Successful Test Flight and Landing for Xombie Rocket Lander and GENIE 65
An anonymous reader sends word that Masten Space Systems' Xombie rocket has successfully demonstrated vertical takeoff and landing for NASA's Flight Opportunities Program. It was guided autonomously by the GENIE system from Draper Laboratory. "The rocket rose 164 feet, moved laterally 164 feet, and then landed on another pad after a 67-second flight. The flight represents the first step in developing a test bed capability that will allow for landing demonstrations that start at much higher altitudes-several miles above the ground." This navigation technology is laying the groundwork for future exploration of planets, moons, and asteroids.
Lunar Lander (Score:5, Funny)
I barely held back from pressing the UP arrow on the keyboard while watching the video.
Lunar Lander game (Score:2)
3D Segway (Score:1)
meme in 3.... 2.... 1.... (Score:2)
I, for one, will welcome our new Xombie overlords in 3... 2... 1....
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BraaaainX... BraaaainX... BraaaainX... 3... 2... 1... BraaaainX (*)
(*) Xombie language translation of your pledge, as a courtesy to our Xombie overlord guests.
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If anything, an ICBM needs to travel as fast as it can, and have a huge acceleration for the purpose of reducing reaction time for incoming warheads. That goes completely against the design philosophy of launches intended for spaceflight, much less a rocket-powered lander. A typical nuclear warhead is really quite sturdy and can handle high acceleration forces (100-200 m/s^2 are common, sometimes up to as high as 400 depending on the missile). A typical satellite payload package usually is only built to
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The point being that I agree with you (and not the grandparent) in terms of any danger in terms of weaponizing these kind of rockets. There may be some common components for commercial spaceflight launchers and what you can find for military missiles, but there are enough major differences that they are not interchangeable. This is especially true for "modern" rocket designs, where there is a clear separation of the designs because they have different objectives in terms of flight profile and performance characteristics.
You're right, there's enough difference between a missile and a plane than no one would ever use a plane as a missile... and even if they did, it wouldn't have the same effect.
164 feet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just 1.28 cm more and it would have been 50 meters exactly. What a coincidence. You might almost think they had gone metric.
I see they'll be missing planets again in the future.
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The Revolutionary War?
Go on...try and deny that they lost that one. You can't.
Yeah, but their money was still 240 pence to a pound. I haven't had to keep track of such weird monetary conversions since Dungeons and Dragons came out with the 2nd edition AD&D books. I sympathize. I regularly got screwed by merchants before the rule change!
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Re:164 feet? (Score:5, Informative)
Just 1.28 cm more and it would have been 50 meters exactly. What a coincidence. You might almost think they had gone metric.
They have. You're seeing the rounded number. https://www.google.com/search?q=50+meter+in+feet [google.com] = 164.041995 feet (164 feet ½ inches)
I see they'll be missing planets again in the future.
Yeah, imperial bad metric good. But the NASA of yore somehow hit the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, etc etc using teh evul miles and pounds-force. Maybe it has to do with _mixing_ units between suppliers and integrator without proper communication?
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164.041995 feet (164 feet ½ inches)
Thats 164 feet 1/24 inches for those of us who know math. WTF Google? That doesn't even round to 164 1/2 for any sane form of rounding.
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Re:164 feet? (Score:5, Funny)
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Using how many hogsheads of mead?
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Just 1.28 cm more
That's half an inch, you insensitive clod.
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Didn't the lunar lander do this back in 1969 .. well they tested it out back in 1967 or something. I'll bet this thing needed mad CPU power and control systems too.
From the Apollo LM [wikipedia.org] Wikipedia entry:
To allow astronauts to learn lunar landing techniques, NASA contracted Bell Aerosystems in 1964 to build the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV), which used a gimbal-mounted vertical jet engine to counter 5/6 of its weight to simulate the Moon's gravity, in addition to its own hydrogen peroxide thrusters to simulate the LM's descent engine and attitude control. Successful testing of two LLRV prototypes at the Dryden Flight Research Center led in 1966 to three production Lunar Landing Training Vehicles (LLTV) which along with the LLRV's were used to train the astronauts at the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center. This aircraft actually proved fairly dangerous to fly, as three of the five were destroyed in crashes. It was equipped with a rocket-powered ejection seat, so in each case the pilot survived, including the first man to walk on the Moon, Neil Armstrong.[8]
So, not quite. This is quite a bit more advanced and hopefully more stable.
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Are any of the Grumman engineers still around to build a follow-up module if we ever want to go back? Most of them are either pushing up daisies or collecting retirement benefits... think about it.
I'm glad that *somebody* is working on these skills in some way to make sure that the capability is even possible.
I'm also glad that computing power has advanced beyond discrete transistors and 7400 logic gate chips that are the size of your thumb, because that is what the original Apollo Guidance Computer was bu
Syfy? (Score:1)
Please, somebody find and kill the dipshit that tagged the story "Syfy." Please don't bastardize English, validate the work of evil marketing goons, and give away free advertising to the wrestling channel.
