John Carmack: I\'m back

John Carmack posted in the forum, that he’s back:
http://www.xprizenews.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1216

Sorry for disappearing for so long.

Yes, the last six months have seen less effort going to Armadillo than before, but it has been due to external forces – a new baby at home, and a new project at Id. The drive to complete things is as strong as ever at Armadillo, and more of my time will shift back to rockets when all the technologies are mature for the new Id project. In the meantime, we still work and make progress every single week, even if I don’t get the updates out as often.

It was a hard decision to walk away from the mixed monoprop experience base, but a lot of the lessons learned and skills built in the last year will still transfer over to the new lox vehicle. We need to work out our cryogenic handling procedures, gimbal actuators, roll thrusters, and throttleable biprop engine, then we will be putting everything together into a test vehicle again.

We flew four different vehicles in the last twelve months (and crashed three of them), it won’t be all that long before we are back in the air, hopefully without the engine related problems that have plagued us.

I will be at Space Access ’05 at the end of the month, and I recommend it to anyone considering attending.

John Carmack