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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."
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.
My blog
Carmack and Romero are two different people.
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!
Failed? I think not. Just so you're aware, Armadillo was the only team last year to even attempt the lunar lander prize, and except for some bad luck, would have walked away with it.
This year, there may be a few other challengers, but I think John and company will walk away with it. John and his team have taken this challenge in directions that the "big guys" have never tried, and it's working.
We'll see! Only 65 days left!
XenoPhage
Technological Musings
Id say so.
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.
Executive summary:
"hotwired the battery...we don't need no stinkin' ground shutoff code...Sensors - never got around to testing them...we left some slop...ya think something rated at 4G would work up to 6G?...we know the GPS receivers are vibration sensitive so we stuck some bubble wrap round them and hoped...we checked earlier telemetry and yup - they're darn vibration sensitive...hold on lads; I've got an idea...The rocket has gotta return to the ground at some point; if only we'd done some testing on this...John's doing some fancy flying - oh, sh*t, he's not...now the tanks are scrap we're probably going to do some useful tests on them that we wouldn't have done with usable ones - heck those things cost money, baby...some of the wiring harness is wrapped in leather so we're going to alienate the vegan customer base...flammable foam catches fire."
I think I'll walk.
PS: The captcha I had to type in to submit this was "Piloting" - BWAHAHAHAHAHA
AT&ROFLMAO
Shame, I was already to invest in his new company, dubbed the "Union Aerospace Corporation"
You mean even safer than a huge orange fireball?
I don't know, that's a pretty high bar.
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
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
You see, we're all volunteers at Armadillo, and therefore all have day jobs. My day job required me to come to Germany for the Leipzig Games Convention to promote things entirely unrelated to Armadillo. This is the job that actually provides a salary, so it kind of takes precedence over Armadillo sometimes.
Could I have left the video with the others so that they could capture it and get it up on the web page? Well, no one else on the team has any experience with that -- their expertise is in software design, electronics, manufacturing, welding, etc. So I'd have had to train them to do it. And again, why would I do that when, as I understood it, John's not going to post the video till the next update anyway?
But you go and believe whatever you want. Just know that we WILL post the video when I get back.
Matthew Ross
Armadillo Aerospace