Dagondanum writes "Armadillo Aerospace has officially won the 2009 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge Level 2, on a rainy day at Caddo Mills, Texas. Reports came in from various locations during the day and spectators posted videos and images using social networking tools such as Twitter. The Level 2 prize requires the rocket to fly for 180 seconds before landing precisely on a simulated lunar surface constructed with craters and boulders. The minimum flight times are calculated so that the Level 2 mission closely simulates the power needed to perform a real descent from lunar orbit down to the surface of the Moon. First place is a prize of $1 million while second is $500,000."
It does indeed move incredibly smoothly. How does it steady itself? It most certainly looks top-heavy. Are there separate thrusters keeping it from tipping, or does its main engine have thrust-vectoring?
I should have watched the end of the video first: around the three minutes mark you can clearly see the plume moving from side to side while the machine stays almost still relative to the ground.
Yep, the main engine is thrust vectoring. Roll control is handled by small cold-gas thrusters that use the same helium supply that pressurizes the main propellant tanks.
Note also that "it most certainly looks top-heavy" is actually an example of the pendulum fallacy [wikipedia.org]. It doesn't matter whether the center of mass is far above, a little above, or below the rocket engine, you need active stabilization on a hovering rocket. (On a rocket flying a vertical trajectory, passive stabilization via fins will suffice to hold it basically straight.)
Maybe they need to find a way to turn something like into a commercializable product, to reap more rewards from their fine work.
I wonder if there's some kind of dual-use alternative market for something like this? How about making a small miniaturized version that could be marketed as a toy for adult geeks? (aka "overgrown kids")
Cmon - wouldn't you like to have your own miniature thrust-vectored hovering lander thingie floating around your office?
You could power the toy version with lighter fluid. Some kind of chip would control the thrust vectoring, and some tiny microturbine would act as the turbopump for the rocket motor.
Hey, why not? It would be cooler than these R/C micro-helicopters
A really cool design would allow you to just plug in an ordinary Bic lighter into it as a ready-made fuel tank.
A fancy version could even have a small camera onboard, and maybe send a video feed back to your laptop via bluetooth. There are R/C helicopters that ha
With the way the thrust cone wandered all over the place as they were landing, showing them compensating for things as they brought it down- I'm suspecting a bit of Gyro stabilization coupled with thrust vectoring for directional changes.
The corrections they were making near the end are so that they land as close as possible to the center of the pad, because that counts in determining who gets first place if another team also wins the challenge.
Living in Texas and following the tweets about it, I believe it was actually fairly windy yesterday. It was stormy and rainy across the state, and I know that they were much more worried about the rain than the wind.
That engine can thrust and vector a lot, and Dallas/Plano (their lab) and west Oklahoma (a common test site) aren't exactly known for their stellar weather, so they've always had to deal with wind.
Sadly I have no concrete numbers, but 10 mph seems like a pretty reasonable limit based on the env
Perhaps, just perhaps, this will land on the moon within 2 years. That would be a spectacle to see. I think that if I were Apple or Ellison, I might consider funding it. ANother one might be Paul Allen. Allen has always been on the cutting edge of tech (and unlike his previous partner, not stealing it). Hopefully, he considers talking to carmack and getting this going there. Something like would be likely to spark the kids a bit more.
I think the Google Lunar x-prize is pointless. Its now more or less 5 years to it expire, but the full sum is only paid out if someone makes the trip before the end of 2012.
The orginal x-prize took 8 years for someone to win, and that prize had a strong commercial (space tourism) appeal, while the Google prize have not.
Then maybe the time limit should be extended. And perhaps it should be geared more towards research teams from academia rather than commercial industries.
First off, this is a much loftier goal (far more difficult than suborbital space flight), so naturally it will take longer to achieve. That's to be expected.
Secondly, these type of high-risk, low (immediate) commercial return ventures are inherently unappealing to private commercial industries. Things like space exploration and basic research are long-term investments in the future of humanity. Private industries prefer short-term investments with immediate returns. That's why government agencies like NASA and publicly-funded research organizations like CERN are needed. Otherwise these tasks would never be undertaken.
Lastly, it would probably speed up the process (of returning to the moon) if NASA hadn't decided to take all that publicly-funded space research/technology and auction it off to the highest bidder, basically turning it into private research (to be guarded as trade secrets) and proprietary technologies that are inaccessible to public researchers. I mean, we went from having no space program to landing on the moon in just under 11 years. Returning to the moon 4 decades later in 5 to 7 years really isn't that unreasonable—given that we're able to build on previously acquired knowledge and experience and actually have the motivation as a society to return to the moon.
