John Carmack's Test Liftoff a Success 384
brainstyle writes "Space.com is reporting that John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace (and who apparently has some game design hobby) has had a successful launch of the prototype of its entry in the X-Prize. From the article: 'I had tried several algorithms on the simulator before settling on this one, and it behaved exactly the same in reality, which is always a pleasant surprise.'"
But can we use it as a weapon in DOOM3 ? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But can we use it as a weapon in DOOM3 ? (Score:5, Funny)
I bet I can guess who you're voting for this November.
Re:But can we use it as a weapon in DOOM3 ? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Gun ownership is INALIENABLE tsarkon reports (Score:2)
Re:Gun ownership is INALIENABLE tsarkon reports (Score:5, Interesting)
You're trolling, of course, but it's a good troll because it exploits a gap in knowledge most people arguing this issue aren't even aware of.
Without taking time to go into a long reply with many examples, suffice it to say that the Framers knew very well the difference between "arms" and "artillery." They specified "arms." Typical military rifles (a flintlock back in the day, an assault rifle today) are fine. Military weapons of serious, if not mass, destruction (a cannon back in the day, a nuke today) are not fine.
There can be some reasonable disagreement about where, exactly, to draw the line. In the old days, all artillery required horses to drag it and a crew to serve it. Nowadays, an RPG is a one-person weapon. Thus, the old criteria of "man-portability" may no longer be relied on to draw a bright line between arms and artillery. Where the line is to be drawn is a fine thing for politicians to debate into the wee hours, but it doesn't inform this discussion. FWIW, I think we do a very good job of drawing that line, today. Automatic weapons are very heavily regulated and taxed and the owners are seriously investigated before being given permission to acquire them. Less militarily-capable weapons get less regulation. More capable weapons draw more scrutiny. (Hell, if you want it and can afford it, you can, as a private citizen, own, operate, and shoot out of a fully-operational fighter plane with multiple functional machine guns. But you'd better be rich and have plenty of time and patience to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops.)
In summary, then:
There's a right to bear arms.
There's no right to bear artillery.
Simple, huh?
Re:Gun ownership is INALIENABLE tsarkon reports (Score:4, Insightful)
For all practical purposes, you have the right to bear arms provided that those arms will not seriously impede the government when they decide to get rid of you.
Note, this is not what the founders intended, but they didn't forsee a gargantuan standing army and our modern militarized police forces.
Please note, I am a firm believer in the right to bear arms, but unless you also have the small, weak government envisioned by the Founding Fathers it is not a useful check on tyranny. (As the modern United States of America should prove to any doubters.)
Re:Gun ownership is INALIENABLE tsarkon reports (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think this is entirely true. While it may not have been envisioned by the framers, even with a very powerful military, weapons in the hands of the people can help keep politicians in line, somewhat. The reason for this is that one person, with a gun, and enough drive to kill a politician, is probably going to get the job done. If the politician has done enough things to piss more than one person off, to the point of wanting to kill them, then that politician should probably be very sure he has a current will. To me, the idea of revolt being the prime deterent to tyrany has shifted to the threat of being killed by one determined person with a gun. Even in recent history the president, arguably the most protected person in office, was shot (Regan). Granted the shot wasn't fatal, but it was still life threatening.
Also, this type of argument assumes a couple of things:
1. The revolt isn't started in the military. If this were to happen, things would just get messy, quick.
2. The revolt is not on a massive country wide scale. For this, look at Vietnam. Its very clear that the US had a very clear technological advantage. However, the US military was fighting the whole penesula. People from both North and South Vietnam didn't want the US forces there, or at best didn't care. Identifying the enemy was very difficult. Also, the Vietnimesse were very determined to push the US out, they would take huge losses and not let up. I tend to think that the same could happen in the US, if the government got bad enough. Granted, the likelyhood of it actually happeneing is very low. But, if enough people are willing to fight and die for something, they can overcome a technologicly superior force.
3. Consider who the military would be killing, US citizens. If the revolt is a popular revolt, the US government would absolutly cripple itself by putting the revolt down. Also, this always begs the question of how the soldiers in the military would react to having to kill US citizens. Though, the military does do a good job of keeping its soldiers from thinking about such things.
Re:But can we use it as a weapon in DOOM3 ? (Score:2, Funny)
You mean Bill?
