Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.)
Will North Korea be allowed to enter?
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.
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