Slashdot Mirror
Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace Rocket Crashes and Burns
mcgrew (sm62704) writes "New Scientist is reporting that John Carmack's 'Armadillo Aerospace' has suffered a large setback in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge after one of its two main rockets crashed and burned. 'During the test, Texel lifted off and hovered without incident, then descended again and touched the ground. But it then rose again unexpectedly and began accelerating upward. "Crap, it's going to fly into the crane, I need to kill it," Carmack recalls thinking. He hit the manual shutdown switch, turning off the vehicle's engine in mid-flight. Texel was about 6 metres above the ground and fell like a stone. One of its fuel tanks broke open when it hit the ground, spewing fuel that ignited and engulfed the vehicle in flames. "It made a fireball that would make any Hollywood movie proud," Carmack says.' No one was hurt in the crash, but the vehicle was destroyed."
And to think, they want us all to ride in these things commercially....
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Where's the video?
Gravity will make you it's bitch!
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
On one hand what they were working on was completely destroyed, on the other the explosion was AWESOME!
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
...anisotropic filtering.
HA! - HA!
Kickass Cheap Web Hosting
This is a good thing. It proves (again and again) that new technology is never perfect. Just think, no computer program is ever completely bug free the first time it's compiled. The first car is never perfect... There are always bugs in any system. The point is that the safety mechanisms in the system worked well (after all, acording to the inputs of the lander, it was falling). As with any "accident", there are many failures that lead up to those incidents. That's the price of achievement. Nobody was hurt, so learn, build bigger and build better. If you learn from it, it wasn't a "mistake"...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Always ensure you have enough HP to survive the landing or an invulnerability artifact when performing a rocket jump.
Unpleasantries.
Cause then I could pursue all kinds of things I have no business pursuing.
Get back to your workstation, nerdboy, and write me up some cool games.
Lag caused it... if he waited a few milliseconds it would have 'reset' back to the ground again.
it had to have been caught on video. who's got the youtube link? or perhaps an HD torrent?
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
It was a bad weekend for Armadillo. We set out to put some flights on Texel, the backup Quad vehicle, and it didn't go so well. We have video that we will be releasing, but Matt had to leave for Germany the next day, so it won't be digitized for a week and a half.
We started out with a normal 90 second elevated / tethered hover test, but we ran into a problem with the actuator power. We initially thought it was a bad main power switch, but it turned out to be the lithium-polymer battery pack cutoff circuit incorrectly shutting down at 16 amps of load instead of 40. This was a new battery pack ( www.batteryspace.com HPL-8059156-4S-WR), and it had passed all the individual actuator checks, but when the igniter started firing with both high amp NOS solenoids, the battery shut down (went to 0.3 volts indicated) after one second and stayed there until it was physically disconnected. Russ made a fairly heroic field repair, cutting open the battery pack and wiring around the protection circuit while sitting on top of the rocket. The total time spent on this after three attempts was 90 minutes, and enough lox had boiled off that the vehicle hit lox depletion at 60 seconds of flight. We got a few good data points from this: the batteries need to be checked at full current load, with vents open we boil off about two pounds of lox a minute, and lox-depletion runs are benign, if a little flamey.
For the second flight we were going to do a ground liftoff (still tethered for runaway protection) to test the automatic ground contact engine shutoff code. We have had several reasons to want to automate this: We get a fair bit of bounce on touchdown, because the engine is essentially keeping the vehicle weightless during the terminal descent. A computer controlled shutdown would be at least a half second faster than my manual punching of the shutdown when I visually see ground contact. The quads will just safely bounce around on the ground a bit if the engine just goes to idle and doesn't shut down, but the module, with the gimbal below the CG, will try to tip itself over when a landing leg becomes a pivot point, so there is extra incentive to get it shut off fast. You can see that in our XPC '05 vehicle flight. We also need to handle the case of the vehicle landing in a situation where I can't shut the engine off promptly, either because there was a telemetry problem, or when we are doing high altitude flights, it lands out of direct sight. There is a separate shutdownTime parameter that will keep it from sitting there at idle for ten minutes, but a telemetry abort could still have it on the ground and cooking for the better part of 220 seconds. We could still shut the flight safety fuel valve, which would result in just idle level lox pouring out of the engine, but that has its own problems.
