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."

Comments

Re:to boldly go....

[morgan_greywolf]

And to think, they want us all to ride in these things commercially.... You wouldn't have wanted to fly in an airplane commercially had you been around in the days of the Wright Brothers and Kitty Hawk.

It's a learning process

[evanbd]

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!

Re:Bad comparison

[veganboyjosh]

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).

Re:Bad comparison

[savuporo]

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.

Re:Harsh

[Reality Master 101]

I have no opinion on Carmack one way or another, but tagging this story with 'haha' and 'hesnorocketscientist' seems a tad mean.

I've noticed that Carmack gets a lot of flack whenever Armadillo stumbles, and it's an interesting psychological phenomena. You'd think that especially on Slashdot, there would be a lot of people who like seeing smart people succeed, but in Carmack's case, there seems to be a lot of resentment about a "mere" video game programmer daring to learn something like rocket science. Not only learn about, but actually be *serious* about it! And doing it without any sort of engineering degree! The gall!

This seems to be especially true of amny "real" engineers, who seem jealous that an outsider with money is trying to do what they can't seem to do, which is produce very low cost access to space. "Yeah, if I had Carmack's money, I could do what he's doing better than he could do it..."

Never mind that Armadillo is one of only a few VTVL ships to actually fly.

Carmack is an incredibly smart guy, and he's not given near enough credit for raw intelligence, rather than just being a good game hacker.