Official Armadillo Q&A thread

i know mr Carmack would be well aware of the british efforts with HTP from the 50's to 70's ....
having lifted thier first Satellite the rocket engineers found that politicians
were too dense to follow.

We had really hoped to get off one good altitude flight before running dry, but we just didn’t make it. We have been in conservation mode for months now, leaving a 4,000 lbf monoprop and 1,000 lbf biprop engine sitting on the floor, because we wanted to save all our peroxide for flight tests instead of engine tests. The biggest strategic error I have made was not going ahead and becoming an anchor tenant for X-L Space systems instead of letting them shut down. It was a tough decision, because we would have had to be purchasing peroxide for nearly a year before we really needed the extra volume, which would have meant sitting on a big storage tank. At the time, I also still thought it was going to be reasonably easy to deal with FMC once they realized we were a serious customer making >$100,000 orders.

Our Degussa sales rep was ready to sell to us, but once it went to their legal department, we hit the same wall as with FMC. We have made in-person visits to their corporate offices, and we are just finishing up a full presentation for FMC and Degussa about our company, our plans, and why it is in their best interest to sell us peroxide, but there is no firm list of actions that we can take that will guarantee a proper response from them.

I am funding a small operator to begin running a concentrator for us, which will get us back in the air, but they can’t possibly provide the quantity we need for the X-Prize flights (10,000 gallons or so for the full development program).

After much debate, we have decided to do the hover tests of the new propulsion system with the system suspended from a crane. We originally planned to hack on some temporary landing gear and fly it like our previous vehicles, but the bottom bulkhead is so tightly packed that it would turn into a bigger project than it is worth. Joseph’s Bobcat is fine for our drop tests, but it can’t get enough total height for a decent hover test. We talked about fabricating various tower and cable arrangements, but just renting a small crane for a few hundred dollars turns out to be much easier and cheaper.

The suspense is killing me... how did Tuesday's hover test go? Or has Bad Stuff happened?

kno3, I think they're using a 50% peroxide/methanol mix. The advantage of methanol is that it burns catalytically with hot platinum, which IIRC is their current catalyst. All the information you could want is available in their news archive at http://armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News , although sometimes they've changed approach so many times it's hard to figure out what's current I may try and come up with a sketch of the current arrangement at some point from what I can glean from their notes, but don't expect it anytime soon

Or has Bad Stuff happened?