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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."
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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
And to think, they want us all to ride in these things commercially....
Actually, this is exactly why John and company will be successful. The biggest problem with modern aerospace is "paralysis by analysis". They're so afraid of crashing anything that they have to produce (sometimes literally) millions of pages of documentation before they actually put something into the air.
Armadillo learns by *doing*, not just by creating paper studies. When they're ready to put humans in space, you can bet that their ships will have had hundreds of test flights.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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!
Had Carmack's rocket killed someone (or many people), he would would have been stopped by "paralysis by lawsuit-ysis". Ignoring the huge dangers of rocketry by cutting corners during design may be cheaper in the short run, but as soon as real human lives are lost because of it, you can bet your ass they are going to have to spend more time and money testing their designs "on paper".
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.
Had Carmack's rocket killed someone (or many people), he would would have been stopped by "paralysis by lawsuit-ysis". Ignoring the huge dangers of rocketry by cutting corners during design may be cheaper in the short run, but as soon as real human lives are lost because of it, you can bet your ass they are going to have to spend more time and money testing their designs "on paper".
The point isn't "cutting corners", the point is learning by testing and learning with actual hardware, rather than testing with paper. No one was in any danger at any point during this test. You would have a point if you could claim they were cutting corners in *safety culture*, but they're not. They're not strapping people into test vehicles. There is no human risk here at all.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The Wright Brothers also had lots of things to pull from that already flew. Birds, insects, etc. Hell, even those seeds that fall like little helicopter blades have natural wing shaped leaves to help them slow down/disperse away from the tree from which they could have gotten data.
There aren't any naturally occurring animals or phenomena from which to figure out space travel/launch/re-rentry. I'm not saying the safety record is stellar (yukyuk), but getting off the ground is a little less complex than getting off the planet (and back).
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."
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.
Right, the difference is, aircraft followed the natural evolutionary approach to safe and economical transportation.
Space launchers have never done that. They have always tried to leapfrog to a "complete solution". Most of the launchers active today have their heritage in ICBMs. Apollo program got started by replacing the warheads with men in tin can. Thats not how you build a reliable and safe transportation device.
Or take shuttle. It was designed on paper, and the very first hardware iteration was declared operational configuration. Thats just nuts. You try to take and build worlds first ever reusable space transport, and you try to do it in one hardware iteration ? Try more like something between ten and hundred to get it right.
The trouble is, space industry has always been run by governments across the globe, due to certain historical circumstances. It never undertook the normal evolution of hardware and technologies that has happened with other, commercial transportation markets.
And thats exactly what Armadillo and their kin are trying to do now. Build stuff from the ground up, fly a bit, crash a few times, build it better and so on. Enter the competitive pressure of marketplace, and you will get the right incentives to build affordable, safe and reliable space transportation.
We dont know what these will turn out to be, whether its VTOL rockets like Armadillo and Masten are building, or XCOR HTOL approach, or something else entirely. This evolutionary path is yet to be walked down.
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Modding this as flamebait was really unfair, whoever did that. It's actually a pretty good short summary of all of the problems that led up to the crash. I read some of them and wondered how they could have ever made those mistakes (like not drop-testing the ground shutoff code, something that would be very cheap and easy to do and give much greater confidence in that critical part of the system), but I am going to have to assume that there is much more to the development and testing of these things than is obvious from Carmack's posting. There are probably a million variables to consider and it's probably not possible to do everything that would have seemed obvious after the fact.
But anyway, the post is not flamebait in any way shape or form. Someone with mod points, please correct this.
There were many attempts at manned flight before the Wright Brothers. The first Hot air Balloon was invented in 1709. The first successful manned flight was in 1783. The first steam powered air ship was flown in 1852. The wright brothers didn't fly until 1903. Manned rocketry now is like flight was in 1800. Sure we CAN do it but WHY? There is no commercial incentive to go into outer space. Manned space travel is nothing but a game for billionaires and a test bed for the military and scientists. It hasn't developed because no one cares.
There is no application for manned space flight and manned space flight will not get any better until there is one. The applications for the airplane were immediately obvious. Early air planes were used to scout during wars and deliver mail. Even if you could travel into space cheaply what would you do? There are no military applications for manned space travel. Its much cheaper and less risky to just use radio control. The only reason to be in space is to conduct experiments that require micro gravity. Even if space travel was much cheaper and safer then it is today, what exactly would you do with it? Space tourism is not exactly a compelling reason to pour billions of dollars in R&D into space travel
So if you die building and testing rockets for the government, that's noble -- but if you die building and testing rockets for a private company, that's ignoble.
