John Carmack speaking at the QuakeCon conference in Dallas on August 1. Screenshot from the webcast of his speech.
Armadillo Aerospace, the suborbital vehicle company founded and funded by video game designer John Carmack, has kept a low profile in recent months. The company did not participate in the recent Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Colorado, an event where Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace all had special sessions. The last news from the company was in late February, when it reported on the launch of its STIG-B rocket at Spaceport America in early January. That launch failed when the main parachute snagged and didn’t deploy properly, causing the rocket to hit the ground at high speed.
There is a good reason for that silence over the last five months: the company is, for the time being, effectively out of money. “The situation that we’re at right now is that things are turned down to sort of a hibernation mode,” Carmack said Thursday evening at the QuakeCon gaming conference in Dallas. “I did spin down most of the development work for this year” after the crash, he said.
The current situation was the result of a decision Carmack said he made two years ago to stop accepting contract work and push for the development of a suborbital reusable sounding rocket. “We thought we were within striking distance of the suborbital cargo markets, the NASA CRuSR payloads,” he said, a reference to NASA’s Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research program (now part of the Flight Opportunities program) that funded launches of vehicles like Armadillo’s STIG rockets for carrying various experimental payloads. The contract work Armadillo had was generating an operating profit, Carmack said, but “I reached the conclusion that we just weren’t going to get where we needed to go with that.”
Carmack said he instead funded the company out of his own pocket, for “something north of a million dollars a year.” He said he hoped this focus solely on vehicle development, making use of many technologies already developed, would allow the company to make faster progress on its STIG family of suborbital rockets, but instead the opposite happened: things slowed down. “What happened was disappointing,” he said. “What should have been faster—repackaging of everything—turned out slower.”
Carmack offered several possible reasons why work on the STIG vehicles didn’t go as fast as he’d hoped. One was that he was not involved in the company on a day-to-day basis during this time, focused instead on software development. “Me not being there left me in a position of not wanting to second-guess the boots on the ground,” he said. “I left my hands off the wheel.”
A second reason was what he called “creeping professionalism” at the company as its volunteers became full-time employees and started working with NASA. Rather that turning out hardware quickly to try something, he said, Armadillo started doing more reviews and additional planning: comforting to customers like NASA, but not nearly as speedy as before. When Armadillo was all-volunteer, “everyone was focused on getting the work done” when they were in the shop only a couple days a week, he recalled. That efficiency, he believed, wasn’t maintained at that same level of urgency when people started working full-time at Armadillo.
Carmack said another mistake the company made was not to go into series production, making several versions of the STIG rockets simultaneously so that the loss of a single vehicle would not be as traumatic. “That was our critical mistake in the last few years, because we should have been able to put more of these together,” he said. Instead, he said there was a “creeping performance” issue, where the company made increasing use of carbon-fiber and heat-treated aluminum rather than simply using thicker aluminium. “This is chapter and verse some of the errors that NASA has done over the years, and it’s heartbreaking for me to see my own team following some of these problems,” he said.
With Armadillo currently in hibernation, Carmack said he is actively looking for outside investors to restart work on the company’s rockets. “If we don’t wind up landing an investor, it’ll probably stay in hibernation until there’s another liquidity event where I’m comfortable throwing another million dollars a year into things,” he said. Funding Armadillo, he said, has “always been a negotiation with my wife,” he said, setting aside some “crazy money” to spend on it. “But I’ve basically expended my crazy money on Armadillo, so I don’t expect to see any rockets in the real near future unless we do wind up raising some investment money on it.”
[…] things have not gone nearly as well, with a sharply declining launch rate. The company is currently broke and in “hibernation” mode until some new investors can be […]
[…] for several months now, Armadillo Aerospace is currently inactive. Jeff Foust at NewSpace Journal reports that company is essentially out of money and is currently in […]
[…] Article from http://www.newspacejournal.com/2013/08/01/carmack-armadillo-aerospace-in-hibernation-mode/Carmack: Armadillo Aerospace in “hibernation […]
Crowd funding please!
Maybe SpaceX could buy them out?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4Kejdj-A34
[…] See on http://www.newspacejournal.com […]
[…] You can read the Full Story here […]
Young enthusiastic ‘volunteers’ are seeking a career; they need money to live on and are looking out for their future with others in the business. There is a whole army of ‘retired professionals’ that would make great ‘volunteers’ to get the job done for no pay and in many cases, might even include some expenses for materials. We’ve done that with our project and have less than $50,000 involved over the years.
In my dealings with students on our projects, I always have them make several rockets just for that reason. After the design, it’s easy to build several in the event of a loss or to have ‘spare parts’ ready to go to avoid loss of time/momentum.
If a program goes on ‘hibernation’ for too long you lose any continuity and it may be hard to start back up. Keeping a low profile of ‘volunteers’ working still leads to progress and hen additional funding is procured the project is ready to benefit from that.
[…] NewSpace Journal reports that Armadillo Aerospace is in hibernation mode. The story by Jeff Foust is based on remarks which […]
How about starting a Kickstarter campaign to create a new launcher that can put a cubesat into space. Then develop the cubesat that will allow gamers to play Doom from space similer to Planetary Resources’ “selfie”. Then use NASA’s cubesat program to launch the cubesat while developing the new rocket. And… John would match the funding that is raised by the crowd?
Just a thought…
Interesting.
One of the solutions to the Fermi Paradox – the fact that the Milky Way probably contains millions of worlds where intelligent life has evolved, many much older than Earth and therefore in a position to develop interstellar travel, but that we see no evidence of any such cultures – is that at a certain point, the cost and ease of development of virtual worlds is so much less than exploring actual ones that intelligent species simply give up and retreat into a Matrix-like environment. So they never get off the ground, so to speak. Their fantasy worlds become too compelling.
Seems like John Camrack has admitted that this is so in his case.
He in no way admitted to any such thing.
He and his family simply chose not to continue with a 1,000,000+ a year hobby for the time being.
You can go back to reading your science fiction.
We have NOT heard the last from John Carmack!
While he regroups and goes over his possible mistakes
he will come out a wiser,more thoughtful,mature, rocket builder.I see this as a growing time.
He has given too much of his life to this enterprise to stop now,a year or two or three,to rethink,shure,,,,,,it is all over?,,,
Never Happen.
Armadillo has a place in history,and it is not all written yet.
[…] legendary programmer John Carmack (Doom, Quake) took over as Oculus VR’s Chief Technology Officer in August, it raised a bunch of questions: “Does this legitimize Oculus’s technology?†“Wait, I […]
[…] mythological programmer John Carmack (Doom, Quake) took over as Oculus VR’s Chief Technology Officer in August, it lifted a garland of questions: “Does this legitimize Oculus’s technology?†“Wait, we […]
[…] space tourism and research activities in 2014, a fourth company is unlikely to follow. In August, Armadillo Aerospace founder John Carmack said in a speech that his company was out of funds and in &… because of a lack progress after a suborbital test flight in January that suffered a parachute […]
[…] August, John Carmack announced that his small space venture, Armadillo Aerospace, was in “hibernation mode” because of a lack of funding. Carmack, discussing the status of Armadillo during a question-and-answer session during the […]
[…] Armadillo Aerospace had been in “hibernation mode” since last year, the company’s founder and chief funder, John Carmack, announced last August. Carmack later joined Oculus VR, a virtual reality company that Facebook acquired in March. Carmack later posted on Twitter that the Facebook deal gave him money to try again in aerospace, but that he had no plans to do so for “several years.” […]