I have been very hesitant to put in ground contact shutoff code, because shutting the engine down for some incorrect reason would be catastrophic, and I would feel awful if that ever happened. We had some switch based ground contact sensors on the old VDR, but they never got tested. We have concluded that the landing jolt, as seen by the IMU accelerometers, is a good enough ground contact signal. There is always the worry that combustion instability, or a nozzle ejection event, might trigger the signal level, so there are additional guards about it only functioning when you are within three meters of the ground (we must leave some slop for uneven terrain or GPS innacuracy) and trying to descend.
We loaded up again, being very thankful that we now pack three six-packs of helium for each test trip after we were forced to cancel the second flight on a previous test session due to insufficient helium after troubleshooting a problem forced a repressurization on the first flight. Liftoff and hover was fine, and at the 45 second mark (no sense pushing it on a ground liftoff), I had it come in for a landing. It hit the ground, and I saw it bounce back up. My first thought was "That didn't seem to help at all".
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It took me a while to get the hang of rocket jumping, too. Keep at it!
The carmack FAILED!
"On one hand what they were working on was completely destroyed, on the other the explosion was AWESOME!"
Overheard during Fiesta night at Taco Bell.
So they're not there yet. Big deal. Armadillo's attitude to safety is that it's ok to risk the vehicle in testing, as long as people aren't at risk. They do a *very* fast development cycle, and they don't pretend to be able to find every problem through analysis -- which means some of them get found the hard way. That's a *good* thing for safety, not a bad thing. You *can't* find every problem through analysis, even if your budget is 5 orders of magnitude larger than Carmack's and you try.
Carmack's approach is to treat the vehicle as a developmental test platform, and that involves a certain level of risk to the vehicle and acceptance of that risk. The result, however, is that he learns things a *lot* faster than he otherwise might, and as a result the entire development program is faster and cheaper, counting the cost of the lost vehicles.
When Carmack shifts the vehicle from developmental status to operational testing status and then to operational status, I'd be happy to trust him when he says it's safe. It's unfair to criticize him for being unsafe now -- crashing the vehicle wasn't a safety risk!
When can we buy parts of the wreckage on ebay?
He should fly the rocket from a first person perspective.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Are they sure it was a Rocket?
Are they sure it wasn't Daikatana 2?
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
Ok maybe not, but it was the obvious joke (and not one that's been cracked yet).
Ahh, I'm bummed out now. I was really looking forward to seeing them at the X-Prize Cup in October. They were expected to claim the prize (for the level 1 lander challenge), as they had already completed flights matching the profile on their own, and just had to repeat it a the cup for it to be official. I don't know if they'll have enough time to rebuild the craft in time for the event.
Perhaps it would have survived had it only fell 6 feet instead of 6 meters.... Oh wait, this isn't NASA and this isn't Mars
Or, put another way... within 20 years of the Wright Brothers the airplane industry had far better safety records than the space industry does after 50 years.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
When I was a kid, I remeber the coming of the 747 (I paid attention since my father was a commercial pilot). Many ppl swore up one side and down the other, that this was a NIGHTMARE in the making. They said that they would never go because it would crash all the time killing more ppl than were in my town (small town). Their were so many cowards and small thinkers. Fortunately, Boeing pushed it, built it, and now, it is the major largest craft going.
Another group thought that we had no business going to the moon and swore that LLM would simply sink into the moon. I suspect that these same ppl believe that we never went.
Just so that you know, Carmack and his rocket are real.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I have no opinion on Carmack one way or another, but tagging this story with 'haha' and 'hesnorocketscientist' seems a tad mean.
So he's a game designer dabbling in space exploration. It's not like he ran a bicycle shop or something. Now *there's* a logical starting point for a career in aeronautics!
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
It is more for the competition. After that, you can bet that it will be changed. Though, I have to say, I have been think about the GPS units. It strikes me that if we are going to explore the moon and mars, we should be developing cheap GPS sats. to send there.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
First, Armadillo is not out of the race. Second, there are 8 other in this. One is new shepard who keeps VERY quiet. I believe that this year, there will be a winner.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why would a candidate for a mock lunar lander be designed to depend on GPS? There won't be GPS service on the moon in the foreseeable future.
