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Successful Test Flight and Landing for Xombie Rocket Lander and GENIE
An anonymous reader sends word that Masten Space Systems' Xombie rocket has successfully demonstrated vertical takeoff and landing for NASA's Flight Opportunities Program. It was guided autonomously by the GENIE system from Draper Laboratory. "The rocket rose 164 feet, moved laterally 164 feet, and then landed on another pad after a 67-second flight. The flight represents the first step in developing a test bed capability that will allow for landing demonstrations that start at much higher altitudes-several miles above the ground." This navigation technology is laying the groundwork for future exploration of planets, moons, and asteroids.
I barely held back from pressing the UP arrow on the keyboard while watching the video.
I used to play an ancient video game called "Lunar Lander" (less famous than Asteroids) where you had to manually do what computer controls right now without blinking. One less game to play with.
I, for one, will welcome our new Xombie overlords in 3... 2... 1....
Just 1.28 cm more and it would have been 50 meters exactly. What a coincidence. You might almost think they had gone metric.
I see they'll be missing planets again in the future.
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I've just noticed this is like those unicycle DIY Segways: One single rocket + 2 axis + 3 accelerometers + gravity = stable position (XYZ) . Have in mind current drones have more than one engine (to correct position) and '60s rockets had lots of hydrazine mini jets to fine tune orientation. Good job NASA.
Please, somebody find and kill the dipshit that tagged the story "Syfy." Please don't bastardize English, validate the work of evil marketing goons, and give away free advertising to the wrestling channel.
Isn't the main aim of these type of rockets with no multi-stage deployment to be cost effective at launching?
Why are they launching from a static position when generating that kind of lift will cost the most.. What about building a railgun type launching platform into the ground to avoid some of the massive fuel costs on the initial burn?
Yes im aware theres no matching launcher on the moon but the gravity there is alittle bit kinder so im guessing the initial fuel costs are much less.
Brother! Good wasteful job did this man! But it seems a businessman's presentation, or possibly the researching director's or the researcher's, but i don't know exactly it!.
It's another story, but in this age, the jobs are made by anothers, so that businessmen do only buy made things manufactured cheaply by their partners of third companies (e.g. asiatic, chinese, thailandian, philipinan, malaysian, etc. jobs).
And the difference was the wasteful money that they did profit! (good for businessmen & contractors, sometimes not-good for researchers, workers, etc but atleast were sustainable for ther lives).
JCPM: to learn to be lesser wasteful, and it will compensate you, more environment-friendly, more ecologic.
The Delta Clipper (DC/X) performed the very same stunt back in the 90s: Take off and land on its rocket. That was 20 years ago.
The DC/X was a demonstrator of a single-stage-to-orbit project. It promised to bring down the cost of space flight by an order of magnitude and make the Space Shuttle obsolete.
It flew several times, achieving perfect flights, then was given to NASA. They "acccidentally" forgot to connect the hydraulic line that deployed on of the landing struts and the DC/X crashed at its first NASA landing. And oh darn, they couldn't find the couple of millions needed to fix it.
This dangerous competitor to the shuttle was thus killed. The Shuttle program was safe. Whew.
Now that the Shuttle is no more, revolutionary concepts such as DC/X or its Xombie imitation might safely crawl out of the hole in which NASA had thrown them. Maybe.
The first rule of a bureaucracy is self-perpetuation. The fact that a bureaucracy is building space shuttles doesn't change its bureaucratic nature.
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
First flight of the Shuttle: 1981
First flight of DC/X: 1993
I don't disagree that the DC/X was killed by NASA jealousy and incompetence - but the shuttle was a mature production program by the time DC/X was testing. No one had money for aerospace in the mid 1990s - both military and civilian programs were being canceled left & right.
I applaud ANY project that is successful at ANY aerospace related engineering. Anything is better than giving the money to 3rd world despots & domestic leeches.