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
Re:But can we use it as a weapon in DOOM3 ? (Score:2)
Hope for all geeks out there (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, I think that this demonstarates the new power given to the (relativly) little guy by computers. Thanks to simulation we can all tweak ideas without blowing up prototypes.
I wish I had as much free time as some of these people.:E
Re:Hope for all geeks out there (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks to simulation we can all tweak ideas without blowing up prototypes.
I think you'll find Armadillo Aerospace blew up a lot of prototypes.
Re:Hope for all geeks out there (Score:5, Funny)
I think you're thinking of John Romero - I hear he's working on a rocket powered by nothing but his own over-inflated ego.
Id versus ego, who will win? Mwuhahaha!
Ahem.
Re:Hope for all geeks out there (Score:2)
Amazingly, this has already been done (Score:2)
Re:Hope for all geeks out there (Score:2)
Look at the history of the combustion and steam engines. In the early days of the automobile there were something like 5000+ innovators all trying to become millionaires. With the steam engine, just about any ironsmith thought he could come up with a better system. In many cases, they would look at another competitor's design (Which would be thicker at some point than the rest of the system), assume that this was a manufacturing def
Re:Hope for all geeks out there (Score:5, Informative)
I dont know many model rockets powered by Peroxide. I also dont know of many that are capable of going to 131 feet and returning to within 1 foot of their launch point vertically (VTOL), meaning full flight control on takeoff, hover, and landing, and all with the click of a button. This rocket demonstrated the control authority they have now with their vane controlled engine, and their flight control system software. Basically he clicked his mouse, the computer flew the rocket to a pre-determined altitude and returned it to the ground under power.
Sorry, but this is advancement. NASA tried something similar (DC-X/A [spacefuture.com]), but way bigger, took them several years to get it to even take off, and eventually blew it up, all at a much much higher cost ($40mill?). This "Large freakin model rocket" has been developed by a much smaller team, for what Im sure is alot less investment, and proves that their approach to a re-usable rocket can work. This is also their small scale vehicle. They have a larger one using the same technology and systems that they are testing as well. Rather than risk damaging it, they test everything on the smaller one until it works correctly. Read their website (once /. effect wears off), you might actually learn something.
Tm
Simulator? (Score:5, Funny)
I hope he's not referring to the "simulator" about the space marine on Mars/Phobos/Deimos...
(especially not if the simulation behaved exactly the same)
Re:Simulator? (Score:2, Funny)
I wouldn't mind if it includes the infinite respawns.
I for one welcome our new BFG toting overlords!!! Of course I plan on being one of them.
Re:Simulator? (Score:2)
Re:Simulator? (Score:2)
And it's much easier to type than the first no-clipping code in Doom(up to about version 1.2 i think.) IDSPISPOPD is somewhat harder to write during stress.
It's always nice (Score:5, Interesting)
anyways, this is good news for J.C. congrats man
Re:It's always nice (Score:2, Informative)
A simulator is just some code to stimulate input to your code. Simulator != a big box with a joystick and 3D-glasses and force feedback.
People tend to think of MS Flight Simulator when they hear the word 'simulator'.
Re:It's always nice (Score:3, Interesting)
Linus Torvalds
John Carmack
Alan Cox (gotta love his kernel hacks)
and the miriad of other kernel programmers!
Re:It's always nice (Score:2)
Tim Sweeney
Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto (Ruby)
Alan Kay
Ken Arnold (jini)
Doug Lea (Java guru)
Paul Graham (spam fighter, Lisp advocate)
I just realized I would be hard pressed to name six professional baseball players. Let's see... Ken Griffey Jr., Nomar Garciaparra, Pedro Martinez, Derek Jeter, Barry Bonds, and... uhhh... ummm, Babe Ruth.
Re:It's always nice (Score:5, Interesting)
Thats right.
Re:It's always nice (Score:2)
Traditionally sports are physical endeavours (sp?), lately it seems that counter strike (and the like) has been accepted as sports. If not in the oplympics then at least to the degree that there are leagues and turnaments being held professionaly.