Yeah, after RTFA and John's forum post, it appears that they only crashed their smaller unit and their larger craft is still fine. I also hadn't heard that they were shooting for the level 2 with pixel. That should be interesting.
I totally agree.
In fact I believe that Carmack is more qualified than most. For a start he's a maths genius, having spent his life creating the most advanced graphics engines from scratch. He's single handedly developed many of the graphics techniques that are used in virtually every game.
When someone is that smart, it's clear that if he puts his mind to it, he could easily learn the finer details about rocket science.
while Carmack was working on IDTech5!! Carmack is too valuable to the gaming industry for him to be involved in such potentially dangerous hobbies. Now that Epic is tied up with the backlash against Unreal 3 this is id's opportunity to become the engine of choice again. Put down the rockets John and go back to the keyboard where it's safe!!! On a more serious note I'm glad to hear that noone was hurt.
"That's one doomed Aerospace Rocket."
(In the words of Duke.)
John goes on about the use of GPS in the control for acceleration for a bit. Understanding that where you have no nearby reference points, such as in space, this may be a good solution. At the same time, you usually don't have anything nearby to worry about crashing into (such as the ground). Although GPS can be very accurate, it often takes more datapoints that can be obtained in a very short timeframe to get that accuracy.
I wonder if there's a reason why they aren't using some means of LASER or RADAR rangefinding when in close proximity to landing for obtaining positioning (altitude) and velocity/acceleration information. The update rate could easily be several orders of magnitude faster than GPS could ever provide...especially since you need two position reports from GPS to find velocity and three to determine acceleration.
You are absolutely spot-on.
There's an old saying for these kinds of situations when developing a kernel. It's:
Opps
Minor nitpick -- this was NOT an X-prize competition (Rutan already won X-prize last year). This was a NASA sponsored competition for design of a lander.
Texel was one of two essentially identical vehicles that Armadillo put together last year for the Lunar Lander Challenge. The other is Pixel, which is the one they actually flew last year (and that had a good shot at winning) at the LLC level 1 event. Pixel is still flightworthy. This crash of Texel doesn't take them out of the LLC race, although it will lower their chances of success; it is going to make them much more cautious about banging Pixel up ahead of the next LLC competition and therefore they'll get flight less testing in.
They're also working on a set of new vehicles they call Modules, of which I gather they have one essentially complete and five in production.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Shame, I was already to invest in his new company, dubbed the "Union Aerospace Corporation"
Off-the-shelf GPS receivers and lithium battery packs are two things that do NOT belong in a mission-critical (or even money-critical) application.
Carmack is going way too far in the direction of "Use whatever seems to have the specs we need." He seems to be forgetting that if you have 100 components that are 99% reliable, your overall system is only 36% reliable.
I don't trust lithium batteries to meet their discharge specs on my iPod much less a rocket controller.
The tagging system on Slashdot is getting really pathetic. What kind of jerkoff tags this posting "haha". You think you can do better?
I'm hesitant to criticize a group that is breaking so much new ground so quickly, but this sounds like some really amateurish mistakes when it comes to electrical engineering. Basically they added new sensors to detect when the craft impacts the ground. The computer monitoring the sensors was expecting a signal of a certain strength to indicate it had touched the ground, however the value the computer was expecting was higher than what the sensors could physically produce. So it sounds like they either engineered the electronics wrong making it impossible for the sensor to produce a meaningful response, or they misread the sensor datasheet which resulted in flawed software.
Now it's one thing to make an engineering mistake, but it couldn't have taken them an hour to rig up a simple test rig they that they could drop onto the ground, or tap with a mallet, or something similarly simple, to see if the computer could register a landing.
I just can't imagine strapping something new onto an entire rocket assembly, going to all the risk and expense to actually launch the thing and fly it around, hoping that all the new circuitry and software will work perfectly the first time.
