #3 is applied to an upper limit of one billion. A tiny, tiny shift in attitude across that population is going to generate a huge difference in the number of people prepared to attack US interests. I conclude that the answer is yes, the effect of increased hostility of one billion people on the numbers of actual terrorists is likely to dwarf the effect of attrition on Islamic extremists due to combat in Iraq.
5) What proportion of Iraqi fighters killed represent terrorists who would otherwise have been engaged in attacks on U.S. soil? I conclude this is tiny. Most of the resistance is now Iraqi shiites, fighting for a previously reviled cleric that the US has successfully turned into a hero.
Think about it: you are a pissed-off religious fundamentalist who hates the U.S. Do you go to Iraq to fight it where it's strongest? Only if you smell blood and want to get in on what looks like an inevitable humiliation for the U.S. Otherwise, you continue to go after soft, civilian targets. It's not like these guys targetted Ft. Bragg before we invaded Iraq. On the contrary, they went after civilian targets even when there were military targets available.
To the extent we are making the terrorists fight us there instead of here, I think we're only finding the guys who couldn't get here. There may be more of them going to Iraq because they can afford the short commute. These would have stewed in whatever hellhole they found themselves in before we invaded.
A wise dude said of the conflict: "It's not whether we can keep winning battles: we can. The problem is to stop having to fight battles." And they can keep us fighting battles as long as someone is pissed off about a dead relative and has access to an AK-47. This describes 70%+ of the population.
And you have to admit, "If we can properly subdue Iraq and Afghanistan, then we will have gone a long way towards sorting out the Middle East" is a massive hand-wave. The Bush team had absolutely no plan. And worse, they disregarded the plans others made. Bunch of egomaniacle armchair warriors and fuck-ups. These weren't the grownups we were promised.
"We don't have the metrics" when asked whether we were winning - and that was limited to just Iraq. "We don't know the score - we don't even know how to keep score" is not a comforting thing to hear from the nitwit in charge.
I think the answer has to be assessed region by region, with a subjective guesstimate at each point. Are extremist clerics gaining or losing support in city/province/country x,y,z? You can't count the lone gun nuts in any society, but you can probably take a population's temperature to see if the nuts have attained a critical mass. At bottom, I think starting a war of attrition is stupid - we lose those. It should be a hearts-and-minds thing; these we sometimes win. Not often, because we turn them into wars of attrition instead. Sometimes the hearts can't be won, but I think it could have been done in Iraq. Too late - much too late - now.
Indonesian terrorists hit Bali because Australia participated in the coalition of the window-dressing. Spain got hit for the same reason. I think the terrorist cells responsible may have remained debating societies without the invasion of Iraq.
There are some strategies that seem plausible to me, but invading a country unrelated to the 9/11 attacks isn't one of them.