MSS Q&A Thread

Congratulations on starting up flight testing! We Armadillos have been eager to see you get to this point -- we want to see other guys hovering too!

Thanks Matt! You guys have been always been a great support for us. Here's to hoping we can get everything ready and debugged in time to give you Armadillos some real competition this October. Happy flyin!

~Jon

Hi Jon

Nice to seen some decent armadillo competition!! I really enjoy the way you (and armadillo) keep us informed on your development.

Since powering up the engines and keeping the vehicle stable seems a problem for now, why don't you try to power up all engines without liftoff on a stable launch platform? just a little throttle without flying and after that maybe a little hop or something like that?

Well, looking forward for nice stable flight (and some more nice swings on the tether)

cheers,

c

Well, after a flurry of tests a couple of weeks ago, things have gone silent at the Masten blog site, masten-space.com/blog. any testing going on?
Hope nothing too bad happened!
- J

A brief update has been posted on the blog
http://masten-space.com/blog/?p=122

Abit of wear and tear on the vehicle frame, hope all is sweet and it stands up to many more tests to come!


Iain
-------------------
www.kiwi2space.co.nz

Hey guys,

I know its been a while, but here's our latest posting. Sorry, not much in the way of eye-candy.

http://masten-space.com/blog/?p=127

~Jon

Thanks for the post Jon!

When you say

Are you thinking about 2008? If so will we see some eye-candy posts?

Thanks again
Rob

Actually Dave was the one who wrote the update.



Well, we are "thinking" about competing in 2008, but if we do so or not depends a lot on how things go over the next several months. But either way, we'll be posting eye-candy from time-to-time as we have something to post.

~Jon

Hey all, just wanted to announce the end of flight testing for XA-0.1 (after a fashion)....

http://masten-space.com/blog/?p=128

Seriously though, after looking over the damage, we realized that while we could probably have XA-0.1 patched back up and back under the tether within a week, that it probably wasn't worth it. We've learned a lot from the vehicle and the design process, but there's a certain point where continuing down a given path isn't the best investment of time or resources.

We're in the process of formalizing our plans for moving forward, and should have more details up on the blog in the next few days/weeks.

~Jon

Jon, thanks for the link!
Great picture! well from our stand point!
Any videos or other media available?
Good luck to you guys!

You say you could get it under the tether in a week. Are you tempted to really push it hard with the mentality that if it blows up then you havnt lost anything njow?

As the post says, we should have some better video soon. Our video camera didn't have a very good angle, but we there was a film crew on site that had a much better shot. We're waiting to get a digitized copy from them. Hopefully we'll have something to put up in the next few days.



Not really. We have a finite amount of money and man-hours we can throw at things, and spending more money on trying to get XA-0.1 back together looks like a very poor utilization of our resources. We've got some plans that we'll go more into soon, but at least for right now, we're probably just going to scavenge all the still useful stuff off of the vehicle (which is really most of the hardware), and let it rest in peace.

~Jon

There's a new blog entry in the Masten blog: http://masten-space.com/blog/?p=129

It's good to hear they they are making progress even though it is not in metal but on paper.

Its been acouple of months there guys since your last blog.
Whats the latest, anything new to report?



Iain

What do you know after just making that post they update their blog!!

http://masten-space.com/blog/?p=130


Iain

Well there you go.

We'll be updating the blog on a more regular basis in the future. I like the smaller, single topic posts better than the monthly all-in-one style, so I plan to post more often. Jon will be posting as well.