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

[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.

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.

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

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: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...

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.)

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?

decapitated dummy pic

[FleaPlus]

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

Poor, poor dummy.

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.