While there is little chance that programming will ever become a sport it would be fun to see things like perl poetry tournaments. I do remember attending one RPG con where they has a contest where the participants were given 4 hours to write a scenario which wou
Re:It's always nice (Score:3, Informative)
Hopefully... (Score:5, Funny)
He's unlikely to win the X-Prize... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure the Armadillo team would have loved to have won the X-Prize, but they don't seem to be too discouraged. They've built a rocket that flies and lands very neatly, and that uses a novel propellant mixture. I gather they're still going to try to build an X-Prize class vehicle over the next year or so. They've learned a lot about building rockets. And, judging by the celebration when they landed that test flight, they're still having fun. Sounds like a hell of a hobby to me, and I wish I had the cash to do something like it :)
Re:He's unlikely to win the X-Prize... (Score:3, Insightful)
And while JC would do it no matter what, just for the heck of it, or maybe just for the chance to strap the biggest possible engine to his butt, he must be well aware of that.
Awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm confused. (Score:5, Funny)
I know not this reality which you speak of.
Re:I'm confused. (Score:2)
Re:I'm confused. (Score:4, Funny)
Reality is where the pizza is delivered from.
I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
The X prize is a waste of time (Score:2, Funny)
A rocket that can get up there will need more than just a few extra miles. It needs to travel at about 10 times the speed, have serious prtection for reentry, and have heavy shielding to protect it once it gets out of the Van Halen belt.
Re:The X prize is a waste of time (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The X prize is a waste of time (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The X prize is a waste of time (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The X prize is a waste of time (Score:2)
Re:The X prize is a waste of time (Score:2, Informative)
It's the difference between the X-2 [wikipedia.org] (they lost a couple due could have gone higher than 38kM, but would need attitude jets) and the Titan [wikipedia.org] (which could take Carmack's vehicle into LEO)... But the X-Prize isn't about LEO, so that's okay. The X-Prize target is 100kM, because they want cheap commercial ICBMs
Re:The X prize is a waste of time (Score:2)
Maybe something (only) John can answer (Score:5, Interesting)
dammit
Re:Maybe something (only) John can answer (Score:2)
But the most important thing is obviously the money from doom and quake.
Re:Maybe something (only) John can answer (Score:3, Insightful)
For myself I think many real world programming tasks are broadly quite similar, gather requirements, design, code, test. I'm sure many of us have coded for disparate industries in our time writing complex apps for telecoms, financials etc without fully understanding the entirety of the low down nitty gritty. The key is being able
Re:Maybe something (only) John can answer (Score:2)
- CAD/CAM (and I do mean both)
- Medical Imaging
- Genetics
- B2B/Database
- Internet Security Applications
A good programmer is good no matter what they do -- they just need a bit of time to ramp up on the problem domain.Go Johnny! (Score:3, Funny)
"/Dread"
It bothers me (Score:2, Funny)
Re:It bothers me (Score:4, Funny)
Baikonur?
If there were more hot chicks at these places, I guarantee you we'd have moved all heavy industry and manufacturing into the Lagrange points by now
Re:It bothers me (Score:2, Funny)
Re:It bothers me (Score:2, Funny)
You know what they say: "To get laid you have to be cute, be able to talk to women, or play an instrument... OR build a prototype for the X-Prize competition and have at least 1 successful launch"
fuel? (Score:2)
Re:fuel? (Score:2)
Re:fuel? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:fuel? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:fuel? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:fuel? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:fuel? (Score:2)
Re:fuel? (Score:2)
H_2O_2 is monopropellant... interesting. It's never late to learn something new.
I have a Question about non-equator launches (Score:2)
Also is an equatorial launch even needed if it's going to be sub-orbital anyway?
Is there any advantages from a high Polar launch have any advantages that an equatorial launch might lack?
Re:I have a Question about non-equator launches (Score:5, Informative)
There is no need to launch anything from the equator.
The closer to the equator you launch from, and the closer to due-east your launches are pointed, the more benefit you gain from the Earth's rotation in making orbital velocity.
This applies to Aircraft launches too, since the boost is then: aircraft velocity + earth rotation.
The further your launch is from 0 degrees inclination, the less benefit you gain from earth's rotation, and the less the benefit from launching at the equator. This can actually be made up somewhat by launching from north/south of the equator due east (e.g. Kenedy launches are most efficient to 28 degree inclination launches, the same as the latitude of the launch site.
Launches into polar orbit - 90 degree inclination - by definition get no benefit from Earth's rotation, so it doesn't matter where you launch from.
Launches that are sub-orbital get no benefit from the earth's rotation other than - possibly - affecting the range achieved. For the specific case of the X-Prize, where most teams seem to want to land more-or-less where they launched from, there's no benefit from earth's rotation it's - at most - just another trajectory-affecting factor to take into consideration.
