1 Amateur Rocket Crashes, Another Explodes

prostoalex writes "A 23-foot-long space rocket carrying 3 dummies exploded in the Pacific Northwest after reaching about 200 feet. The team was competing for Ansari X Prize, offering $10 million to the team that successfully completes a low-budget private space rocket capable of carrying men into space. Google News offers more perspectives into the event, the team is saying the rocket, whose parachute malfunctioned, would have to be rebuilt." And AmiNTT writes "Everygeek's favorite rocketeers over at Armadillo Aerospace have suffered a fairly serious setback over the weekend - the crash of their 48-inch vehicle link in a test hop at their 100 acre test field. Of course there is video and pictures - 2 3... This setback should keep them from flying for about five weeks, but will give them a chance to make some design changes. I'm sure they will be back better than ever. (Armadillo have shown up on Slashdot many times in the past.)"

You'd Think...

[the pickle]

...that the guys at Armadillo would be used to the /. traffic by now, having been on here so many times before.

Sadly, it seems they have yet to learn from history. Or, perhaps, their bandwidth costs are being spent on new rocket parts.

Well, here's a copy of the news article from Armadillo, anyway.

Armadillo Aerospace News Archive

Good tests, Complete loss of vehicle

August 8, 2004 notes

Good Tests

On Tuesday we did a very successful set of hover tests with the big vehicle. I had two changes that I wanted to test: an optional PWM of the throttle movement to make it change position slower when it was in hunt-for-an-acceleration mode, and testing a 50% gain increase which I might enable during high speed flights if it looks like it is having a hard time controlling the attitude. I had these set up momentary overrides on the joystick, so I could lift the vehicle up, engage the change, let go real fast if it isn't working, then try the other one, all on a single propellant load.

When we tipped the vehicle up, several catalyst rings fell out of the engine nozzle. We looked up the engine with a boroscope and found that the screen at the bottom had pulled past one section of the support plate, allowing some rings to escape. This had also happened on the previous 12" engine after a few runs (you could see a couple red hot catalyst rings fly out in one of the static test videos). It didn't seem to be progressive last time, so we went ahead and left it alone, expecting the test run to squash the rings down into an interference fit again.

Because this was set up to be a 25 second hover (tethered), which would be our longest hover test, we decided to make this a no-direct-view test, with my flying it from behind a concrete wall looking at a monitor instead of directly viewing it. The engine warmed up fine and lifted off and hovered fine. I was about to engage the first test when the vehicle just set itself back down on the ground. It took me a few moments to figure out what happened - I had moved the computer and wireless antenna behind the wall with me, so the telemetry link was very ratty, dropping quite a few packets. Eventually it dropped enough in a row to hit the internal limit and triggered a loss-of-telemetry abort, which is an auto land. Perfect!

I moved the antenna back in view of the vehicle, and we completed both of the control system tests without incident. We used our new propellant disposal burner to catalyze the remaining propellant, which worked pretty well. The foam coming out was probably still 10% peroxide or so, but a little water was fine for washing it away. We might consider adding a spark ignition system to it so it would completely burn everything away, but that would be a more complex system, and would leave us with a red hot propellant burner.

When we set the vehicle back down on the cradle, a few more catalyst rings came out, but the engine still seemed to be working perfectly.

Based on these results, I changed the flight control code to use the PWM valve movement when it is hunting back and forth past a desired acceleration. If it hasn't crossed it in 500 msec, or the desired valve position is fully open or closed, it goes back to full speed.

We also weighed the vehicle, and surprisingly found it lighter than we had estimated, right at 1000 pounds.

Complete Loss of Vehicle

Saturday was a perfect day for flying, so we went out to the 100 acres for a boosted hop. We had high expectations for success, since the vehicle had been operating perfectly on all tests so far.