Bullshit.
Advancing the state of the art is a noble cause no matter who pays the bills -- whether it's the taxpayers as a whole or a few millionaires who want to go on expensive vacations, working on spaceflight is a just and honorable vocation. To the extent that this research -- whatever the immediate funding source -- helps to bring down the cost of launching payloads into orbit in the long term or leads to the use of less expensive, reusable launch vehicles, the people involved in it are doing something they can legitimately decide is an activity worth risking death over.
Legislatively restricting spaceflight to governments in the name of protecting those people who may otherwise voluntarily choose to work in a field which they know has more risk than some desk job is an example of the worst sort of "mother-knows-best" nanny state bullshit governance. You can have your safe office job if you want it -- but don't you presume to speak for my interests when you lobby against letting me choose to work on something more interesting and useful to humanity as a whole than 99% of the population has any opportunity to be a part of.
Exploration for profit has a long and proud history -- what do you think brought Columbus out of Spain? The profit motive makes the work itself no less worthy of respect.
i know you meant it as a joke but .. Space Shuttle is a result of "intelligent design". They put together best and the brightest in one big agency, tasked them with building The One and Only Space Transportation System now and for decades to come.
The result, as expected ( regardless of individual talents ) is something that is horribly expensive, costs billions a year whether you fly it or not, is notorious for killing astronauts seven at a time, and goes nowhere particularly useful.
Had someone done the same anno 1900, gobbled up all talented engineers into one agency to design and develop the one and only National Aero Shuttle, dirigibles would probably still be the dominant mode of air transportation and the total aviation would be limited to a handful government employees flying a few circles each year. Maybe there would be an International Aero Station too by now, manned by two men whose only useful function, apart from fixing the station, would be to have a few live interviews on TV to tell us how great it feels being up there.
are you sure you prefer "intelligent design" ? evolution and market forces can be cruel, but one thing they tend to guarantee is that only the fittest designs survive.
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Well, the fact that he's released basically everything in the past and says he will release this video once it's ready to release counts for... everything.
Boeing mostly loses a couple of $100-plus-million satellites due to a leaking valve and we have a couple of relatively small press releases from them and the DOD about the valve issue. They all time things and restrict things up down and sideways.
John gives us good images and in many cases video, within short times of the accident, and a technical description of the failure and root causes that's first-class. Within a couple of days.
It takes a special kind of petty mind to see malign intent in a one-week delay because someone's on a trip...
Do not judge space travel by the shuttle, because it is a kludge of a spacecraft. Its design specs were changed mid-stream when the US Air Force decided it wanted to use the shuttle for military purposes. It was supposed to be a stand-alone craft, but the military requirements (heavier satellites, polar orbits) meant that an external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters needed to be added. Also, the military decided that the shuttle needed to come down in one orbit. That means a much rougher re-entry. How many shuttle accidents would we have had if there were no external fuel tank, and no SRBs?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Uh, if they gave a flying fudge about bad publicity John Carmack wouldn't have posted a blog entry detailing all the bad assumptions and decisions that caused the crash. They've already deliberately put out all the bad PR you could ask for; what more is a video going to do to them?
Why do you think Armadillo needs good PR anyway? They are not a commercial venture. And the X-Prize Cup that they are competing for doesn't consider your success/failures before the actual prize attempt either, much less your PR spin on such, they only care about success or failure in an official attempt.
The word "Translation" in your post should be translated as "Blindfolded Rectal Extraction".
The enemies of Democracy are
The problem is that the amount of energy to meet escape velocity is staggering. Being able to expend that much energy in a certain amount of time is just difficult.
The principles of aircraft, in comparison, can almost run on human power, and in a few cases, it does work on such little power.
1. A sub orbital glider that can make 100 kilometers is a big achievement. Only about 10 entities have done that in the history of the world, give or take a few. Think take. You, as an individual or company, are not one of them. You lose.
2. You use all of those infrastructure pieces yourself. You can't build a rocket that can make 100 feet, much less 100 km. You lose.
3. You can't make a glider out of paper that can make 100 fucking feet. much less any rocke except for an Estes model. YOU LOSE.
Whine some more. I find it entertaining.
Oh man that would be fucking AWESOME.
This space available.