Re:I have a Question about non-equator launches (Score:2)
The one example I can think of to counter this is Israel. They actually launch east-to-west (probably in a similar fashion as Hebrew is written right-to-left, not left-to-right). Of course there is a very good reason they do this. To the west of them, is just the Mediterranean. To the right are a whole lot of countries they have traditionally considered hostile
The full scale vehicle is also flying, sort of (Score:5, Informative)
The flight time is currently limited by federal law to 15 seconds of rocket burn time. We have a waiver coming to extend that to 120 seconds, but beyond that we will need a full launch license.
The significance of all this is that the vehicles are intended to fly up, come back down and land right where they took off from, all without ablating, expending, or seperating anything. It should be possible to have turn around times under one hour even for quite large vehicles.
BTW, Doom beta testing is going very well.
John Carmack
Re:The full scale vehicle is also flying, sort of (Score:2)
The main driving factor will be the bloody wind tho.
A question that's been itching in the back of my mind:
I wonder if MASA is even taking the X-Prize seriously, or simply being a bobblehead, nodding and making agreeable noises, and when it's over with, goes back to their old, aincent, and dangerous trappings of the STS program and fighting for grant money?
Re:The full scale vehicle is also flying, sort of (Score:2)
Re:The full scale vehicle is also flying, sort of (Score:5, Funny)
That's the kind of thing people really care about...
(ps. Congrats on the rocket thing...)
Re:The full scale vehicle is also flying, sort of (Score:5, Informative)
ablate: To remove by erosion, melting, evaporation, or vaporization
Re:The full scale vehicle is also flying, sort of (Score:2)
Re:The full scale vehicle is also flying, sort of (Score:3, Funny)
Hi John!
The JC Factor (Score:5, Funny)
John Carmack always gets +5 when he posts something. It's not even a question, moderators are drawn to give up those points like a heroin addict looking to shoot up when they see his name.
I think one day JC is going to just put "I farted, it stanks" and hit OK by accident, and then see the following on the comment:
+1 Insightful
+1 Funny
+1 Interesting
+1 Informative
There is a reason for this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously, Joe Schmo is not going to know him, but we do. It is fine that you may resent him, but you should also respect the fact that living the geek dream is something that we all aspire to doing... but for one circumstance or another, we haven't been lucky enough to do it.
So give Carmack some friggin' props for at least pressing a little bit of the envelope and being a pioneer. In a world where technology is everywhere, he is pushing the barrier. Respect that.
Personally, I have always been dissappointed my whole life that I couldn't wake up, suit up, get in the airlock, and go out and weld space stations with my hands for a living. I think all of us geeks are upset for not being born in a more advanced civilization than we already are, or not having been born with enough money to get all the education we want.
He is at least using his cash for a useful hobby. Some day there will be normal use space travel. Damn if I can't wait for those days. Think, modern commerce in space... instead of spy sattelites and weapons platforms. It sounds a whole lot better than what is going on now.
Damn you innovators! Damn you all!
Re:The JC Factor (Score:4, Insightful)
John Carmack has the "inside scoop" on a lot of issues we talk about on Slashdot, as he knows the people and technology we talk about, and is able to give a different perspective on it than a lot of us would. His posts containing his viewpoints and stories have a lot of stuff that is indeed interesting and insightful, much more so than the average Slashdot post. The posts where he is talking about his personal observations of Steve Jobs, or his rocket experiments, for example, is information that most Slashdotters would be unable to provide.
Will they make it? (Score:2)
Re:Will they make it? (Score:2, Insightful)
I like this quote from Canadian Arrow's website [canadianarrow.com]:
"Although there are many different teams competing for the X PRIZE, we are all fundamentally on the same team. When one of us wins the X PRIZE, we will all become entrepreneurs and pioneers in the eyes of the world."
I can't speak for the actual participants, but I know that if I were on one of the teams I wouldn't be doing it primarily for the prize, but because I want to go to space. After all, I suspect that most of the entrants that are getting somwhe
Impressive video! (Score:2, Interesting)
Holy smokes! that was a really impressive video. How in the world did they make it so that the rocket stabilized so well? I mean, gyroscopes only provides a partial answer. When the said that it landed within 1 foot of the launch pad, I assumed they meant that it *fell* within one foot of the launch pad. That thing sailed up and came down as if it was landing on an egg shell. Impressive!