The Google X-Prize is silly. The hard part of that prize is not the lander. The hard parts are getting your lander there in the first place, and the requisite high-bandwidth communications link back to Earth. Guidance when you can't use GPS is tricky, but easier than those two. (Detail work can be done inertially, but you also need a star tracker or similar baseline reference to work from.)
Any serious contender for the GXP needs to be planning to do a couple test flights if they want a serious hope of w
They seemed to be attempting to land on the X, but gave up in the end. Having to put the thing out with a fire extinguisher is a bit worrying too. Otherwise, looks good.
However, the article really shouldn't say "claims prize" when they just didn't fail. The comp isn't even over yet!
It's the first one to accomplish the ground rules correctly that wins the purse in question. This means there's a second prize shot at Level 1 and the two Level 1 ones were up for grabs. Now only the Level 1 and Level 2 second prizes are free. They did, in fact, win first place, being first at the Level 2 pass of things. It's only not over in the sense of all the purses not being won.
That's not correct. First, they already won Level 1 last year, so there's only 2nd place of Level 1 available for grabs. This year the rules were changed a bit so that each team can try for the challenge at their home bases, and only Armadillo has so far. There are 2 other competitors that have yet to fly. If they succeed at the Level 2 then they will determine who gets first place by looking at who landed the closest to the center of the pad. So even though Armadillo succeeded, the other teams can still do better in theory and claim first place.
It may be standard practise to put it out with an extinguisher. I was reading about a recent test of a much larger rocket (I forget the details), and it was suggested that it was doused with CO2 at the end not because it wouldn't burn out on its own, but to preserve the engine in whatever state it was at the end of the burn to allow more information to be extracted from it.
As for the flames needing a fire extinguisher... Heh... I strongly suspect you'd have needed something along those lines for the primary thrusters on the Moon mission or the Space Shuttle rockets. Just because you cut off fuel flow, doesn't mean you don't have fuel still burning in the combustion chamber- you're just not supplying it any more when you do that. It's not like a jet engine or a car engine in several ways. And, I suspect that they put the fire out because of safety concerns rather than ne
1) They landed on the X (well, with the X within the space defined by the legs of the craft). In fact, the craft didn't move much horizontally in the last 30 seconds or so...it pretty much hovered over the X for long enough to meet the 180 sec limit.
2) The flames were from the simulated lunar surface that it lit on fire, not the craft itself. If I were them, I wouldn't be too concerned with lighting the surface of the moon on fire...it seems unlikely.
3) The contest is run in stages, and there are prizes for being the first (and second) team to finish each stage, so they did in fact claim a prize for being the first to finish stage 2 of the contest. Yes, there is still a stage 3, and there is a separate prize for being the first to finish stage 3.
Depending on the composition of a material it can burn in space but I doubt a moon/planet that has a massive quantity of oxidizer and fuel sources on the surface would stay that way very long. (All it would take would be heat generated by an impact, etc. to potentially set it off)
The flames were from the simulated lunar surface that it lit on fire, not the craft itself.
OK, but the simulated lunar surface looks a lot like concrete. Also, they seem to have some inside their engine, as that's where the flames are coming from;)
Are you sure the flames were from the simulated lunar surface? It seemed to be coming out of the bottom of the rocket booster and then shooting towards the ground (3:15 in the first video). I think someone mentioned this was done intentionally to freeze the engine's state for further data collection purposes.
Though it does look like the safety personnel sprays the extinguisher at both the lunar pad and the booster.
First off, the starting pad and the lunar pad are 2 different locations. The first is a normal flat concrete launch pad. The second is supposed to be a "simulated" lunar surface with rocks and craters. And if you look from the top-down view (around 2:39 in the first video), you can clearly see the "X"—that don't look like no rebar I ever seen. In fact, it looks suspiciously like the highly stylized, and quite distinct, "X" in the X-Prize logo.
It's true; I hadn't thought of whether it was a problem on the moon. It just jumped out at me, as an inelegance in the design, which usually suggests that the whole thing could be done better. I mean, seriously... flames from the engine, lapping around the rest of the craft? It might still work, but it's far from pretty.
If they want a shot at faking another moonlanding they really need to hire a better set designer, that didn't look anything like the moon!
I had a great set for my faked Moon landing. It looked perfect as the rocket came down on its parachute! For some reason folks said it didn't look like a real Moon landing - go figure!
I had a great set for my faked Moon landing. It looked perfect as the rocket came down on its parachute! For some reason folks said it didn't look like a real Moon landing - go figure!
You silly, the parachute was too big! Everything is lighter on Moon, you need a smaller parachute.
