Masten and Armadillo Perform First VTVL Restarts

FleaPlus writes "Recently Masten Aerospace, winner of NASA's 2009 Lunar Lander Challenge, demonstrated using its Xombie vehicle the first-ever mid-flight restart of a VTVL (vertical-takeoff vertical-landing) rocket, a critical capability for the emerging suborbital/microgravity science and passenger markets (video from ground). Not to be outdone, John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace (winner of the 2008 Lunar Lander Challenge) flew its Mod rocket to 2,000 feet (610m), deployed a drogue parachute, and then restarted the engine to land (multi-view video showing John Carmack at the controls)."

Comments

Awesome

[DarkKnightRadick]

I would venture to say that this is definitely a win for private-sector aerospace. (:

Awesome frame rate

[MalHavoc]

John's new 3d engine looks sweet. Incredible detail! Are there plans for a rail gun?

Re:"John Carmack at the controls"

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

to see if you can control a rocket with the WASD keys?

This gives "Rocket Jumping" a whole new meaning.

Re:Very Impressive

[nofx_3]

I watched it twice. In the first video I was impressed by the same thing as you, the vectoring stabilizing the falling rocket. On the second watch I was even more impressed when I realized even after the drogue shoot and free fall, the rocket landed just a foot or two from it's original takeoff point. So the vectoring didn't just stabilize the rocket, it also steered it back to the takeoff point.

Re:Just a step...

[FleaPlus]

Very impressive, but these are just jump-jets for now - sort of rocket helicopters. Going from what we saw to something that can get to orbit, deposit a payload, and return to earth undamaged is going to take a lot more work. Good luck to both teams.

I don't think either Masten or Armadillo (or Virgin, XCOR, or Blue Origin) are planning on targeting the ground-to-orbit market any time soon. I think the general target markets for them for the next several years goes something like this:

* testbeds for NASA autonomous lander tech, like autonomous hazard avoidance (NASA can just put their AI/vision equipment on existing lander to test them out)
* suborbital science payloads: there's a lot of scientists who currently have to pay $1 million+ a launch to fly payloads on suborbital sounding rockets to the upper atmosphere and near-space that would love to pay the much-lower prices Masten and Armadillo charge to fly at much-higher flight rates
* microgravity science payloads: getting amounts of microgravity time that can only currently be beaten by flying on the ISS
* suborbital passenger payloads: both "tourists," scientists who want to be able to operate their experiments manually, and training for orbital astronauts. Armadillo just announced that they were planning on charging $102K per person, undercutting Virgin's price by half: http://www.space.com/news/space-tourism-new-deal-100430.html
* robotic landers for NEOs/Moon/Mars, boosted to the location by an expendable rocket
* after making tons of money on the above, then maybe they'll start thinking about orbit. Once that happens, it'll probably be with something like pop-up boosters, where a reusable VTVL craft will boost an expendable secondary stage high/fast enough that it can reach orbit.

Let me know if I forgot any. ;)

Re:"First VTVL Restarts"

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, first with the same engine (hence "restart"). LM landings used two different engines and stages for landing and taking off.

Orbital Factories?

[Doc Ruby]

So how long before a corporation launches a factory into (relatively) permanent orbit, for manufacturing in microgravity and near-vacuum? Will factories like that be able to dump their products back into the ocean for collection by delivery ships?

I want to see if aerogels can be made in orbit not just cheaply, but with their internal structure oriented so they can be regular windows. They're such good insulators, and have such small mass per surface area that they could probably be dropped from orbit into the ocean without any extra packaging. Or as packaging containing other, more fragile stuff made in orbit and then the aerogel reused for its own applications once it's collected at the surface.

Re:Orbital Factories?

[Khyber]

"Things tend to do that pesky burn up on re-entry thing."

Aerogels are ungodly insulating and resistant to heat. I've seen a piece just a few millimeters thick keep a crayon from melting with a blowtorch heating up the aerogel.

It's a type of glass, just like the ceramic heat shielding tiles used on space shuttles.

Re:Orbital Factories?

[Chris Burke]

Did you say ungodly?

Burn the blasphemous, heathen aerogel!

Wait, fuck...

Re:Orbital Factories?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct. This Space Nuttery is absolutely unrealistic and unfeasible. It never, ever made sense and is mostly delusions, fantasies and sci-fi nonsense that makes for good dreams but makes zero economical and engineering sense.

