X Prize and John Carmack

Anonymous Coward writes "ABC News is running a story ostensibly about the X Prize but in reality they only talk about John Carmack and his teams efforts to win the prize (or at least compete). Quote: 'Some people have commented that I am trying very hard to make aerospace like software, and that's the truth," he says. "If we looked at what we do in software, if we could only compile and test our program once a year, we'd never get anything done. But that's the mode of aerospace.' "

TechTV

[Cutriss]

It should be noted that they're only carrying show notes, and that the interview with John Carmack was actually carried out by TechTV's Tech Live, and was run last night at 8 PM EST, and again twice this morning.

It will air again tonight at 6 PM EST.

Re:what's an X-Prize?

[Cade144]

Dude, it's this. [xprize.org]

Then != Than

[blunte]

Hate to be picky, but damn, please learn this.

Then [reference.com] != Than [reference.com]

And yeah, parent post is a troll.

Never trust AC reposts!

[RobertB-DC]

Moderators, please watch for these signs:

* Claims that a server like abcnews.com, cnn.com, microsoft.com, etc is "slowing down"

* Anonymous Coward posts with no reference to the poster's true identity

* Lines like so he can cart around cocket parts

Two Words

[tommasz]

Dick Rutan [dickrutan.com].

Its about the testing methodology

[mattgreen]

Read the article for once people instead of knee-jerk reacting to an analogy.

Carmack merely wants to improve the method by which rockets are constructed. He says he starts small and builds his way up, rather than constructing the rocket and control system and then working for six months to work out the problems.

This is a well-known software development technique, and I don't see why it wouldn't be generalizable to other fields. If anything it should inspire more confidence in the creator at least.

not really comparable to NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

What most of these articles tend to obscure is that NASA flights and X-Prize flights are really doing different things. NASA is directed almost entirely at orbital spaceflight and beyond. The X-Prize is directed at sub-orbital flight. The physics of orbital spaceflight effectively require the use of large, multi-stage rockets with very high speeds. Sub-orbital flight does not. The X-Prize appears to be aimed at opening up the sub-orbital domain, which has been largely neglected so far.

Re:Cost

[WolfWithoutAClause]

I'm definitely not buying a house in its flight-path.

I don't think that FAA will let John launch if there is a house in the flight-path. Besides, John will be launching pretty much vertically- he's not going for orbit (which means going sideways very fast); he's only going for 100km (which means going straight-up very fast).

Re:Cost

[GooberToo]

Correct! Not only are markups on jets very high but anything that is regulated by the FAA is heavily insured for liability. This, in turn, is happily passed along to everything you purchase for planes.

My father owns a small plane. Items which should cost $5-$10 for a car often cost $90 - $100 for a plane. You'd be amazed at the amount you pay for aviation insurance. My father pays something like $750.00/mo in insurance and he's been flying since before I was born.

Long story short, insurance and especially liability insurance adds a significant cost to all things aviation.

Things I like about Armadillo Aerospace's program

[Thagg]

I admire and respect Carmack's space program. He is doing a number of innovative things.

His program of building control systems and then big rockets is mentioned in the article. It's unfortunate that so far whenever they've tried to launch a rocket the computer has immediately crashed -- but they seem to have a handle on why this is happening and the current computer construction and mounting system is far better than the previous ones. He also has a tremendous amount of telemetry, and analyzes the inevitable failures exhaustively.

They is now using a fairly innovative mix of medium-strength hydrogen peroxide and some fuel to power the rocket. Other people (and Armadillo, previously) have used highly purified hydrogen peroxide, but that is hard to get (and expensive) in the quantities that they need. This mixed monopropellant has a higher specific impulse, too.

They are using a innovative final recovery system -- the ship lands nose first on a long aluminum cone that crushes to absorb energy. Unique, cheap, and innovative -- if funny-looking.

The thing I like the most, though, is his website http://www.armadilloaerospace.com [armadilloaerospace.com] (it will surely be slashdotted for the next couple of days.) Carmack is religious about posting the results of the last weeks efforts, warts and all. It appears that he receives substantial insight from people responding to these progress reports (apparently the mixed monopropellant research was instigated by somebody posting results of German WW2 torpedo experiments.) This kind of openness is quite rare in aerospace research.

Anyway, all the best to Carmack et al. I think that Rutan's Spaceship One project may win the X prize, but maybe not -- his system depends on a lot of planning and simulation being accurate, whe re Armadillo can respin the project many ways if things don't work out the first (or second) try.

thad

Re:That quote

[DarkSarin]

Actually, having just worked on building one, they do just fine. The issue is NOT building in all out of concrete, if so CA would not allow any concrete buildings. The way to deal with seismic activity is rooted in your foundation and whatnot. If you handle that correctly, then you don't need to worry about the concrete, which has much better structural integrity than wood, even the manufactured tgi's.

There are other advantages to ICF's though. You can build the entire walls and roof without any inside walls, and then do your inner wall structure. This means that you can change the layout if you want.

The ICF's also have much better insulation than is possible with a stick frame.

Re:Software Design *most definitely* != Rocket Des

[L7_]

Obviously, you never worked on the software portion of an aerospace project.

I know from personal experience that the test-patch-test-patch cycle is alive and well in all the software products produced by the aerospace corporations that I have worked at.

The design of the product like a airplane or ship or whatever itself might need alot of upfront resources, but I will tell you that there are multimillion dollar maintenance contracts on aerospace software maintenance. Fixing bugs that got by QA.

This is for the software. Not the hardware.

And yes, these are Engineers. And there is a QA process, its just that it seems software is much more complex and is therefore much harder to test.

Re:Cost

[John Carmack]

Just building the vehicle costs less than $100k, most of the money is in building multiple iterations of everything as you figure out exactly how you actually need to spend the money:

$ 6k 850 gallon fiberglass tank
$ 2k High pressure carbon fiber pressurant tank and regulator
$ 1k Honeycomb composite panels
$ 5k Aluminum fabrication for cabin
$15k Redundant parachutes, drogues, drogue cannons, releases
$13k Fiber optic gyro based IMU
$ 8k Unrestricted (supersonic / high altitude) GPS
$ 2k PC104 systems
$ 5k video, audio, and data communications
$20k Engine machining, catalysts, laser cut plates
$ 5k Plumbing, valves, etc
$ 5k Fastblock external insulation

For powered landings instead of parachute landings, delete the parachutes and add:

$ 4k Laser altimeter
$ 4k Wire rope isolator landing gear

You could trivially spend an order of magnitude more by just using "space certified" versions of everything, but the important point is that standard industrial versions of many things are perfectly adequate. In many cases, todays standard industrial practice is far ahead of the best that could be done at any price in the early sixties.

This is all with free labor for assembly and testing, but that is still only a couple hundred man hours for a full vehicle. We are expecting to destroy the first vehicle in some (unmanned) testing mishap along the way, and build another one mostly from scratch. That will take less than two months, depending on lead times for some items.

John Carmack