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Armadillo Aerospace’s Scorpius vehicle on a flight as part of the Lunar Lander Challenge in September 2009. On Monday NASA announced that it has made $475,000 in awards to Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems for experimental flights of suborbital reusable vehicles. These are the first contracts for test flights under the agency’s Commercial Reusable [...] Armadillo’s Mod vehicle descends under a drogue chute for several seconds before relighting its engine, in this screen capture from an Armadillo Aerospace video of Saturday’s flight. First it was Masten Space Systems, who last month demonstrated an in-flight engine relight on their Xombie vehicle, and now it’s Armadillo Aerospace’s turn. On Saturday Armadillo flew [...] Eric Anderson (left) and John Carmack talk about their suborbital partnership at ISDC on Thursday. As expected, Space Adventures announced Thursday at the International Space Development Conference, (ISDC) in Chicago its partnership with Armadillo Aerospace to provide suborbital space tourism flights. Armadillo will develop a vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) suborbital vehicle carrying people to [...] John Carmack speaking at Space Access ’10 in Phoenix. Speaking at the Space Access ’10 conference in Phoenix yesterday, John Carmack noted that the evolution of Armadillo Aerospace from a group of hobbyists to a full-fledged business is nearly complete. “We’ve pretty much become the company we set out to be a number of years [...] In today’s issue of The Space Review I have a summary article about Saturday’s Level 2 flights by Armadillo, including video of both flights. While that was going on, though, other teams have been making progress on their flights. On Sunday, Masten Space Systems announced via Twitter that they made two 90+second test flightsdespite gusting [...] Here’s a video I shot of Armadillo’s first leg of the Level 2 flight on Saturday. This was shot from a distance of about 1,500 feet from the pads, the designated safety boundary. This is considerably closer than the distance the public and media witnessed similar LLC flights in [...] Armadillo managed to beat the weather and any technical gremlins on Saturday with a pair of successful Level 2 flights, ensuring that they at least qualify for the prize. (Because of the nature of the competition, they won’t know until the end of October, when the competition season closes, if in fact they have won first [...] I’m in the Dallas area this weekend to (hopefully) see Armadillo Aerospace compete in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at the Level 2 category. The “hopefully” is less associated with any technical issues–they’ve flown their “Super Mod” vehicle a number of times on the pads they’ve built at the Caddo Mills Municipal Airport northeast of [...] This year the Lunar Lander Challenge competition that is part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges prize program is being run differently: rather than a single once-a-year event in New Mexico, each team can decide when and where they will compete during a competition window that opened July 20 and runs through October 31. At another Centennial [...] Below is a brief video interview I conducted with John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace at the end of the Space Access ’09 conference. (This was recorded outdoors at the end of the day, hence the low lighting; you should also turn up your audio.) He talks about their current plans for both the Lunar Lander Challenge [...] |
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