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and give away free advertising to the wrestling channel.
Tonight on SyFi Wrestling we have Mysterious Goo vs. Rampaging Mammoth followed by our main event an 8 way tag team match with the Giant Incests vs. the Mutant Reptiles. And with the rumors of the Wolfman being in the building you know the Lizardman will be watching his back.
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sort of [slashdot.org], not quite.
Initial Fuel Cost? (Score:1)
Why are they launching from a static position when generating that kind of lift will cost the most.. What about building a railgun type launching platform into the ground to avoid some of the massive fuel costs on the initial burn?
Yes im aware theres no matching launcher on the moon but the gravity there is alittle bit kinder so im guessing the initial fuel costs are much less.
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Brother! Good wasteful job did this man! But it seems a businessman's presentation, or possibly the researching director's or the researcher's, but i don't know exactly it!.
It's another story, but in this age, the jobs are made by anothers, so that businessmen do only buy made things manufactured cheaply by their partners of third companies (e.g. asiatic, chinese, thailandian, philipinan, malaysian, etc. jobs).
And the difference was the wasteful money that they did profit! (good for businessmen & contra
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An atmosphere? Why??
DC/X (Delta Clipper) did that first 20 years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
The Delta Clipper (DC/X) performed the very same stunt back in the 90s: Take off and land on its rocket. That was 20 years ago.
The DC/X was a demonstrator of a single-stage-to-orbit project. It promised to bring down the cost of space flight by an order of magnitude and make the Space Shuttle obsolete.
It flew several times, achieving perfect flights, then was given to NASA. They "acccidentally" forgot to connect the hydraulic line that deployed on of the landing struts and the DC/X crashed at its first NASA landing. And oh darn, they couldn't find the couple of millions needed to fix it.
This dangerous competitor to the shuttle was thus killed. The Shuttle program was safe. Whew.
Now that the Shuttle is no more, revolutionary concepts such as DC/X or its Xombie imitation might safely crawl out of the hole in which NASA had thrown them. Maybe.
The first rule of a bureaucracy is self-perpetuation. The fact that a bureaucracy is building space shuttles doesn't change its bureaucratic nature.
Re:DC/X (Delta Clipper) did that first 20 years ag (Score:4, Insightful)
First flight of the Shuttle: 1981
First flight of DC/X: 1993
I don't disagree that the DC/X was killed by NASA jealousy and incompetence - but the shuttle was a mature production program by the time DC/X was testing. No one had money for aerospace in the mid 1990s - both military and civilian programs were being canceled left & right.
I applaud ANY project that is successful at ANY aerospace related engineering. Anything is better than giving the money to 3rd world despots & domestic leeches.
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the DC/X crashed at its first NASA landing
It was an impressively successful crash too. IIRC, the DC/X had 3 engines and one of them blew up. It also had an impressive stabilisation algorithm which managed to keep the rocket up and under control even after one of its engine blew up, which was quite impressive. In the end it was more like a hard landing than a crash.
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Yup, the machine fell on its side. It wasn't ruined, just damaged. Fixing it wouldn't have been a huge project. That's what makes it unforgivable. Twenty years wasted.
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The old-hat aerospace industry as a whole has completely failed. I have seen it personally. If the government just gave its space and science dollars to small teams of motivated individuals instead of massive bureaucracies, we could be outpacing the world in science and technology again.
Funny thing, this. I looked up the Wikipedia Apollo LM [wikipedia.org] article to refresh my mind on something for another post and it points out that:
The Lunar Module was built by Grumman Aircraft Engineering and was chiefly designed by the American aerospace engineer, Tom Kelly.
(my emphasis).
What major project these days is designed mostly by one person? Or even a small group? This may be why SpaceX / Masten and the other small groups will be really useful. Get back to focused engineering, stay away from at least some of the bureaucratic bullshit endemic with large institutions.
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I thought the win by Masten for the 2nd tier prize of the Northrup-Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge [wikipedia.org] was completely legitimate. The "shenanigans" was simply following the rules, and that they won the "tie breaker" over Armadillo Aerospace. Yes, John Carmack wasn't too happy about the way they lost, but let's get real about the issues involved.
BTW, while Armadillo Aerospace (not Masten) was one of the original X-Prize teams, the Lunar Landing Challenge was not technically one of the "X-Prizes".. even though P
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Otherwise interesting.
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It sounds like being a sore loser.
Masten had technology which was able to accomplish the general goals of the competition, so if they weren't going to even be close there wouldn't have been any controversy at all. My impression was that Armadillo sort of thought going in that they were going to win the 1st place prize for the 2nd tier competition. They even made an attempt a year earlier without much success.
Regardless, in the long run both companies ended up in a pretty good position and I don't think Ar
"Xombie" name is taken. (Score:2)
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