Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

cIclops · 2006-11-10 19:20:56

The N-1 was a disaster because it clustered literally dozens of engines to make up for the lack of Soviet large engine technology, but large numbers of engines simply isn't reliable enough.

No and yes. In the case of the Quad vehicle that relies on its engine to land, having a second one is a pretty good idea. Too many adds weight and complexity. Having enough engines to cope with one out works provided the reliability of each engine is high enough. Shuttle can reach orbit on two engines out of three.

cIclops · 2006-12-06 08:48:31

Pixel inflight - latest Armadillo update

SpaceNut · 2006-12-06 09:41:16

With our paired tanks, if ullage gas started leaking out of one tank, propellant would be pushed over from the other side, and it could quickly exceed the ability of the gimbal to balance the vehicle. This is the primary weakness of the current quad architecture, and it didnâ€™t seem wise to tempt fate.

If the multiple tanks were made into a doughnut shape with the engine mounted inside the hole, it would have better balance.
The issue of 4 legs is one of the reasons that office chairs have 5 to allow for them not to tip so easily.

publiusr · 2006-12-08 15:45:23

Tacking landing legs to the propellant tanks was asking for trouble.
They should have been on wide legs with shocks. The throttle control wasn't fine enough--so it came down hard.

Small craft can get away from you really fast.

cIclops · 2007-01-04 08:35:09

Carmack saddles up

Armadillo update - January 4th, 2007

Designing for consistent manufacturability is a big deal for us now, because we are going to be flying vehicles with at least four engines this year, and we are looking at possible orbital vehicles with 64 or more modules.

Now 64 modules (engines?) is a lot of plumbing!

GCNRevenger · 2007-01-04 08:41:40

Now 64 modules (engines?) is a lot of plumbing!

It isn't when you are a pathetic garage hobby-ist on millionaire steroids.

With this kind of thinking, these guys are doomed.

Rxke · 2007-01-05 02:22:58

doomed.

Heehee, fitting for Carmack

cIclops · 2007-02-07 03:04:29

Update from Armadillo - 5 Feb 2007

We are going into production on five individual modules (two tanks + one engine) for our first run. We intend to fly each module as an independent unit, and we will probably fly a two module system in Titan II differentially gimbaled form, and a four module system in differentially throttled form with the gimbal actuators replaced with tie rods. We may also fly a four module system with four gimbaled engines, controlled by two independent electronics boxes for full system redundancy.

Video of latest test flight showing engine gimbal working (10MB)

cIclops · 2007-03-27 18:02:34

Checkout Armadillo's slick Space Access 2007 video

Excellent presentation of Carmack's old and new designs, test flights and team

GCNRevenger · 2007-03-27 21:16:07

When somebody from Armadillo gets killed, I imagine that the whole insane-utter-impractical-garage-tinker-project thing will abruptly end

John Creighton · 2007-03-27 22:30:43

When somebody from Armadillo gets killed, I imagine that the whole insane-utter-impractical-garage-tinker-project thing will abruptly end

Take some Prozac and think happy thoughts.

cIclops · 2007-04-30 15:59:23

Armadillo awarded research contract

DATE:01/05/07
SOURCE:Flight International
By Rob Coppinger
X Prize competitor Armadillo Aerospace has won a small US Air Force Research Laboratory deal to evaluate the Texan company's liquid-oxygen/ethanol rocket technology. The one-year, $100,000 contract is a small business innovation research (SBIR) Phase 1 award.
A small research and development team supported by computer-game entrepreneur John Carmack, Armadillo is developing computer-controlled LOX/ethanol rocket systems. It attempted to win the X Prize Lunar Lander Analog competition last October, but GPS navigation problems led the team to attempt a manual flight that ended in a crash.
"We will be commencing work on [the SBIR] imminently. Our proposal was based on evaluating the merits of our modular design to solve a variety of different solution spaces with extreme low cost and flexibility," says Armadillo vice-president Neil Milburn.
Armadillo is the second of two companies to be awarded an SBIR contract after attending an entrepreneurial space meeting with the US Air Force Research Laboratory in Colorado last month. Xcor Aerospace was awarded a $100,000 Phase 1 contract to design a suborbital demonstrator. The company has been working on liquid- oxygen/methane engines with Alliant Techsystems.

cjchandler · 2007-04-30 18:53:22

As for having a zillion small engines, I can't imagine that it would be effiecent, but if you had enough, you could still make it to orbit without some of them, so what you really need to count is how ofter they fail explosively. I really don't know how often that happens, but if it's only a small fraction of the time, then it might be a bit more fesible.