Standing that close! Idiots... (Score:3, Informative)
Sheesh!
Re:Standing that close! Idiots... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Standing that close! Idiots... (Score:3, Funny)
A impressive feat (Score:2)
The guidance is impressive, it equivelent to having a computer balancing a broom stick in real time.
Remember the govt's VTOL spacecraft that tipped over and blew up on the pad?
I bet if John was funded by paul allens millions he would be as far along as the scaled composits team. The fact that he has gotten this far with far less money
Lame attempt (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a surprisingly lame attempt at the X-Prize. A hydrogen peroxide engine is a terrible choice for propulsion. The propellant is dangerous and and has low specific impulse. It has been mainly used for thrusters in the past. It is not even the best choice for that. Bipropellant thrusters now predominate. Any high power rocket modeller can show better than this. One wonders why he chose to publicize the event, considering the upcoming flight of Burt Rutan's vehicle. That is what I call a serious attempt.
Re:Lame attempt (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, he publicizes what his group does every week on the website. I think the only difference is that, in the week leading up to the SpaceShipOne launch, there's been more commercial media coverage o
Re:Lame response (Score:3, Insightful)
John Carmack first contact (Score:3, Funny)
Zarvox: Greetings earthling. We come in peace. What is it that you do on your planet?
Carmack: I make computer games where you run around and kill aliens.
In related news... (Score:3, Funny)
-- Greg
Various responses (Score:5, Informative)
We don't expect to win the X-Prize, both because Burt probably has it in the bag, and we are behind schedule. We still plan on continuing our development, because our designs are nearly an order of magnitude cheaper to fabricate and operate than Space Ship One, and orders of magnitude matter. If SS1 crashes on Monday, we will throw more time and resources at an attempt, because there really is no other contender, but it will be a long shot.
We could have flown an unguided rocket to very high altitudes a long time ago, but we have instead concentrated on control systems, which is where the important work needs to be done. A team that was busy flying rockets to hundreds of thousands of feet altitude, then decided to add a guidance and control system to their rockets would be in for many rude surprises at high energy levels.
This isn't immediately obvious, but an X-Prize class vehicle pretty much requires an active control system (a trained pilot with appropriate controls is also an active control system). A short burn time rocket, like the recent CSXT 100 km shot, can live with just aerodynamic stabilization (note that it also landed 20 miles away), but the G forces are far too high for people. As the burn time lengthens with lower acceleration forces, the vehicle will gravity turn away from vertical, making it almost impossible to keep a 60 second burn time even accelerating upwards.
People that harp on about propellant specific impulse in the context of suborbital rockets are like programmers that obsessively optimize a function that isn't a hot spot. The goal of a rocket ship is not to deliver specific impulse, it is to move a payload reliably and cost effectively. Isp can always be traded away for mass fraction, and quite often you can improve operability or reliability by doing so. With our new vehicle designs using a single engine and jet vanes instead of four differentially throttled engines we are more likely to consider trading some engine and system complexity for performance, but issues like the requirement for deep throttling still make it a complex decision.
I do Armadillo work on Tuesdays, weekends, and late at night. At Id lately I have been working on next-generation rendering technology while the rest of the company manages the Doom beta process.
I don't issue press releases. I just publicly write about what I am working on, and other people find it noteworthy enough to talk about. All of our development work, including the dead ends and mistakes, is fairly well documented on the Armadillo Aerospace website.
John Carmack
Re:no X-Prize (Score:5, Insightful)
And, they aren't that far away. They've got the big rocket that carries three people built; they are just very - and appropriately - cautious. They are extensively testing all the algorithms and principles on the smaller rocket first. The main thing they think will take over 5 months is getting permission to make the shot.
Re:If he is building rockets.... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:xcor closer than armadillo (Score:3, Informative)
EzRocket is a great, great testbed for a restartable, reliable, affordable, commercially available rocket engine.
And the flight test series they conducted really did push the state-of-the-art in rocket propulsion, in all of the arenas above
However , the EZRocket testbed - a converted Rutan LongEze homebuild aircraft - is in *no way* a suitable platform for development as a honest-to-goodness Space Rocket. It's not even got a pressurised cockpit, for instance.
XCor do have sub-orbital transport plans - t
And 100km is for tourists (Score:3, Interesting)
umm.... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.xprize.org/teams/teams.html
Unless they're on there under a different name, they're not competing.
