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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.)"
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
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
Sounds like a lot of stupidity and/or hype.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Did anybody else look at that video and immediately remember the montage sequence from The Right Stuff with archival footage of NASA's rockets blowing up?
Wow... am I with you on this one. Remember people... these are ENGINEERS. They are developing something new...
Compare this engineering to software engineering.
1) A software engineer comes up with an idea.
2) A programmer writes a test case of the idea. Often, the programmer is the engineer in step 1.
3) Software is run. Program crashes, bombs, but does something resembling the goals in step 1.
4) Bugs are found, worked out, kinked, etc.
Repeat steps 3 and 4 until the program works as it should....
The ONLY difference between this and aeronautics is that when it crashes, you have to rebuild the rocket. (You have to rebuild the software, too, but that's assumed, automatic and usually done in 10 seconds)
So, I really don't get why the disconnect. It's engineering! Products are seldom viable in the first design attempt, but a basically workable design is tweaked until it's ready.
No different here.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I'm concerned about Brian Feeney and his da Vinci Project. Apparently they may be planning to launch with no test flights in order to hit the deadline for the X Prize.
This is extremely risky, and perhaps suicidal. Rockets do, as we've seen, notoriously tend to blow up and otherwise malfunction in their initial testing.
NASA got it right because they tested over and over again and had a big budget to do so.
With the deadline fast approaching, it seems that some teams, like Feeney's, will be tempted to cut corners in order to have a chance of winning the X Prize.
Cutting corners and sticking to a timetable is what caused the Challenger disaster. I hope we don't see other lives lost as a result of this X Prize deadline.
ding-ding-ding we have a winner!
By the time a satellite *needs* to be pulled out of orbit to be refueled/repaired, it is generally old technology worth less than the launch cost for a retrieval mission. This is why the shuttle's satellite repair function was basically unused, and why no one has bothered to even think of doing something like this.
There are rare exceptions, but not enough of them to justify designing something to do it.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
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.
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.
You're right, but you shouldn't be. What business of the public is it if a fellow blows himself up in his rocketship? So long as he doesn't damage anything in the process, of course.
But you're completely correct: an accident and suddenly folks will demand regulation 'for the good of the pilots.' And another industry will be set back another half-century.
So, they screwed that one up slightly- IRC the main problem there was a short circuit.
I was referring to another incident, although I should have pointed out that this didn't fail during flight. If I remember correctly, the output driving an optoisolator unit was sourcing way more current than it was rated for. Carmack was quite flippant about it afterwards, and it didn't seem to occur to him that even a cursory check would have uncovered that problem ahead of time.
What really got me was that they even didn't have a way to measure how much fuel was left and now they are looking for a good sensor to do so. Since they chose to do powered landing, fuel is essential to the survival of this craft and the passengers, and it seems like a reasonable precaution to keep track of how much of that is left.
It didn't bother me if it was in the plan for the future rev of the craft and the unfortunate sequence of event exposed the problem earlier than they hoped for but it seems that they didn't think of the issue before this crash.
As a programmer^W software engineer myself, I have to say that this design methodology looks verrrry familiar.
* Write code.
* Compile.
* Fix syntax errors.
* Compile.
* Declare variables.
* Compile.
* Celebrate successful compile!
* Run.
* Change variable declarations to prevent runtime overflow error.
* Compile.
* Fix typo in * Compile.
* Run.
* Celebrate run to completion!
* Check results. Database is now empty.
* Panic.
* Call DBA to request database restore.
* Find comment: * Purchase another case of Jolt.
If I didn't know better, I'd think Carmack had a software design background...
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.