20,000 Show up for X-Prize Expo

Zacharski writes to tell us that the X-Prize Cup Expo was held Sunday in Las Cruces New Mexico in front of about 20,000 people. John Carmack was there with his team from Armadillo Aerospace. From the article: "Armadillo Aerospace got their rocket-powered, vertical takeoff, vertical landing vehicle off the ground. Blasting off into the sky then hovering for a few seconds, the craft began lowering itself to the ground - but tipped over on touchdown. The wet ground due to overnight rain was the cause, although the craft appeared undamaged in the fall. An internal hose was punctured, however, causing subsequent flights to be scrubbed." The expo also ended with quite a bang when Starchaser's Churchill Mk2 rocket engine blew up.

Comments

$20 million will do that

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a single X-Prize team (save Scaled Composites of course) have come even remotely close to getting a ship into the air.

Carmack referred to rocketry as plumbing but with the volume turned up. Guess it's not quite that easy.

Re:$20 million will do that

[sjasja]

> This is the kind of stuff that would take NASA 20 years to do

What, get a rocket to blow up? And another to lift off a few feet and then tip over? NASA can do that too.

> Shit, we can't even go to the moon if we wanted to.

Sure you can. It's a question of money. A lot of people would like to pay less taxes rathern than more. It's a question of priorities. Talk to your congressman about that.

> All the tooling for the saturn rockets was DESTROYED.

An urban legend that just won't die. Some facilities were converted for new uses (e.g. STS). No, NASA engineers do not randomly go whacking equipment with axes. Some equipment can rust if there is no program (= money) to store it properly. Some equipment just gets old and no longer relevant (room-size computers with less computing power than your cell phone, electronic equipment for which nobody manufactures the required vacuum tubes, etc.)

A rednecky "the government is big and bad and can never do anything right" paranoia game is a fun game to play. Lets you work up to a nice adrenaline rush. Feel like a big man when you get to look down your nose at others. But don't actually believe it when it matters.

Re:$20 million will do that

[WindBourne]

It shows the absolutely amazing things people can do with the interest and incentive. This is the kind of stuff that would take NASA 20 years to do,but they are well on their way in 5.

I wish ppl would get past this crap.

So NASA could not do it in 20 years, eh? In under a decade, NASA got man onto the moon. And that was 40 years ago. Now, ask how many of these companies today could do that? Even today, few. And 40 years ago? Absolutely none. In fact, ask any of these companies to put 50 tonnes into space in under 5 years. How many? none. They are going through the exact work that NASA (and their quasi private contractors) did back in the 60's. That is they are putting together Engineering teams with some small RD teams. NASA has always done large amounts of R&D on the cutting edge. How many of the current x-prize teams are doing any? Absolutely none. They are all doing engineering (big difference).

BTW, Just as the current group of X-prizes stand on NASA's broad shoulders, NASA also stands on other giants shoulders. In particular, Russia, WWII germanany, and even the Chinese did HUGE amounts of research, that NASA used. Even getting into space was more cooperative than not; Canada, Original Europe (England, France, etc), and Japan have contributed directly and indirectly to NASA's effort.

Shit, we can't even go to the moon if we wanted to.All the tooling for the saturn rockets was DESTROYED. What a fucking great idea, eh? I don't say this much, but hooray for the private sector.

Blame NASA for that?? Not even close. This is the fault of politicians. Nixon started us down the shuttle path. Interestingly, NASA wanted to build a craft along the lines of Rutans approach, but Nixons ppl killed it. They did not like the up front price. Once the shuttle was flying, Reagan had the saturn line killed. When funding was sought to preserve the info, they felt that it was not needed. We have learned the hard way that that kind of info is difficult to get back. BTW. if you think that Private enterprise does a better job on that, well then ask Boeing. Boeing would love to extend the 747 and make some major changes. But they can not. Why? because they do not have many of their core blue prints. The 747 was designed on paper in the 70s. And yet, they do not have the info either. Right now, the vast majority of the 747 depends on skilled craftsman, just as the Saturn did.

