Official Armadillo Q&A thread

Surely they'll just do the JEEP waterfall in colored flame?

They only need to switch the engine on and off every few microseconds, how hard could that be?

I checked out the link to youtube which Webkabouter provided in his post above and noticed that there is another video showing the testfiring of the armadillo engine with the salt injection.

So in case anyone missed it:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5ZsTKucYcVs

Looks even more impressive on video

Argh! With all of the rumors and developments being batted about on this forum over the last 3 - 4 weeks, is anyone else besides me rabidly jonesing for an official AA update??

The move, the RRL developments, the XCOR "competition", Methane & MOD progress, reliability and power of the stainless engine... Soooo much potentially cool news!

--Noel
(IT guy, amateur aircraft designer/builder, and rocket enthusiast)

NWade, While I do agree that I would like to get my progress fix, this is AA we are talking about (and not one of the other many "companies" I could name) That means that they are using precious time to make flying hardware. Perhaps even a few sales or product deliveries.

I do check the site quite often though.

After the 2006 X-Prize Cup John documented the fact that, due to use of different coordinate systems, he had to fly Pixel manually instead of letting the computer do it.

I was surprised then to find that at last years competition he still appeared to be flying the rocket manually.

Are there any plans to let the computer control everything from take-off all the way through to landing?

This is by no means intended as a slur on John's piloting skills

Colmeister

And it is finally here: our monthly (well, more or less) dose of progress report:
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/A ... ews_id=358

Wow, things are sure starting to take shape. Way to go, Armadillo!
What kind of production volumes are you looking at for the RRL? Just a handful of engines I guess. Do they want you to have some installed by the time the X-Cup rolls around?

Could You give us the details about you're new stainless steel engine, and how it compares to old graphite one in terms of ISP and Thrust.
By the way I admire You're modular approach which is the probably the only alternative.

Are you guys combining small amounts of O2 and H2 in the helium tank and a catalyst bed to increase the pump output pressure? (as suggested here http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/pur ... 295437.pdf)

Have you built a model for a mars sample return mission? Assuming you had a solar electric vehicle in mars orbit to rendezvous with, is it practical to use a quad for the main stage?

What about the "golden quad", made out of titanium, tungsten and composites and all that. Have you given that any consideration?

New update up guys!

It's another good one!



Rob

Where's the media ? Any pictures/videos of the tests, or the new place ?

As John said: "the Rocket Racing League has requested that we allow them to manage the public dissemination of information about the project, so I won’t be discussing it here. Since that has been a large part of our work lately, this update is a bit light."

That's essentially why there isn't any media -- almost all the media I've taken recently has to do with that project.

As for the new place, it's hard to get shots of the hangar-shop these days without including RRL stuff (there was one shot of the hangar as we were moving in in the previous update).

I find this to to be an unfortunate turn of events... RRL cannot "disseminate" the way John can. Nor, are they likely to be motivated to release much technical information.

Yeah, that's too bad. It's good that Armadillo's got some paying customers now, though. And the engine development is exciting. Looks like they are finally getting some nice workhorse engines. Ten thousand lbs of propellant in a month? Wow.

This is a (big) shame.... RRL, one point down...