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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.)"
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!
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?)
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.
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 should have read Rocketry for Dummies.
May we never see th
Here is a torrent for the 4MB video. I'll keep it up for 24-48 hours.
48InchCrash.mpg.torrent
Please seed.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"