GCNRevenger · 2007-04-30 20:26:37

Nah, the USAF isn't shopping for launchers, its just shopping for RCS thruster technology. About the only choice on the table is either hypergolics or oxygen-alcohol. Hypergolics are nasty, so if the USAF can avoid them, they'd be happier.

cIclops · 2007-05-09 02:35:48

Carmack discusses reaching LEO using LO2/CH4

Vapor pressurized lox-methane has large advantages for upper stages, because you can burn the ullage gas all the way down to vacuum. An upper stage is going to probably use a 30:1 expansion ratio or so, since it will oeprate only in a vacuum. We may not make it, but the current plan of record is to try and build an extremely high mass ratio upper stage (about 15:1) using lox / methane at an initial pressure of only 100 psi or so. This would go on top of a straight up to 100km / straight down booster (that we will hopefully be using for commerical purposes) and provide the full 7.5 km/s or so of horizontal orbital velocity, and a slight altitude increase to LEO.
To start delivering payloads of significant mass, you would have enough upper stage modules that you would go agead and stage, making it a 3STO. Unless making the upper stage reusable turns out easier than expected, in which case you could do just fine even with a sub 1% GLOW to payload fraction.

cIclops · 2007-05-15 10:05:11

192 seconds of tethered flight (sufficient for Armadillo to win both Lunar challenges) - (27 MB mpg) - 12 May 2007

cIclops · 2007-06-03 23:33:22

Latest video of untethered flight including refueling (3:41 mins)

Looks like a fully compliant Level 1 Challenge flight.

New update from Carmack

The longest flight of the DC-X was 142 seconds. A tethered hover doesn’t really qualify as a “flight” in my book, but we will do the free flights soon enough. We already have the fastest demonstrated turn around time between flights by a huge margin. I don’t think we will ever fly Pixel to 3140 meters to exceed their altitude record, but we might (if a customer wants that flight profile, we can oblige).
It takes a few qualifiers, like “The longest flight of a terrestrial rocket powered VTVL”, but we are doing things now that nobody has ever done before. It still isn’t at the point where what we are doing has a clear value to enough people to make an obvious business case, but that is coming soon

cIclops · 2007-06-21 12:14:14

X PRIZE Foundation Announces Competitors for Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge (PDF) - 20 Jun 2007

Teams competing in the two-level NG-LLC include:
Acuity Technologies, Menlo Park, CA: The Acuity Technologies team is led by Robert Clark, who founded the company in 1992. The team, which has previously designed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for the Department of Defense, hopes that the light weight of their XHopper will give them an advantage in the Challenge.
Armadillo Aerospace, Mesquite, TX: As the only team to fly a vehicle in last year’s challenge, Armadillo may have a leg up on the competition. After their successful test flight on June 4, this team of volunteers is anxious to show what they can do at the 2007 Wirefly X PRIZE Cup. They are led by John Carmack, founder of id Software.
BonNova, Tarzana, CA: Allen Newcomb, an engineer who was part of the team that won the Ansari X PRIZE, helms this group. The team, which includes both a fiction author and an IndyCar crew member, founded the company for the sole purpose of winning the NG-LLC.
Masten Space Systems, Mojave, CA: With a team comprised almost entirely from Silicon Valley internet technology veterans, Masten Space Systems is currently working on launching tethered flights. The company, helmed by David Masten, is currently selling SodaSat opportunities to launch and recover very small payloads& for only $99.
Micro-Space, Denver, CO: The Micro-Space team, along with Armadillo Aerospace, is one of two Ansari X PRIZE teams to compete in the NG-LLC. Many of the components of Micro-Space NG-LLC vehicle have already been successfully flown as components of other high-powered rockets.
Paragon Labs, Denver, CO: This team is comprised of 16 industry experts from all of the necessary subsystem disciplines and led by Kevin Sagis, founder of Paragon. The team's vehicle is called Volkon.
SpeedUp, Laramie and Chugwater, WY: SpeedUp is the only team using a monopropellant engine for the Challenge. They are led by Robert Steinke, a former employee of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, and have long-term plans to sell low altitude rocket rides to the general public.
Unreasonable Rocket, Solana Beach, CA: Most of the work from this small team has been done by the father-son pair of Paul T. Breed and Paul A. Breed. The members of Unreasonable Rocket are determined to show that a small, family team can compete in serious rocketry, and are building their vehicles in a garage for under $200K.
The ninth team has requested to remain confidential. Their confidentiality period ends 60 days before the start of the competition at which time the X PRIZE Foundation can publicly announce the name of the team.

The competition will held 27 Oct 2007 at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, NM, USA.

cIclops · 2007-07-03 09:35:33

John Carmack's post about lunar flights - 3 Jul 2007

I currently favor lox-methane for a short lunar trip that is launched by a single booster. With vacuum all around, just some reflective foil should allow lox-methane to store for a week.
I do think about peroxide, or possibly even nitrous, as an oxidizer for storable space propulsion modules that may be assembled one at a time by a great many launches, where they might need to sit around for a long time. Also for mars missions...
I haven't done the detailed analysis, but I think that our current electronics are fine for keeping a vehicle stable through the various required burns to and from the moon, they would just need to be initialized before each one with a star tracker, or more likely, manually with a sextant. Higher precision accelerometers for burn termination and a radar rangefinder for landing would probably also be necessary. Getting tracking from a government radar would help a lot.
I do want to go to the moon, but I'm not in any particular hurry. I think we can bootstrap our way through routine orbital operations, at which point heading for the moon won't seem all that ridiculous.
John Carmack

Has John been playing too much Quake 4?