I mean just read Doc Ruby's nonsense. Aerogels? Windows? Is the man on crack? If it were useful, we can make aerogel here on Earth... Who could afford windows made in space? Absolute nonsense.

These space manufacturing fantasies are the justifications that war-mongers used in the 1950s and 1960s to justify rocket research, that were actually meant to deliver nuclear payloads halfway around the earth quickly.

I have read many space engineering textbooks. They usually throw in a few "ball bearings made in space" one-liners either as the author's ironic sarcasm, or some sort of weak justification that this isn't just weapons research.

These ideas mostly reflect the era: cheap energy, massive manufacturing capacity and very expensive computers. (And a powerful technological enemy "over there".)

In the DECADES that the Space Nutters are still hurling tin cans around the planet, computers have progressed way beyond even the wildest Space Age prognostications. I've read those too. Very few people understood what cheap computers could do, eventually.

Strangely enough, the people 40 years ago who said we'd be connected 24/7 with cheap computers were seen mostly as crackpots, and the space colony types were seen as realistic. 40 years later, the roles have swapped.

We don't need free-fall to make perfect ball bearings, we can simulate the entire process digitally and use computerized control in the process here on Earth to make ball bearings. And I don't know about you, but ball bearings have always worked just fine when manufactured on Earth. Just more Space Nuttery quackery and delusion.

It's a religion of the 20th century. A religion that says we have unlimited energy (we don't), unlimited technology (we don't), and unlimited markets up there (completely psychotic). Space Nuttery should be in the DSM-IV, a genuine psychiatric disturbance, a psychotic break with reality.

Yes, the imagery of the Space Age is grandiose and romantic. It hasn't panned out. There will be no space habitats, moon colonies or space manufacturing.

ANY technology you can use in space, you can use on Earth much easier.

Free-fall, lack of water and atmosphere are totally alien environments, you'd have to re-design every single machine and every single process to work up there. Think of how many things you take for granted on Earth, like things fall down. Inertia works differently in free-fall. Just that changes everything. How do you shake a few tons of molten metal in space? Well, since you are no longer coupled to 6x10^24 kg of mass (Earth), you pretty much shake the entire factory. Just that is an entire engineering problem in itself. This also kills asteroid mining.

As you noted, there is nothing up there. Everything we need is right here, easier and cheaper to get at, extract, refine and sell.

Space is a dead end.

But did you hear about the guy who makes artificial DNA and shoves it back into living cells?

That's the future. The biotech right now is at the level of late 1950s mainframe computers. They are in the hands of a few smart, avant-garde people with lots of money, and a few people with more prosaic needs.

The next decades will bring biotech in the hands of more and more people as it gets cheaper and cheaper.

The applications will be as unpredictable as the applications of millions of cheap computers in the hands of everyone were for the Space Age.

Space will always be difficult, and have a few uses. It will never, ever be the dreamland the psychotic Space Nutters make it out to be, for simple physical and economical reasons.

Re:"John Carmack at the controls"

[Dice]

Pfft. Carmack doesn't use WASD, arrow keys, *or* the mouse. He has the console permanently open and controls his character's movement entirely with console commands. None of it is scripted, he's just that fast of a typist. In fact, half the time he's used timers to issue the next 90 seconds of gameplay so that he can just sit back and laugh at how predictable the rest of our movements are.

Re:Fuel requirements?

[tibit]

Given that most orbital rockets linger in the dense, friction-expensive atmosphere rather shortly and *slowly* there is very little benefit to be had by dropping them down from a plane. I suggest a simple calculation: express the orbital energy as a function of mass and height, and see how small the potential energy is compared to kinetic energy. Hypotethically, if you would lift a rocket up to orbital height without giving it orbital velocity, you'd still need pretty much all of the fuel just to reach the orbital velocity.

The only benefit from launching higher up is for sub-orbital flights that do expend a significant amount of their fuel to overcome atmospheric friction and to gain potential energy. That's why SSOne launches up high.

OTOH, LEO requires ~30 times more energy than sub-orbital. GEO/lunar requires ~60 times more. So, whatever you launch to GEO, the energy used to bring it up to 100km high is so small that you can ignore it and your error is within 2%!