There was a flash comic some years ago about a sentient zombie called "Xombie", and its owner removed it from newgrounds because apparatnly it was too good and some DVDs were announced to "be coming".
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
Didn't the lunar lander do this back in 1969 .. well they tested it out back in 1967 or something. I'll bet this thing needed mad CPU power and control systems too.
From the Apollo LM Wikipedia entry:
To allow astronauts to learn lunar landing techniques, NASA contracted Bell Aerosystems in 1964 to build the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV), which used a gimbal-mounted vertical jet engine to counter 5/6 of its weight to simulate the Moon's gravity, in addition to its own hydrogen peroxide thrusters to simulate the LM's descent engine and attitude control. Successful testing of two LLRV prototypes at the Dryden Flight Research Center led in 1966 to three production Lunar Landing Training Vehicles (LLTV) which along with the LLRV's were used to train the astronauts at the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center. This aircraft actually proved fairly dangerous to fly, as three of the five were destroyed in crashes. It was equipped with a rocket-powered ejection seat, so in each case the pilot survived, including the first man to walk on the Moon, Neil Armstrong.[8]
So, not quite. This is quite a bit more advanced and hopefully more stable.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
sort of, not quite.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The old-hat aerospace industry as a whole has completely failed. I have seen it personally. If the government just gave its space and science dollars to small teams of motivated individuals instead of massive bureaucracies, we could be outpacing the world in science and technology again.
Funny thing, this. I looked up the Wikipedia Apollo LM article to refresh my mind on something for another post and it points out that:
The Lunar Module was built by Grumman Aircraft Engineering and was chiefly designed by the American aerospace engineer, Tom Kelly.
(my emphasis).
What major project these days is designed mostly by one person? Or even a small group? This may be why SpaceX / Masten and the other small groups will be really useful. Get back to focused engineering, stay away from at least some of the bureaucratic bullshit endemic with large institutions.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
An atmosphere? Why??
I'm thinking that the Chief Engineer for Xombie first looked at the Wiki page and said, "ya we can do that, over again."
There is also Armadillo aerospace headed by JC of Doom fame. The had a smaller design that did this for an X prize. Due to some judge shenanigans they came only 2nd however.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
the DC/X crashed at its first NASA landing
It was an impressively successful crash too. IIRC, the DC/X had 3 engines and one of them blew up. It also had an impressive stabilisation algorithm which managed to keep the rocket up and under control even after one of its engine blew up, which was quite impressive. In the end it was more like a hard landing than a crash.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
The LEM wasn't capable of doing this in earth gravity. It was *extremely* specialized for use on the moon.
If anything, an ICBM needs to travel as fast as it can, and have a huge acceleration for the purpose of reducing reaction time for incoming warheads. That goes completely against the design philosophy of launches intended for spaceflight, much less a rocket-powered lander. A typical nuclear warhead is really quite sturdy and can handle high acceleration forces (100-200 m/s^2 are common, sometimes up to as high as 400 depending on the missile). A typical satellite payload package usually is only built to handle forces up to about 50 m/s^2 (about 5 "G's") and some launchers try to drop that acceleration even further.
The point being that I agree with you (and not the grandparent) in terms of any danger in terms of weaponizing these kind of rockets. There may be some common components for commercial spaceflight launchers and what you can find for military missiles, but there are enough major differences that they are not interchangeable. This is especially true for "modern" rocket designs, where there is a clear separation of the designs because they have different objectives in terms of flight profile and performance characteristics.
If commercial spaceflight pushes the boundaries even more, this differences is something I think is going to be even more pronounced as rockets are being designed not for high performance but rather to simply be cheap. This rocket made by Masten is definitely pushing the envelope of being cheap. The budget for this project is something equivalent to a "petty cash fund" that is so low it doesn't need any specific appropriation legislation to make happen. I don't know the exact amount Masten is getting from NASA, but it is in the mere thousands of dollars, certainly less than a million. Normally NASA can't even do a paper study for less than a million dollars, much less pay for a working rocket.