cIclops · 2007-07-16 05:42:55

Armadillo Aerospace - July 14, 2007 notes

It took me an appallingly long time to get the 3-axis attitude values from the GPS into the correct reference frame for the existing flight control software. It was frustrating having to leave the box and antennas propped up at different angles out in the middle of the parking lot while working on the software inside, but the worst part was that I felt that I had gone through every possible orientations of the quaternion output before I finally just switched over to the Euler angle output and eventually got it working. I’m supposed to be good at all that 3D math. Sigh

New module design - tethered test flights - (mpg video 2:26 mins 20 MB download)

SpaceNut · 2007-08-22 19:40:14

The front-runner for a $2 million NASA competition to build mock lunar landers has lost one of its two main vehicles in a fiery crash. Texel burst into flames after it Crashes, destroys rocket ahead of X Prize contest

The event will be held on 27 and 28 October at the X Prize Cup in Alamogordo, New Mexico, US.
Nine teams have signed up for the competition, but Armadillo Aerospace of Mesquite, Texas, US, is by far the leading contender for the prize.

The nine registered teams are:

• Armadillo Aerospace of Mesquite, Texas

• Acuity Technologies of Menlo Park, California

• BonNova of Tarzana, California

• Masten Space Systems of Mojave, California

• Micro-Space of Denver, Colorado

• Paragon Labs of Denver, Colorado

• Speed-Up of Laramie, Wyoming

• Unreasonable Rocket of Solana Beach, California

• A team that has asked the X Prize Foundation to keep its identity confidential temporarily

John Creighton · 2007-08-23 00:36:30

Armadillo Aerospace - July 14, 2007 notes
It took me an appallingly long time to get the 3-axis attitude values from the GPS into the correct reference frame for the existing flight control software. It was frustrating having to leave the box and antennas propped up at different angles out in the middle of the parking lot while working on the software inside, but the worst part was that I felt that I had gone through every possible orientations of the quaternion output before I finally just switched over to the Euler angle output and eventually got it working. I’m supposed to be good at all that 3D math. Sigh
New module design - tethered test flights - (mpg video 2:26 mins 20 MB download)

That's kind of amusing

cIclops · 2007-09-05 02:49:46

Armadillo update 4 Sep 2007

Bad news: test flight (video 1:12 mins)

After I terminated thrust, the vehicle coasted to an apogee of about 20 feet, and fell to the concrete. It made a fireball that would make any Hollywood movie proud, but the vehicle didn't launch itself back off the ground, make an earth-shattering kaboom, or throw any shrapnel. The fire truck moved into range of the crash and hosed down the vehicle until the fire was extinguished.

Good news: test flight (video 1:51 mins)

The first flight last week was probably the smoothest hover we have ever had, potentially due to using the IMU as a leveling inclinometer on the modules during gimbal calibration.
The chamber is perfect, and the igniter didn’t erode at all. The graphite insulating ring was not eroded at all, and still held firmly in place. Everything looked flawless.

SpaceNut · 2007-10-19 06:55:03

Lunar Lander Teams Throttle Up for Cash

The Challenge is a major head-turning event at the upcoming Holloman Air & Space Expo in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The countdown clock is ticking as the Oct. 27-28 expo draws closer, staged in collaboration with the Wirefly X Prize Cup.
At this year's Cup, the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge will see rocketeers vying for $2 million in prizes that are on the line - cash made available through NASA's Centennial Challenges Program. That space agency funding is focused on speeding up commercial development of technology that can ferry cargo and humans between the moon's surface and lunar orbit.
The roster of rocket teams that entered this year's Challenge:
Acuity Technologies of Menlo Park, California; Armadillo Aerospace of Mesquite, Texas; BonNova of Tarzana, California; Masten Space Systems based in Mojave, California; Micro-Space of Denver, Colorado; Paragon Labs of Denver, Colorado; SpeedUp of Laramie and Chugwater, Wyoming; and Unreasonable Rocket based in Solana Beach, California.

cIclops · 2007-10-22 12:05:54

Module test flight - video 1:45 mins - 21 Oct 2007

Virtually flawless flight, Armadillo are in great shape for the X Prize Cup!

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#26 2006-11-10 19:20:56

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#27 2006-12-06 08:48:31

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#28 2006-12-06 09:41:16

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#29 2006-12-08 15:45:23

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#30 2007-01-04 08:35:09

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#31 2007-01-04 08:41:40

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#32 2007-01-05 02:22:58

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#33 2007-02-07 03:04:29

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#34 2007-03-27 18:02:34

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#35 2007-03-27 21:16:07

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#36 2007-03-27 22:30:43

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#37 2007-04-30 15:59:23

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#38 2007-04-30 18:53:22

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#39 2007-04-30 20:26:37

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#40 2007-05-09 02:35:48

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#41 2007-05-15 10:05:11

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#42 2007-06-03 23:33:22

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#43 2007-06-21 12:14:14

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#44 2007-07-03 09:35:33

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#45 2007-07-16 05:42:55

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#46 2007-08-22 19:40:14

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#47 2007-08-23 00:36:30

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#48 2007-09-05 02:49:46

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#49 2007-10-19 06:55:03

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

#50 2007-10-22 12:05:54

Re: Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge

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