Cross winds would surely be vastly more significant, but rain would be pretty much irrelevant when you consider the mass of the craft and the amount of thrust involved.
Surely that alone invalidates a simulated moon landing? (as would any cross winds)
That and the 6x stronger gravity...
I'd think doing the same thing on the Moon would be a lot easier - getting it there, and ensuring it works 100% of the time without the intervention of a man with a screwdriver... not so much.
If manned/unmanned missions to the moon become more common there is always the possibility of a limited GPS system being put in place. Might make navigating unmanned missions easier as well as locating the lander after a longer trip. (Although the later could be taken care of by a tracking beacon as long as line of sight doesn't become a significant issue)
Definitely. And it did it quite well, actually. What makes it more impressive is the nature of the design- they're not using the same class of tech as NASA and other space agencies have used in the past. It's capable of the same, but it's cheaper and intrinsically more robust- dual systems, etc.
Actually, the winds are minimal today in this area. I wouldn't know whether they're up over in Caddo Mills, but it's been a slow, steady, soaking rain for the last two days in the area with no appreciable winds (Caddo Mills is roughly 20 or so minutes to the North and East of Dallas along I-30 in-between Rockwall and Greenville.).
Low or no winds would be close enough to the conditions for a test for the purposes of the prizes.
This is really good nerd news. Does anyone know of a more detailed account of the event?
I used to follow their weekly news updates on all their internal progress and that was really enjoyable. However, it seems that lately they quit posting almost entirely, the last update was for May (http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home). I really wish there other technologically oriented blogs that detail development and results the way they do (did?).
The summary is misleading. They didn't actually win the $1 million yet. Masten Space and Unreasonable Rocket are both going to have a crack at the prize and have until October 31 to best Armadillo's performance.
If you've got a "build a little, sell a little" mindset like John Carmack, sure. He's actually said he hasn't spent more than $1 million on Armadillo.. and last year he let slip that the group is actually profitable already. With the prize money they intend to put on a few more people fulltime.
Woohooo (Score:5, Insightful)
Cool.
The flight looked amazingly stable.
GO Armadillo Aerospace. I'm just impressed and pleased that they made it.
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Re:Woohooo (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Woohooo (Score:5, Informative)
Yep, the main engine is thrust vectoring. Roll control is handled by small cold-gas thrusters that use the same helium supply that pressurizes the main propellant tanks.
Note also that "it most certainly looks top-heavy" is actually an example of the pendulum fallacy [wikipedia.org]. It doesn't matter whether the center of mass is far above, a little above, or below the rocket engine, you need active stabilization on a hovering rocket. (On a rocket flying a vertical trajectory, passive stabilization via fins will suffice to hold it basically straight.)
Parent
Market It As a Toy! (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe they need to find a way to turn something like into a commercializable product, to reap more rewards from their fine work.
I wonder if there's some kind of dual-use alternative market for something like this? How about making a small miniaturized version that could be marketed as a toy for adult geeks? (aka "overgrown kids")
Cmon - wouldn't you like to have your own miniature thrust-vectored hovering lander thingie floating around your office?
Carmack's geek
Power It With a Bic Lighter! (Score:2)
Hey, why not? It would be cooler than these R/C micro-helicopters
A really cool design would allow you to just plug in an ordinary Bic lighter into it as a ready-made fuel tank.
A fancy version could even have a small camera onboard, and maybe send a video feed back to your laptop via bluetooth. There are R/C helicopters that ha
Re: (Score:2)
With the way the thrust cone wandered all over the place as they were landing, showing them compensating for things as they brought it down- I'm suspecting a bit of Gyro stabilization coupled with thrust vectoring for directional changes.
Re:Woohooo (Score:5, Funny)
left arrow, left arrow,left arrow,right arrow,up,up,Up,UP,UP!,UP, shit, we made it.
Parent
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Would've been easier with just entering "idspispopd". Or is this already version 2?
Actually it was (Score:4, Funny)
set cg_bobroll "0"
Parent
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Lunar Lander [wikipedia.org] was made by Atari, not Konami.
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I kind of doubt the thing will be in an oxygen atmosphere on the moon, so there won't be any need to douse it in CO2 after landing.
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Like OH MY GOD
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The corrections they were making near the end are so that they land as close as possible to the center of the pad, because that counts in determining who gets first place if another team also wins the challenge.
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Living in Texas and following the tweets about it, I believe it was actually fairly windy yesterday. It was stormy and rainy across the state, and I know that they were much more worried about the rain than the wind.
That engine can thrust and vector a lot, and Dallas/Plano (their lab) and west Oklahoma (a common test site) aren't exactly known for their stellar weather, so they've always had to deal with wind.