After we loaded up the propellant and pressurized the vehicle, we ran into a problem. When I opened it up to 20% throttle for the warmup it looked like it cleared up fine, but the telemetry was only reading 100C, as if the hot pack hadn't started heating. We were a long way from the vehicle, so we couldn't really tell what was going on. I gave it a bu

Armadillo aren't stopping...

[Goonie]

Carmack commented on this on the Armadillo blog a month ago; his opinion is that only Rutan's team are close, given that they are very close to success he's not going to try a Hail Mary attempt, and nobody else is close as far as he can tell (and recent events would tend to underline this view). Furthermore, he and the rest of the Armadillo team intend to continue their rocketry work anyway.

More broadly, I believe there are plans for post X-Prize competitions in the future, where various teams would get together annually to compete for the highest launch, fastest turnaround, and so on.

Ultimately, it wouldn't surprise me, particularly if Scaled wins the X-Prize, if in a few years time we have the "Y-Prize" for orbital shots.

Re:October Sky

[fejikso]

October sky [imdb.com] is a very inspiring movie. I also recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it, especially if they have any interest in science.

It may not have the best script, acting, etc. but it's very enjoyable.

slashdot fails journalism 101 again

[Anonymous Coward]

I've noticed too many slashdot articles in which the information is misrepresented, misquoted, or quoted out of context. This is yet another case... Slashdot claims that it exploded after reaching 200 feet, which is untrue. It exploded 200 feet horizontally FROM its takeoff point. If you actually had bothered to read the article, the craft approached nearly 1000 ft vertically. It was during landing that the chute failed to deploy and the craft was destroyed.

Of course, 1000 ft isn't that impressive. However, they did produce the craft very cheaply. And, it surely could have travelled farther than 1000 ft, they were merely testing their initial design.

My advice for the team is to attempt to test their next rocket without their dummy payload. It would be best to successfully launch and land a test craft safely before attempting to gauge their capacity for load.

Torrent of the video

[madumas]

Here is a torrent for the 4MB video. I'll keep it up for 24-48 hours.

48InchCrash.mpg.torrent [66.11.160.110]

Please seed.

mirror of video

[reezle]

Let's see how long my server lasts. {Sheepish-Grin}

VIDEO [sbnsor.com]

(Thanks for the text-mirror earlier. It was nice to read about it, and see that they all kept their sense of humor about the situation.)

Re:I think

[shayera]

well, depending on your definition of existance, I call your attention towards the glorious Saturn rockets, especialy Saturn V
No Saturns went boom, and for those saying "what about them astronauts what got themselves fried", well however tragic it was, it's not really the rockets fault, that the capsule atop a nonfueled rocket decides to burn itself out.

I'm sure that if one takes a lot of time to search archives, there are other rocket types that have experienced no booms, but admittedly it seems to be quite rare.

Re:Bah! Amateurs!

[Entrope]

The dictionary can explain perfectly well. Doing it professionally means it is your profession, your bread and butter. Burt Rutan's crew seems to qualify as professionals, although their investors expect to lose money on the X-Prize pursuit. An amateur is someone who does it for fun or as a hobby. Armadillo Aerospace may (or may not) be as expert as the professionals, but they are an amateur operation because they pay the bills with other pursuits.

Re:poor dummies

[AKAImBatman]

These people can't fly their ships without proper FAA (or local equivalent) approval. If the FAA doesn't think it's safe, it doesn't fly. That's why Armadillo is so far behind. The FAA wasn't pleased with their "crush-cone" design, forcing them to reengineer for a powered landing.

SpaceShipOne Flights scheduled for 9/29 and 10/13

[John Sokol]

SpaceShipOne Flights are planed for September 29th, 2004, October 13th, 2004 at the Mojave Airport, Civilian Aerospace Test Center in Mojave,
California.

Press release [primary.net]

I just went up to Mojave this weekend to see what was around and there was almost nothing to see and all was closed.

I Don't think they are in any way prepared for the turnout they are going to get for this next flight.

Rutan's team has a very good chance success being he's already done it with one test pilot. No matter this outcome these will be a historic event.