Armadillo Aerospace Big thrust gains

Looking good for Carmack, at last they got some real thrust out of there engine...
They have doubled the thrust for a given nozzle / tank pressure over the last two months...

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=241

That is very cool.

I enjoy Armadillo's atleast weekly updates. It is interesting to watch the evolution of their machine.

Armadillo's weekly updates are always exciting, but this update is even more so because of this:

We have doubled the thrust for a given nozzle / tank pressure over the last two months.
This combination is more than what we needed for flying the vehicle, so we started building a full ship-set of engines in this style. With any kind of luck, we will be hot-firing the complete vehicle next week.

That will make for a great video!

Carmack has posted his test schedule...


The upcoming tests will be:

Hot fire on the ground
Captive hover test under a crane
Constant velocity up / down free flight
Accelerating free flight with constant stabilization
Accelerating free flight with unstabilized descent
Launch-license limit propellant loads

Still waiting on that license...

hi
so what's the state of armadiloo then? do they have a rocket? i looked at the pic's n all i saw was a man in a chair? floating? do they have any plans to build a rocket soon?
Rob

Well.....

They have many different parts...
But i don't think it will look like an odinary rocket..

Here are some pictures of some parts....:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_01_18/bigNozzles.jpg
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2003_12_20/newTank.jpg
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2003_12_06/insulated.jpg
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2003_11_22/2003_11_22_c.jpg
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2003_08_09/upright.jpg

Watch the movie Tucker with Jeff Bridges. The scene where they are first attempting to put the rear-engine into the prototype is where I place them at. The scene where big industry conspires to put him out of business is a few years off...

I wonder how on earth they're going to keep the rocket stable in ascent, as they're inteding to put the CG aft.

Their spacecraft will be stabilised during ascent and descent by its engines. I believe there will be five engines arranged with one in the center and four out at the edges of the craft, with the onboard computer throttling engines up and down in order to adjust the craft's attitude.

I've been following the progress of the Armadillo project for a couple of months now and I'm very impressed by their openness, which really sets them apart from the other teams and will surely serve as far more of an inspiration to other semi-amateur outfits.

Whilst Starchaser and 'you know who' are further down the path of developing their basic technology, I can't follow their efforts with quite the same interest simply because they do operate as closed teams and tell us little about their progress. A visit to either of their websites is a dull experience compared with the Armadillo site.

Carmack & Co will probably not be first past the post but for me, a successful Armadillo launch into space (even if they only scoop second or third place) will mean more to me than any other team's success simply because I've been able to follow the story, with its ups and downs, in its weekly series of gripping installments.

Good luck Armadillo !

I totally agree.

I also favor Carmack for one other reason: he has the simplest vehicle design. It's likely to be the most reliable and have the quickest turn-around time.

I rather doubt they have the fuel capacity to idle the engines during the coast phase.

The most recent design is eight engines, with four assigned as dead weight.

While armadillo's weekly updates are interesting to read, they actually point out the lack of planning. If Scaled made such weekly reports, they'd be rather dull to read, as they'd mostly be about planning, simulating and designing. The stuff at monthly test flight reports ARE the open stuff, about the faulty wing spoilers, the lack of pitch stability with unburn angine and feathered tail, and the test boom on a pick-up truck to proof the remedy fix, or collapsing landing gear. These are the good stuff.

And armadillo being simplest... well, it used to be, before going to this powered landing stuff, with computer-controlled static stability and redundant engine systems.

Actually it 8 engines, ordered in 2 pairs of 4, each pair is controled seperatly by a computer. And the craft should be able to land with only 4 running.. They said, somthing about they could ad 1 extra in the middle... Don't know how that one should be controled..
You can se the engine/nozzel setup here:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_01_18/bigNozzles.jpg

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=241
All of our weld-on 12” nozzles have arrived from EnTek. The current vehicle will probably eventually be changed over to using four of these engines, while the cabin-at-the-bottom vehicle may need a dual-quad of eight engines. Each quad would be controlled be an independent computer, and either one could land the vehicle, so it would give us a level of redundancy, and reduce the deep throttling requirement by only using a single quad at landing. We could add the ninth engine in the middle if we need the extra thrust.

I think that Armadillo's choice to eliminate the parachutes actually decreased complexity. The parachutes take days to repack, while a sans-parachute vehicle could be refueled and relaunched in hours, according to Carmack. Now that's simple.

Don't forget that a parachute-landed vehicle also poses tougher regulatory issues, since the vehicle could drift a long distance laterally. Now Armadillo should have an easier job getting a license.

As for the computer, I don't think that will be a problem. Remember that Armadillo flew a small hovering VTOL prototype back in 2002, and the computer control was considered so reliable that they flew a person on it. Plus, John Carmack is a programmer - so I don't think the computer will be an issue.

Anyway, that's my two cents. I guess we will find out if the vehicle really is simpler once Armadillo starts trying to fly it.

Last time I was repacking a parachute, it took 45 minutes.

The computer is not at issue here, the flight hardware is. The VTOL model had to lift a man to few feets up and that's about it; at mach three, there are other problems. If the sideslip gets too great, the engine will not likely be powerful enough to correct it, the slip will increase and the vehicle will disintegrate. All this will happen in fractions of a second at those speeds. Although for a computer doing millions of instructions per second it's leisurely pace, the hardware is not nearly that fast as there are relays and solenoids with according latencies to consider. Compared to the competition, the system has upto nine times the amount of plumbing, rigging and wiring plus rapid throttling capability. (The jet engines in the White Knight are more complex, but in constructional and operational sense they're monolithic entities.)

Just to add more information to our discussion:

Here's what Carmack said on the parachute issue, from the Dec 20 update:

We have been leaning towards powered landing instead of parachutes for a couple months now. The primary incentive has been that range safety and potential casualty calculations really don’t like big parachutes, because under the right set of failures that causes them to mis-deploy, the drift can be many tens of miles. Arguing for redundant interlocks on parachute deployment wasn’t well received, but a naturally unstable vehicle that only lands under power has an extremely limited area that it can possibly hit.
The huge advantage of powered landing is operability. Even without any effort to correct for wind on the ascent, the landing point will only be a mile or two from the launch point, and there wouldn’t be any parachutes to repack or crush cones to replace. Forget reflying in two weeks, it could fly again in an hour.