Sadly I have no concrete numbers, but 10 mph seems like a pretty reasonable limit based on the env
Google x-prize? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The orginal x-prize took 8 years for someone to win, and that prize had a strong commercial (space tourism) appeal, while the Google prize have not.
Re:Google x-prize? (Score:4, Insightful)
Then maybe the time limit should be extended. And perhaps it should be geared more towards research teams from academia rather than commercial industries.
First off, this is a much loftier goal (far more difficult than suborbital space flight), so naturally it will take longer to achieve. That's to be expected.
Secondly, these type of high-risk, low (immediate) commercial return ventures are inherently unappealing to private commercial industries. Things like space exploration and basic research are long-term investments in the future of humanity. Private industries prefer short-term investments with immediate returns. That's why government agencies like NASA and publicly-funded research organizations like CERN are needed. Otherwise these tasks would never be undertaken.
Lastly, it would probably speed up the process (of returning to the moon) if NASA hadn't decided to take all that publicly-funded space research/technology and auction it off to the highest bidder, basically turning it into private research (to be guarded as trade secrets) and proprietary technologies that are inaccessible to public researchers. I mean, we went from having no space program to landing on the moon in just under 11 years. Returning to the moon 4 decades later in 5 to 7 years really isn't that unreasonable—given that we're able to build on previously acquired knowledge and experience and actually have the motivation as a society to return to the moon.
Parent
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The Google X-Prize is silly. The hard part of that prize is not the lander. The hard parts are getting your lander there in the first place, and the requisite high-bandwidth communications link back to Earth. Guidance when you can't use GPS is tricky, but easier than those two. (Detail work can be done inertially, but you also need a star tracker or similar baseline reference to work from.)
Any serious contender for the GXP needs to be planning to do a couple test flights if they want a serious hope of w
good... so far (Score:5, Interesting)
They seemed to be attempting to land on the X, but gave up in the end. Having to put the thing out with a fire extinguisher is a bit worrying too. Otherwise, looks good.
However, the article really shouldn't say "claims prize" when they just didn't fail. The comp isn't even over yet!
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Actually... The rules are a bit interesting...
It's the first one to accomplish the ground rules correctly that wins the purse in question. This means there's a second prize shot at Level 1 and the two Level 1 ones were up for grabs. Now only the Level 1 and Level 2 second prizes are free. They did, in fact, win first place, being first at the Level 2 pass of things. It's only not over in the sense of all the purses not being won.
Re:good... so far (Score:5, Informative)
That's not correct. First, they already won Level 1 last year, so there's only 2nd place of Level 1 available for grabs. This year the rules were changed a bit so that each team can try for the challenge at their home bases, and only Armadillo has so far. There are 2 other competitors that have yet to fly. If they succeed at the Level 2 then they will determine who gets first place by looking at who landed the closest to the center of the pad. So even though Armadillo succeeded, the other teams can still do better in theory and claim first place.
Parent
Re:good... so far (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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As for the flames needing a fire extinguisher... Heh... I strongly suspect you'd have needed something along those lines for the primary thrusters on the Moon mission or the Space Shuttle rockets. Just because you cut off fuel flow, doesn't mean you don't have fuel still burning in the combustion chamber- you're just not supplying it any more when you do that. It's not like a jet engine or a car engine in several ways. And, I suspect that they put the fire out because of safety concerns rather than ne
Re:good... so far (Score:5, Informative)
Wow...so many things wrong in so few sentences.
1) They landed on the X (well, with the X within the space defined by the legs of the craft). In fact, the craft didn't move much horizontally in the last 30 seconds or so...it pretty much hovered over the X for long enough to meet the 180 sec limit.
2) The flames were from the simulated lunar surface that it lit on fire, not the craft itself. If I were them, I wouldn't be too concerned with lighting the surface of the moon on fire...it seems unlikely.
3) The contest is run in stages, and there are prizes for being the first (and second) team to finish each stage, so they did in fact claim a prize for being the first to finish stage 2 of the contest. Yes, there is still a stage 3, and there is a separate prize for being the first to finish stage 3.
Parent
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I wouldn't be too concerned with lighting the surface of the moon on fire...it seems unlikely.
That's a bit of an understatement, considering that the moon has no athmosphere, let alone one out of oxygen. ;)
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Depending on the composition of a material it can burn in space but I doubt a moon/planet that has a massive quantity of oxidizer and fuel sources on the surface would stay that way very long. (All it would take would be heat generated by an impact, etc. to potentially set it off)
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OK, but the simulated lunar surface looks a lot like concrete. Also, they seem to have some inside their engine, as that's where the flames are coming from ;)
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Are you sure the flames were from the simulated lunar surface? It seemed to be coming out of the bottom of the rocket booster and then shooting towards the ground (3:15 in the first video). I think someone mentioned this was done intentionally to freeze the engine's state for further data collection purposes.