It makes me wonder about the whole process NASA has in place with these contests. Even if a craft can meet various flight goals, does it result in anything of worth to NASA? For example, take a piece of software. Say there is this program that really does something impressive (game engines come to mind). So you take a look at the source, and find it is a total and complete mess. Maybe it is full of memory leaks and other bugs, so it just can perform a specific task right, but given other scenarios it crashes. Maybe the code is insecure, or is not scalable, or cannot be extended, or is not maintainable, or is not portable to other platforms. Any of those things could practically render the sources useless. But yet the program does a specific task and does it really well. For some reason I feel that NASA is going to end up with crafts with similar engineering caveats.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
"doesn't anyone remember the recent explosion at Mojave that claimed 3 lives"
It was not a blow up rocket fuel type of explosion, it was a ruptured presure vessel not even part of the rocket, escaping gas caused a preasure wave that did the damage. Nothing spectacular, it happens from time to time in industrial settings where high pressure are used.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Hey Carmack. You should try using water as fuel, and split it into HH and O gas. For more info, watch http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-333399219 4168790800
Btw, one of his patent expired a few months ago
Anyway, good luck with your next rocket launch.
This evolutionary path is yet to be walked down.
You know what, this is one area where I prefer intelligent design!
(I know, I know, I have sacrificed my principles for a cheap joke..)
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill
It seems good to hear real time responces rather than the dry "Huston we have a problem", or "There seems to be major malfunction some where". "Crap, (HOLY SHIT) it's going to fly into the crane, I need to kill it," Carmack recalls thinking.
While in many cases you probably aren't going to see real-life physics in a game, I'd imagine that one could apply some knowledge of real-life physics+math to games, and vise-versa. Being able to calculate complicated vectors, as well as environmental physics, would be a boon both for gaming and rocketry. Who knows, perhaps the "advanced physics" engine used by rocketeers today might be commonplace in the games of the next decade, or a little bit of vector-math used in a game might come in quite handy at calculating rocket angles/etc.
They started out early, but almost everyone has passed them by at this point.
Are they still going with the intentionally crashable nose cone? That inspires me.
I`m sure he has someone with that degree in his team.
Besides, it`s not like you can`t be successful unless you have a degree. This reminds me of a speech that Steve Jobs gave at a graduation in Stanford. He started with "I never finished college...".
Now if you guys want to see some serious space programm, watch Top Gear's take on building a space shuttle :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckyXtEd0PV0 (Part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk5M6J2zMWQ (Part 2)
You're pathetic.
The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtis, Robert Goddard.......all pioneers. Go watch some video of the early days of NASA. Some of the rockets blew up on the pad, or exploded when they hit max Q. It happens, and will happen some more before they work the kinks out. Hell, look how long the shuttle has been around! And it STILL has problems.
It was bound to happen if you've ever seen how ramshackle and unflightworthy their electronics are.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
What in the world are they doing putting GPS on a mock-lunar lander?
s h-destroys-rocket-ahead-of-x-prize-contest.html
"But the touchdown did have a big enough effect to jostle the onboard GPS unit that Texel relied on to track its motion. The disturbance caused faulty readings from the unit, confusing the vehicle."
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12522-cra
Yet, with all that expertise available for free, they still decided on rotating propellers for propulsion...
The true reason why space flight is so much harder than flying in the atmosphere is air, the "atmos" in the atmosphere. It takes much less power and energy to use an airfoil than any other mechanism capable of flying in a vacuum.
And that's also why people are considering other exotic stuff like space elevators, lifting something in a vacuum where there's nothing to grab to, not even air, isn't easy at all.
Next they will have a large dark-red fireball, then a medium-to-small infrared fireball, and so on, until they get a minuscule low-frequency fireball.
d00d, u fragged ur 0wn r0cket, PWNED!!!
Ok, sorry about that, but it had to be said.
Where is the freaking youtube video? I know they filmed it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It might be Quaked instead, or Wolfensteined. These days, there's a whole range of possible catastrophes - no need to limit yourself to one.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I guess it also partially depends on which signals you're using. The P-code (military only) is still a better positioning reference over the S-code (civilian use), even with the selective availability turned off (which it has been for about ten years). That's why you have corrections transmitted to augment the GPS satellites (differential GPS transmitters, WAAS, etc.). Yet, even P-code users sometimes use corrections as well.