BTW, if you think that I say the above because I am opposed to the X-prize or something like that,

1. I am decade long registered libertarian (and vote that way).
2. I have worked for 3 major Private Enterprise R&D labs; Bell Labs, IBM watson, and USWest AT.
3. And along the line of an x-prize

Oh Yeah, I am a fan of x-prize, but I also value NASA for what it normally does. Sadly, it has died over the last 5-6 years. I am hopeful that griffin can bring it back to what it should be; a front-edge R&D team that pushes the envelope that private enterprise can not and will not do. O'Keefe was an absolute disaster. Goldin was not bad, but allowed politics to take hold. In addition, he should have pushed outwards more than he did, esp. towards the end.

Re:$20 million will do that

[Rei]

scalable

It's barely scalable to X-prize-req's. It's not really scalable beyond that. His ISP is too low and mass is too high. Plus, his design methodology has produced one disaster after another.

Don't get me wrong - I've always been a huge Carmack fan, and was in awe of his programming skill in my childhood. But following the diaries on Armadillo Aerospace, they keep repeating one widely known rocketry problem after another, and taking every dead end in the book. They can't even decide on what propellant to use - I mean, for YHVH's sake, they're this far into development, and they're not even set on a single propellant?

From H2O2 monoprops to vaned thrust deflection on a rocket instead of gimballing, the project seems one big attempt to tackle every no-no in the book. While I don't give Rutan the sort of idolization that many around here do, I have to say this for him: He built his craft to the task at hand. He took the minimum required work for the low delta-V task at hand, but didn't take any of the "known dead-end" routes. He was also smart to buy his engine from elsewhere and focus on his craft. How many here, when you write a program, start with writing the operating system, then all of the drivers, then the compiler, and then your program? Not many, I'd imagine :) Anybody here build motorcycles or other vehicles - do you start by maching your own cylinders for the engine? Etc. Just because poor-performing rocket engines may have few/no moving parts doesn't make them simple devices to build - especially if you insist on ressurrecting dead horses. The devil is in the details.

Gerald Bull's Super Gun

[Pedrito]

I'm surprised nobody has tried to follow up on Gerald Bull's idea of a Super Gun to launch things into orbit.

It would be relatively cheap and I have to think it's going to be a bit simpler than building a rocket.

You do run into the problem of being limited on what you can launch. Not only is size limited, but whatever you're firing into orbit is going to have to deal with some pretty serious acceleration issues.

Still, it would be cool to see someone follow up on his work to see if it's doable.

Re:Where's Boeing?

[Overzeetop]

That's easy:

NASA spends Billions and Billions of dollars to get something into the air. The contractors stand in line a capitol hill, sign a paper and provide wire information for their bank accounts. For every $100 of NASAs budget they spend, they receive $10 which they may keep as profit.

Why in the world would someone with this kind of deal throw millions of dollars into a project which may or may not end up to be commercially viable? It doesn't make financial sense.

Heat shielding

[terrymr]

There's also the heat issue ... the reason things re-entering the atmosphere get hot is because orbital velocities and atmopspheric friction don't go well together.

Re:Where's Boeing?

[JohnsonWax]

While I agree with your point, don't overlook that Scaled had $2B in today's dollars of NASA funded research to work off of. Retracing the steps of others should always be cheaper and faster because you know what path to follow. But the modern, politicized, cost-plus NASA approach to solving problems pretty much guarantees that any real progress will be exceptionally expensive and largely accidental thanks only to the competencies of the engineers to overcome the f'd up environment in which they are placed.

Re:Well,

[Dmala]

I absolutely agree. Risk of any kind is totally unacceptable. Any endeavour where there's even a chance of someone getting a paper cut should be encumbered by layers and layers of conflicting regulations or outlawed entirely.

Re:Where's Boeing?

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Alan Shephard's sub-orbital hop, which is what SpaceShipOne managed to replicate, was over 40 years ago.

The rocket contractors aren't in "this game" because it's a game. They have their gravy train, and they send payloads into space with some frequency, so they understand how hard it is to do. They're not interested in playing games.