Though it does look like the safety personnel sprays the extinguisher at both the lunar pad and the booster.
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First off, the starting pad and the lunar pad are 2 different locations. The first is a normal flat concrete launch pad. The second is supposed to be a "simulated" lunar surface with rocks and craters. And if you look from the top-down view (around 2:39 in the first video), you can clearly see the "X"—that don't look like no rebar I ever seen. In fact, it looks suspiciously like the highly stylized, and quite distinct, "X" in the X-Prize logo.
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It's true; I hadn't thought of whether it was a problem on the moon. It just jumped out at me, as an inelegance in the design, which usually suggests that the whole thing could be done better. I mean, seriously... flames from the engine, lapping around the rest of the craft? It might still work, but it's far from pretty.
Not impressed (Score:4, Funny)
If they want a shot at faking another moonlanding they really need to hire a better set designer, that didn't look anything like the moon!
Re:Not impressed (Score:4, Funny)
If they want a shot at faking another moonlanding they really need to hire a better set designer, that didn't look anything like the moon!
I had a great set for my faked Moon landing. It looked perfect as the rocket came down on its parachute! For some reason folks said it didn't look like a real Moon landing - go figure!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I had a great set for my faked Moon landing. It looked perfect as the rocket came down on its parachute! For some reason folks said it didn't look like a real Moon landing - go figure!
You silly, the parachute was too big! Everything is lighter on Moon, you need a smaller parachute.
Rainy day ..... simulated moon landing? (Score:2)
on a rainy day at Caddo Mills, Texas ...
Surely that alone invalidates a simulated moon landing? (as would any cross winds)
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Cross winds would surely be vastly more significant, but rain would be pretty much irrelevant when you consider the mass of the craft and the amount of thrust involved.
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Surely that alone invalidates a simulated moon landing? (as would any cross winds)
That and the 6x stronger gravity...
I'd think doing the same thing on the Moon would be a lot easier - getting it there, and ensuring it works 100% of the time without the intervention of a man with a screwdriver... not so much.
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If manned/unmanned missions to the moon become more common there is always the possibility of a limited GPS system being put in place. Might make navigating unmanned missions easier as well as locating the lander after a longer trip. (Although the later could be taken care of by a tracking beacon as long as line of sight doesn't become a significant issue)
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Definitely. And it did it quite well, actually. What makes it more impressive is the nature of the design- they're not using the same class of tech as NASA and other space agencies have used in the past. It's capable of the same, but it's cheaper and intrinsically more robust- dual systems, etc.
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Actually, the winds are minimal today in this area. I wouldn't know whether they're up over in Caddo Mills, but it's been a slow, steady, soaking rain for the last two days in the area with no appreciable winds (Caddo Mills is roughly 20 or so minutes to the North and East of Dallas along I-30 in-between Rockwall and Greenville.).
Low or no winds would be close enough to the conditions for a test for the purposes of the prizes.
congratulations (Score:2)
Nice thrust vectoring! Congratulations to all at Armadillo Aerospace!
My first thought was it was nice to see some money we spent years ago on Doom and the games built from that engine being put to good use.
I wish I had the math programming skills the he so fluidly can poor out. Truly impressive.
Second thought was John played to much lunar lander (ascii version) back in the day too. (chuckle)
Good Jorb! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Try This:
http://spacefellowship.com/Forum/forum-23.html [spacefellowship.com]
twitter? (Score:2)
posted videos and images using social networking tools such as Twitter
I didn't know you could fit videos or pictures in 140 characters. Did they use ascii art?
Re: (Score:2)
But you can fit links to pictures and youtube videos in 140 characters.
Girlfriend's reaction (Score:5, Funny)
My girlfriend* just walked in the room and saw me watching the video of the successful flight. All she said was "No, you can't have one."
To be fair, she was joking... I think.
* Don't even think about it.
It's not over yet; They didn't actually win (Score:3, Informative)
The summary is misleading. They didn't actually win the $1 million yet. Masten Space and Unreasonable Rocket are both going to have a crack at the prize and have until October 31 to best Armadillo's performance.
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So is the title. More appropriate would have been "Moved Into First Place for" instead of "Claims" but that doesn't fit on the screen as well.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you've got a "build a little, sell a little" mindset like John Carmack, sure. He's actually said he hasn't spent more than $1 million on Armadillo.. and last year he let slip that the group is actually profitable already. With the prize money they intend to put on a few more people fulltime.