Are any of the Grumman engineers still around to build a follow-up module if we ever want to go back? Most of them are either pushing up daisies or collecting retirement benefits... think about it.
I'm glad that *somebody* is working on these skills in some way to make sure that the capability is even possible.
I'm also glad that computing power has advanced beyond discrete transistors and 7400 logic gate chips that are the size of your thumb, because that is what the original Apollo Guidance Computer was built out of.
I thought the win by Masten for the 2nd tier prize of the Northrup-Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge was completely legitimate. The "shenanigans" was simply following the rules, and that they won the "tie breaker" over Armadillo Aerospace. Yes, John Carmack wasn't too happy about the way they lost, but let's get real about the issues involved.
BTW, while Armadillo Aerospace (not Masten) was one of the original X-Prize teams, the Lunar Landing Challenge was not technically one of the "X-Prizes".. even though Peter Diamandis and the X-Prize Foundation were requested to act as the judges to determine who was the legitimate "winner" of the contest rules might be, it was more legitimately a part of NASA's Centennial Prizes (or Centennial Challenges) series of competitions and the seed money came from the U.S. Federal Government as a NASA appropriation. I know it is splitting hairs, but it is disingenuous for the X-Prize Foundation to be claiming this as one of their own projects even though apparently they have.
The impressive thing is that Armadillo Aerrospace wasn't the only company involved in the "competition". BTW, I was also impressed with Unreasonable Rocket, who has continued to do other things since the competition as well. Perhaps the best thing that happened is that Masten got some important seed money by winning 1st place for the level 2 competition, and they've spent that money in a very wise manner while Armadillo Aerospace has been well funded because of John Carmack. Both companies (AA and MSS) have also worked with NASA on various projects in an attempt to leverage the expertise learned from the Lunar Landing Challenge, noting that the challenges they have in terms of control systems working here on the Earth are actually going to be tougher due to the high gravity than what they are going to need on the Moon or asteroids.
The point of the challenge (especially Level 2) is that the delta v needed to win the prize was the same as what would be needed to launch from the surface of the Moon, go to a lunar rendezvous orbit (like what the Apollo project did for their Lunar Orbit Rendezvous scheme), and then safely land back on the surface of the Moon (or the other way around). In theory, both companies now have the technological capability of being able to land and retrieve rock samples from the surface of the Moon with their vehicles... if only you could get those landers to Lunar orbit in the first place.
Yup, the machine fell on its side. It wasn't ruined, just damaged. Fixing it wouldn't have been a huge project. That's what makes it unforgivable. Twenty years wasted.
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
The point being that I agree with you (and not the grandparent) in terms of any danger in terms of weaponizing these kind of rockets. There may be some common components for commercial spaceflight launchers and what you can find for military missiles, but there are enough major differences that they are not interchangeable. This is especially true for "modern" rocket designs, where there is a clear separation of the designs because they have different objectives in terms of flight profile and performance characteristics.
You're right, there's enough difference between a missile and a plane than no one would ever use a plane as a missile... and even if they did, it wouldn't have the same effect.
If by follow the rules, you mean field your entry after the deadline specified by the rules... then yes they followed the rules... oh wait, no they didn't. If you are going to give one team extra time, you better give all the teams extra time, or i am going to call judge shenanigans.
Otherwise interesting.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
It sounds like being a sore loser.
Masten had technology which was able to accomplish the general goals of the competition, so if they weren't going to even be close there wouldn't have been any controversy at all. My impression was that Armadillo sort of thought going in that they were going to win the 1st place prize for the 2nd tier competition. They even made an attempt a year earlier without much success.
Regardless, in the long run both companies ended up in a pretty good position and I don't think Armadillo Aerospace is thought of any less of a company. Besides, I think Armadillo is doing just fine financially as a company. John Carmack has already talked about how he has put the last bit of capital that he expects to invest into the company until it is doing much bigger things with mature technology. In other words, it is already a profit making business.