GPS signals are useable out in space, provided that you have a receiver that will recognize that it's not on Earth (a three point GPS fix generates two possible locations, one on/near the surface of the earth and one 24,000 miles in space, four or more fixes would solve this to some extent). While you can get a fix in space, the quality of that fix will continually degrade the further you get outside the orbits of the satellites. First of all, the satellite geometry starts to become poorer because all the satellites are generally concentrated in one direction, rather than spread out over the "sky". When triangulating with acute angles, the fix tends to be poorer. Compound this with the fact that the GPS satellite antennas are aimed at the Earth's surface. So, satellites that, from the perspective of a spacecraft, that are in front of the Earth will likely have their antennas turned away from the spacecraft. This means that there will be weak or an unusable signal level from them. Satellites that would have their antennas aimed at the spacecraft will be, for the most part, behind Earth, so their signals will be blocked by Earth. Needless to say, GPS would as you alluded to, become pretty useless away from Earth, or at least once you crossed outside of the orbits of the satellites.
Maybe someone should remind him that GPS stands for Global Positioning system, not Galactic Positioning System. <grin>
This is not the exact battery in question, but this is not the first time some voltage cut off problems have been observed with those batteryspace.com packs. You'll find a very detailed posting about the 37V/8AH Lipoly here: http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5 05
This was back in March, so the problem existed in earlier batteries as well. As a NiMH battery owner from batteryspace.com I've been a happy customer, but I can't speak for the Lipoly batteries as I have not tried them myself.
[...]Armadillo was testing an automatic system to shut down its engines. The system was designed to reduce bouncing when the vehicle lands[...]
e ring)
[...]lifted off and hovered without incident, then descended again and touched the ground. But it then rose again unexpectedly and began accelerating upward.[...]
Might need to work on the de-bouncing algorithm a bit more...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensation_(engine
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
From TFA - "He notes that the front-runner for the first non-stop transatlantic flight of an aircraft in 1927 was not Charles Lindbergh but Richard Byrd..."
Of course, the first non-stop transatlantic flight was not Lindbergh, but Alcock and Brown. They don't count, of course, because they're British.
If that's the level of his aerospace history knowledge, he probably pays the same amount of attention to his mechanical design. I'm not surprised his rocket crashed!
So Armadillo is nowhere as succesful as von Braun was in the 1940s. Let's here it for commercial space exploration.
Lesson learned... don't use barrels to build your ship. Barrels always explode.
-Z
"Crap, it's going to fly into the crane, I need to kill it," Carmack recalls thinking. He fired his railgun into the vehicle several times before grabbing a nearby quad damage and finishing it off with a rocket. "It made a fireball that would make any Hollywood movie proud," Carmack says.
YES!
This is remarkable because this is only the second craft I know of that Armadillo has lost. They've blown gaskets, blown many engines, done hundreds of engine fire tests, but only lost two craft. The built two of this type of craft just in case they lost one. How many craft are lost normally? These guys are doing great and I'm looking forward to watching a launch some day. Also significant because nobody died. This is a learning experience. There's an old hardware saying, the amount of knowledge gained is directly proportional to the amount of equipment destroyed. If you haven't been out to their website, http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/, it's great. Lots of videos and pictures and descriptions.
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
He's very good at making rocket engines, it's just that players tend to enjoy the results of physics bugs whereas the laws of the universe tend to explode them.
You might need to learn how to read.
/. endorses private rocket launches costing millions of dollars instead of the same money being spent to produce a privately made ultra efficient hybrid automobile. /. priorities are wrong here.
The way that they are developing rockets is the direct antithesis of the way that NASA does it and unlike NASA they get things done. Remember the X-33 Project? NASA spent $912 million dollars and never did a single flight test. It was basically nothing more than a jobs program for NASA bureaucrats and Lockheed-Martin. For that price they could have built 14 test replacements for the DC-X that they crashed. Of course that wouldn't have employed as many bureaucrats, so it couldn't be done. Jerry Pournelle has a great article on how to get back into space and one of the things he talks about is X projects, projects that are designed to test a specific technology, with limited goals, in a short time frame. Of course programs like this don't make Lockheed or Boeing or General Dynamics lots of money and they don't employ lots of NASA bureaucrats, so they really aren't that popular. Pournelle's article can be read here.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.