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.)"

Comments

Oh... one more thing...

[NeoGeo64]

The one that crashed was running Windows 98 and the one that exploded was running OS9.

Re:This is sloppy work

[WolfWithoutAClause]

*battery connectors coming off

OK, that was sloppy. Carmack isn't an electrical engineer. He's learnt the hard way that connectivity is important and unreliable.

*no protection against inductive kickback(essential around any combination of electromechanical and electronic devices)

Yup. Sloppy.

*not restricting allowable user inputs (ie joystick)

Borderline. They didn't expect the joystick to fail in that way, and it was the same joystick used on the simulation, which showed no problems.

*underrated power transistors for drive unit (this is very basic stuff)

So, they screwed that one up slightly- IRC the main problem there was a short circuit. In any case, look what happened on Rutans 100km flight- he had a thermal cut-off trigger- basically the same sort of thing. Are you saying Rutan is simply being careless too?

*finally, not setting minimum fuel level for takeoff

They loaded the vehicle up with twice the expected usage; the problem seems have been that they not only burnt more on the ground than they expected, the engine wasn't burning efficiently so they burnt more on the way up too.

Sure, with 20-20 hindsight they could have put more in and/or scrubbed the launch, but they only had the estimated burning rate to go on; and they had expected that to be a lot lower.