Re:xcor closer than armadillo (Score:2)
Re:xcor closer than armadillo (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is This Really Serious? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is This Really Serious? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is what a rocket ship SHOULD look like.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This is what a rocket ship SHOULD look like.... (Score:5, Informative)
No, not even remotely close.
You only need enough propellant to kill the terminal velocity of the vehicle to land it safely. A vehicle that is stable reentering base first has a Cd right around 1.0, and any high performance rocket vehicle is going to be coming in pretty light after it has burned most of the propellant. The V2 impacted the ground still supersonic because it was aerodynamically stable nose first, so it maintained its 0.15 or so Cd on descent. A reasonably stubby base first reentry will have a terminal velocity of only 200 mph or so.
Killing that speed with a comfortable safety margin takes about 400 pounds of propellant in our vehicle, compared to 8000 pounds of propellant burned on ascent. A higher performance rocket engine could do it with propotionately smaller amounts. A parachute / drogue / ejection system for this weight vehicle is indeed lighter, coming in at about 100 pounds, but that brings a number of disadvantages with it, like coming down tens of miles away and still needing final impact attenuation.
We wanted to use parachtues as a quick hack for the X-Prize, but the test range where we were planning to fly was going to require a half million dollars of "engineering support" and wanted us to carry a thrust termination system (bomb) on the vehicle to satisfy themselves that it won't drift out of the range.
Long term, there is no question in our minds that powered landing is the way to go. We just were given a pretty strong incentive to go there earlier than we were planning.
John Carmack
Re:This is what a rocket ship SHOULD look like.... (Score:3, Interesting)
My intuition was wrong: I'm stunned that so little propellant is used for landing. Nevertheless, you still need lots of propellant to schlep around your landing propellant through the boost phase. About how much "extra" propellant would you estimate is required? By my back-of-the-envelope thinking, it'd be about 800 lbs.
Does your site have specs on the big vehicle's fuel consumption and thrus
Re:This is what a rocket ship SHOULD look like.... (Score:5, Informative)
Since the "payload" of an X-Prize vehicle is three x 200 lb people, needing 400 pounds of landing propellant turns our 850 gallon tank vehicle from a three person vehicle into a one person vehicle.
In the most negative light, you could say that powered landing (with a low performance propellant like we use) takes away two thirds of our payload capacity, but that is a poor metric to base decisions off of, because operational issues have historically been orders of magnitude more important to cost effectiveness than propellant consumption.
We can get the 400 pounds back by either going to a carbon fiber tank instead of a fiberglass tank (cost: $40k up front design fee, then $25k per tank, compared to $9k for the fiberglass tank), or by upsizing everything to a 1600 gallon fiberglass tank (cost: $17k for the tank plus more for bigger engine plumbing, catalysts, and nozzles).
Upsizing the tank is lower risk, because it only uses suppliers that we already buy from, while the carbon fiber tank job would be custom from ATK, and I have already had two other vendors back out on me for big tank work. We already have a 1600 gallon fiberglass tank on hand.
Our mixed monoprop has a measured sea level Isp of 145, with normal increases with altitude. Our big vehicles have a mass ratio of about five, takes off with somewhat under one positive G of acceleration, and has a somewhat regressive thrust profile from partial blowdown pressurization. That combination is sufficient for suborbital flights. A 200+ Isp biprop can do it with a mass ratio of three, but the vehicle gets a lot more complicated to build and operate.
John Carmack
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a hell of a lot more impressive than an unguided model rocket.
Re:Why are people cheering this nonsense? (Score:5, Informative)
these outfits are the same types behind SCO and
Enron.
John Carmack has written some of the most groundbreaking entertainment software out there.
He has donated his old engines to the world, GPLing them.
Id has stayed small and privately-owned deliberately, and avoided the problems with "shareholder short-term return issues" that so many people complain about.
He has spent extensive amounts of time and effort doing volunteer code on 3d drivers for XFree86, allowing Linux and BSD folks to enjoy 3d games. He used his influence to help get Linux and BSD folks the games that they have today.
He has pushed hard for technological improvements in the GPU arena, and has done consumer education on GPU features. He is famously open about what he is working on and his thoughts (the Carmack
And you call him one of the same types of people behind SCO and Enron? That is not only absurd, it's an attack on one of the better men in the software world. I question whether *you* have done as much for society.