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

poor dummies

[metalac]

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.

Re:poor dummies

[Anoraknid the Sartor]

Don't worry, there will still be enough around for you all to vote for come November....

Re:poor dummies

[Aadomm]

Oh come on, people all over the world endanger themselves in ridiculous undertakings all the time even without financial incentive. There is the annual 'running down a hill chasing a rolling cheese' race in England just for starters. At least the X prize has the advantages of both producing some interesting and potentially useful new technology and providing a fantastic spectacle for the rest of us. I am sure the pilots are all fully aware of the risks and would still tell you they are having the times of their lives.

Re:poor dummies

[AKAImBatman]

These people can't fly their ships without proper FAA (or local equivalent) approval. If the FAA doesn't think it's safe, it doesn't fly. That's why Armadillo is so far behind. The FAA wasn't pleased with their "crush-cone" design, forcing them to reengineer for a powered landing.

doom3

[Wakkow]

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..."

Re:doom3

[ron_ivi]

Amusing how the little puffs of steam coming off the ship on the video look like video-game-explosion-effects too, and not what Hollywood would show for a crashing rocket.

Re:doom3

[John Carmack]

I said the same thing -- the puffs from the flying tank look just like a bad particle system that dropped points far too sparsely. Strange.

John Carmack

Eventually they'll change their name...

[omegacentrix]

to the Union Aerospace Corporation...

"The Right Stuff", part 2?

[oostevo]

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?

That didn't set them back, and somehow I don't think this will set back these private experimenters either.

Re:"The Right Stuff", part 2?

[mcrbids]

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.

Re:"The Right Stuff", part 2?

[Syre]

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.

Re:"The Right Stuff", part 2?

[feargal]

To be exact, they haven't done any test flights yet. They haven't revealed when they will do them, but have stated that they do have a number of drop tests scheduled.

I do share your fear though, in Wild Fire's case the project leader, Brian Feeney, will be the pilot so I remain optimistic that adequate testing will be done. If not, at least he's not playing with other people's lives.

Re:"The Right Stuff", part 2?

[Branc0]

This is private space flight... what is this public you are talking about?

Re:"The Right Stuff", part 2?

[Bob Uhl]

Hopefully that will never happen, but should the worst occur, we may find that the public is much less accepting of this endeavour than before.

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.

Armadillo Aerospace down for the count?

[wviperw]

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.

Re:Armadillo Aerospace down for the count?

[ErikTheRed]

So they'll be spending $35,000 for a new rocket, and $35,000 for the bandwidth charges incurred by the slashdot linkage...

It's a pity that there aren't second and third

[multiplexo]

place categories in the Ansari X-Prize, say a second place that would win 5 million dollars and a third place that would win two. It seems as if there's a lot of cool stuff being developed by the impetus of the prize. I'd hate to see that stop when the prize is awarded.

FORTUNATELY FOR US...

[ferrellcat]

Fortunately for us, the three dummies were Bush, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft.

Quote from the log: "Good thing Doom 3 is selling"

[TigerNut]

The setback isn't too serious in terms of money, but you can't easily recover the five weeks required to replace the long-lead items. But, as already surmised, the experience of building the first 48" vehicle will have been invaluable and I'm sure they'll find (or commit to) a bunch of items to make improvements. One thing they already did better compared to earlier vehicles: Mass (or lack of it). The 48" vehicle was apparently slightly under the design weight, at 1000 pounds.

Good luck to John and the rest of the crew at Armadillo.

Wait a second...

[mrchaotica]

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!

Re:Wait a second...

[Mia'cova]

There is a miniature and a full-size. They perhaps don't plan on flying into space inside the miniature.

I'm having a strange flashback to Zoolander right now...

You'd Think...

[the pickle]

...that the guys at Armadillo would be used to the /. traffic by now, having been on here so many times before.

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.

Armadillo Aerospace News Archive

Good tests, Complete loss of vehicle

August 8, 2004 notes

Good Tests

On Tuesday we did a very successful set of hover tests with the big vehicle. I had two changes that I wanted to test: an optional PWM of the throttle movement to make it change position slower when it was in hunt-for-an-acceleration mode, and testing a 50% gain increase which I might enable during high speed flights if it looks like it is having a hard time controlling the attitude. I had these set up momentary overrides on the joystick, so I could lift the vehicle up, engage the change, let go real fast if it isn't working, then try the other one, all on a single propellant load.

When we tipped the vehicle up, several catalyst rings fell out of the engine nozzle. We looked up the engine with a boroscope and found that the screen at the bottom had pulled past one section of the support plate, allowing some rings to escape. 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.

Because this was set up to be a 25 second hover (tethered), which would be our longest hover test, we decided to make this a no-direct-view test, with my flying it from behind a concrete wall looking at a monitor instead of directly viewing it. The engine warmed up fine and lifted off and hovered fine. I was about to engage the first test when the vehicle just set itself back down on the ground. It took me a few moments to figure out what happened - I had moved the computer and wireless antenna behind the wall with me, so the telemetry link was very ratty, dropping quite a few packets. Eventually it dropped enough in a row to hit the internal limit and triggered a loss-of-telemetry abort, which is an auto land. Perfect!

I moved the antenna back in view of the vehicle, and we completed both of the control system tests without incident. We used our new propellant disposal burner to catalyze the remaining propellant, which worked pretty well. The foam coming out was probably still 10% peroxide or so, but a little water was fine for washing it away. We might consider adding a spark ignition system to it so it would completely burn everything away, but that would be a more complex system, and would leave us with a red hot propellant burner.

When we set the vehicle back down on the cradle, a few more catalyst rings came out, but the engine still seemed to be working perfectly.

Based on these results, I changed the flight control code to use the PWM valve movement when it is hunting back and forth past a desired acceleration. If it hasn't crossed it in 500 msec, or the desired valve position is fully open or closed, it goes back to full speed.

We also weighed the vehicle, and surprisingly found it lighter than we had estimated, right at 1000 pounds.

Complete Loss of Vehicle

Saturday was a perfect day for flying, so we went out to the 100 acres for a boosted hop. We had high expectations for success, since the vehicle had been operating perfectly on all tests so far.

After we loaded up the propellant and pressurized the vehicle, we ran into a problem. When I opened it up to 20% throttle for the warmup it looked like it cleared up fine, but the telemetry was only reading 100C, as if the hot pack hadn't started heating. We were a long way from the vehicle, so we couldn't really tell what was going on. I gave it a bu

Re:You'd Think...

[ErikTheRed]

sigh*...looks like Scaled Composites is still that much further along than anyone else. Honestly, does anyone think any of the other teams have a chance of beating them?

Not any more... I stole their sparkplug wires... They'll spend weeks trying to figure it out!

Looks like more than their rocket crashed

[falcon5768]

course nothing can escape the dreaded slashdotting... its like the evil bunnies with fangs ^^.

And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

da Vinci is going to fly without real testing of their vehicle.

Sounds like a lot of stupidity and/or hype.

Armadillo aren't stopping...

[Goonie]

Carmack commented on this on the Armadillo blog a month ago; his opinion is that only Rutan's team are close, given that they are very close to success he's not going to try a Hail Mary attempt, and nobody else is close as far as he can tell (and recent events would tend to underline this view). Furthermore, he and the rest of the Armadillo team intend to continue their rocketry work anyway.

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.

Re:Armadillo aren't stopping...

[Kris_J]

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.

I'd like to see a prize for a vehicle that can snatch a dead satellite from orbit and bring it safely back to earth for less than the value of the satellite.

Re:Armadillo aren't stopping...

[Kris_J]

I don't believe the proportion of costs of launch vs development are clear cut enough to justify the "Uh" at the beginning of your post. While I don't have figures at hand, launch prices appear to be in the order of US$80m-US$100m. I'm sure it costs a lot more than that to develop and build most satellites. This article suggests value in some sort of satellite support system, though it's discussing pushing satellites into higher orbits or repairing/refueling them in space, rather than returning them to Earth.

Re:Armadillo aren't stopping...

[Kiryat Malachi]

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.

Crash and learn

[Viadd]

Everything else operated perfectly, so we still feel good about the general configuration

"Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"

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.

Re:October Sky

[fejikso]

October sky is a very inspiring movie. I also recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it, especially if they have any interest in science.

It may not have the best script, acting, etc. but it's very enjoyable.

Consolation

[Tablizer]

Well, if they fail the X-prize in a live run, there's always the Darwin Awards. Either way, you get an award :-)

slashdot fails journalism 101 again

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's their own fault.

[0x0d0a]

They should have read Rocketry for Dummies.

Torrent of the video

[madumas]

Here is a torrent for the 4MB video. I'll keep it up for 24-48 hours.

48InchCrash.mpg.torrent

Please seed.

mirror of video

[reezle]

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.)

Or perhaps

[Chuck Chunder]

That the guys at Armadillo would be used to the /. traffic by now, having been on here so many times before.

Sadly, it seems they have yet to learn from history. Or, perhaps, their bandwidth costs are being spent on new rocket parts.

Perhaps they simply realise that their website disappearing for a short while every now and then doesn't really matter in any significant way.

You can get your own genuine space rocket debris!

[johnnliu]

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Ho me/Paraphernalia

Check the bottom for Armadillo Droppings.

Captain's announcement:

[Alsee]

48-inch vehicle

This is your captain speaking, please remain remain in a seated position.

-

Make Improvements...

[waynemcdougall]

...she's breaking up! She's breaking up!....<crash>

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...

...stronger...

...higher...

For the $10 million dollar X-Prize

Sweet justice..

[Anonymous Coward]

Carmack, that's what you get for flying the rocket in complete darkness, without a helmet-mounted flashlight!

Other Contestants

[appleLaserWriter]

Will North Korea be allowed to enter?

Prizes can also lead to shoddy engineering

[Morgaine]

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.

decapitated dummy pic

[FleaPlus]

Check out the pic of the dummy head detached from its body from this article.

Poor, poor dummy.

Re:decapitated dummy pic

[Anonymous Coward]

Shortly afterward the dummies announced they are pulling all their troops out of Iraq.

This is sloppy work

[Ge10]

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.

Re:This is sloppy work

[Ge10]

It doesn't take a rocket scientist, it just takes someone with a moderate understanding of fundamental electronic principles. John Carmack is no dunce, but like other programmers seems to place a far stronger emphasis on practical implementation rather than theory. This is a great approach for software design, but not when you're dealing with components which will progressively weaken then fail.

Re:This is sloppy work

[Ge10]

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.

Re:This is sloppy work

[Hiroto. S]

*finally, not setting minimum fuel level for takeoff

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.

Re:This is sloppy work

[RobertB-DC]

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.

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

Dim lIdx As Lnog

* Compile.
* Run.
* Celebrate run to completion!

* Check results. Database is now empty.
* Panic.
* Call DBA to request database restore.
* Find comment:

TODO: Add where clause before executing Delete

* Purchase another case of Jolt.

If I didn't know better, I'd think Carmack had a software design background... :)

Bah! Amateurs!

[JohnPM]

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?... :]

Re:Bah! Amateurs!

[Entrope]

The dictionary can explain perfectly well. Doing it professionally means it is your profession, your bread and butter. Burt Rutan's crew seems to qualify as professionals, although their investors expect to lose money on the X-Prize pursuit. An amateur is someone who does it for fun or as a hobby. Armadillo Aerospace may (or may not) be as expert as the professionals, but they are an amateur operation because they pay the bills with other pursuits.

Re:Bah! Amateurs!

[Mongo222]

Actually what Armadillo is doing is far more complicated than the design that scaled composites is using.

SC is taking thoroughly engineered airplane concepts and strapping a rocket engine to it. They have no autonomous vehicle control system, a pilot is the control. It's all down to aerodynamics and piloting, concepts that are very well understood at this point in their development.. Their engine was designed by an outside firm to their specs and paid well for it.

Armadillo has come up with a new engine chemistry and by engineering and trial and error to the point where they now have a engine that can run with a single propellant, that is easily obtained and cheap. They can use a single pressure vessel to hold the propellant, and with their current engine design is hypergolic (self igniting). They have also successfully designed a built a computer system capable of vertical take off and landing and all the balancing and control issues implied with it. Both of these are infant technologies and Carmack and crew should be congratulated on developing a lot of new technologies and pioneering new ground. The only thing that even comes close to complexity of the control system they have is the now mothballed Delta Clipper launch system.

While I fully support Burt Rutan and the Scaled Composites effort, and expertise in implementation of their chosen design, I have to give Props to Carmack and crew for doing more new engineering and pioneering. What they are doing really is cutting edge work.

free dummies

[acomj]

I hoped someone tried to catch them..

Because, hey... free dummies.

AH the power of the deep thought

I think

[Zebra_X]

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.

Re:I think

[shayera]

well, depending on your definition of existance, I call your attention towards the glorious Saturn rockets, especialy Saturn V
No Saturns went boom, and for those saying "what about them astronauts what got themselves fried", well however tragic it was, it's not really the rockets fault, that the capsule atop a nonfueled rocket decides to burn itself out.

I'm sure that if one takes a lot of time to search archives, there are other rocket types that have experienced no booms, but admittedly it seems to be quite rare.

Re:I think

[CrimsonAvenger]

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.

This doesn't concern me a bit. Everyone has the right to go out with a bang (literally, in this case) if they wish.

I am, however, concerned about the possibility that they take a non-consenting soul with them - crashing on someone's house would be a bad thing (for the owners of the house - the guy in the rocket knew what he was risking when he pushed the big red button).

Re:I think

[CrimsonAvenger]

Why should the Foundation provide technical assistance? It's not really their business to "help people reach the goal".

It's not like the fundamental concepts are top secret or anything. Hell, the patents on most of it have expired. It shouldn't be all that hard for a halfway competent engineer to get something working, given enough coin to make a reasonable effort (I'd have guessed 50M before SS1 flew. Now I'd have to put the floor down around the 20M SS1 actually cost).

Big problem with the Foundation providing technical assistance is that it would actually defeat the idea of the Foundation - to encourage people to come up with as many new ideas as possible. You won't get lots of new ideas when everyone calls the same person for sanity checking ideas.

SpaceShipOne Flights scheduled for 9/29 and 10/13

[John Sokol]

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.

You dirt bag!

[MouseR]

First Armadillo crashes a test vehicle, and THEN you link a video off their site directly on /., ultimately crashing their server.

You sick 'dillo.