Last 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 [...]]]>

John Carmack speaking at the QuakeCon conference in Dallas on August 1, 2013, in a screenshot from the webcast of his speech.

Last 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 QuakeCon conference in Dallas, said he was actively looking for outside investors willing to fund operations. “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 at the time.

There’s been no news about Carmack finding an outside investor for Armadillo, but there may have been a “liquidity event” for Carmack. Days after his QuakeCon appearance, Carmack announced he had joined Oculus VR, a startup company pursuing virtual reality technology with a headset called Oculus Rift, as the company’s chief technology officer. Yesterday, Facebook announced it was acquiring Oculus VR in a cash-and-stock deal valued at about $2 billion. That is a pretty big liquidity event.

How much of that windfall will go to Carmack, a relatively senior but recent hire by the company, is unclear, as is whether he’ll set aside any of that as “crazy money” with which he feels comfortable funding Armadillo. (He noted last August that funding the company “always been a negotiation with my wife.”) Since the deal was announced late yesterday, Carmack has indicated via Twitter that he’s busy focusing on Oculus software at the moment:

Update 3/30: Carmack, in a tweet posted Saturday evening, indicated that the windfall he expected to get from the Facebook acquisition of Oculus VR would help him get back into aerospace, but not in the immediate future:

In response to a question another person posed, Carmack played down the size of the money he would have available to any future space venture:

One decade ago, hopes were high for suborbital space tourism. Scaled Composites had performed the first powered test flight of SpaceShipOne in December of 2003, and other than a minor landing mishap, the company seemed to be on track for [...]]]>

SpaceShipTwo during its first powered test flight on April 29, 2013. (credit: Virgin Galactic/MarsScientific.com)

One decade ago, hopes were high for suborbital space tourism. Scaled Composites had performed the first powered test flight of SpaceShipOne in December of 2003, and other than a minor landing mishap, the company seemed to be on track for flying into space in the new year, putting it on the inside track to win the $10-million Ansari X PRIZE before it expired at the end of 2004. That, many believed, would usher in an era of suborbital space tourism by Scaled and other companies, including other X PRIZE competitors, in the following years.

The future, though, turned out a little differently. Scaled did win the X PRIZE with SpaceShipOne, performing suborbital flights in late September and early October of 2004 (as well as a test flight in June.) Scaled also announced a deal with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, establishing a venture called Virgin Galactic that planned to perform flights using a new vehicle, called SpaceShipTwo, as soon as late 2007.

But six years after that initial start date, SpaceShipTwo is still not yet in commercial service. Building a new, and bigger, vehicle, with a larger version of the hybrid rocket motor that powered SpaceShipOne has turned out to be a far greater challenge than expected in the heady days of 2004. And the other teams who were competing for the X PRIZE in the early 2000s have largely faded away—the da Vinci Project, anyone?

Still, there are signs of optimism for 2014. While development of SpaceShipTwo has been slow, Virgin Galactic did achieve some milestone in 2013, most notably the first powered flight of the vehicle in April. However, more than four months passed before SS2 made a second powered flight, in early September. A third powered flight was reportedly planned for mid-December but scrubbed by poor weather; it’s likely to be rescheduled for early January, after the holiday break ends for Scaled and Virgin.

Virgin did put the year’s developments in a positive perspective in a blog post by Branson on Monday, which included a 90-second video recap of highlights of the past year. It also included undated footage of a full-duration (approximately 55 seconds) burn of a hybrid rocket engine on a test stand; that engine has long been perceived as the limiting factor in SpaceShipTwo’s development.

“We are truly in the final phase of preparations for commercial service,” George Whitesides, CEO of Virgin Galactic, said in the video. When that commercial service will begin isn’t stated, but the company expects that to be some time in 2014; coverage of Virgin’s deal with NBC Universal to broadcast the first commercial SpaceShipTwo flight mentioned a date of August 2014. That, though, is contingent on Virgin making sufficient progress on the test program, which appears to be going slowly so far.

Virgin isn’t the only company in the suborbital spaceflight market. Just down the flightline at Mojave Air and Space Port from Scaled and The Spaceship Company (the Virgin-owned entity that will manufacture SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo vehicles), XCOR Aerospace has been working on its Lynx vehicle. Its development has also been slow going, although the company has in recent months been actively blogging work on the Lynx and associated activities, like engine tests. In the company’s most recent release, about a payload integrator agreement with the Czech Space Office, XCOR said flights of the Lynx Mark I prototype will begin in 2014.

XCOR is selling seats on the Lynx through another company, Space Expedition Corporation, or SXC. It’s best known for the contest it held in 2013 with Unilever, whose products include Axe deodorants and related products. That worldwide contest culminated earlier this month with Axe Apollo Space Academy, which awarded 23 trips on Lynx flights earlier this month to contestants after a week of testing and training in Florida.

Blue Origin is also working, slowly, on a suborbital vehicle. In early December, it issued a press release and held a media teleconference—both rare events for the publicity-averse company—to discuss a test of its BE-3 rocket engine, which flew a simulated suborbital flight profile. Company president Rob Meyerson said suborbital flights of its New Shepard vehicle should begin “in the next several years,” without being more specific.

While Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace all plan to continue development of their suborbital vehicles for 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 “hibernation mode” because of a lack progress after a suborbital test flight in January that suffered a parachute failure. Carmack said the company would remain in hibernation until he found an outside investor or “there’s another liquidity event where I’m comfortable throwing another million dollars a year into things,” as he had previously supported the company with his “crazy money” that he has since exhausted.

Masten Space Systems is not in the suborbital space tourism business—its focus is on flying experiments and technology demonstrations—but it has been quietly working on some vehicles. At the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) in Colorado in June, Masten chief operating officer Sean Mahoney called 2013 “a critical year” for the company as it decides whether to continue work on low-level technology demonstrators or pursue a suborbital vehicle that can fly to 100 kilometers. If the company has made a decision on its direction for 2014, it’s kept that quiet so far.

The article linked to in the preceding paragraph also shows how the schedule slips for other companies continue: at NSRC less than seven months ago, Virgin Galactic was predicting test flights of SpaceShipTwo to space by the end of the year, while XCOR said Lynx text flights would begin by late in the year. Neither, though, happened. As 2014 begins, companies continue to promise major developments, but the slow progress and delayed schedules of the past suggest that people should continue to be patient.

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 [...]]]>

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.

Similarly to the challenges and learnings described by Carmack in transitioning from contract work to focusing solely on the development of a suborbital reusable sounding rocket, consumers looking to buy medications online, such as Cialis, face their own set of challenges. Just as Armadillo Aerospace navigated the complexities of developing new technologies and production efficiencies, individuals seeking to purchase Cialis online must navigate the complexities of finding reputable sources that guarantee the safety and authenticity of their medications. It is essential for consumers to research thoroughly to ensure they are buying from legitimate and secure websites, paralleling the rigorous review and planning processes that benefited Armadillo’s partnerships with entities like NASA. In doing so, just as Armadillo aimed to increase efficiency without compromising quality, consumers must prioritize safety while seeking cost-effective solutions for their health needs.

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.”

Armadillo Aerospace is one step closer to flying a rocket into space after receiving a launch license from the [...]]]>

Neil Milburn (left) of Armadillo Aerospace speaks at the NewSpace 2012 Conference on Thursday after receiving a launch license from George Nield (right), associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the FAA. (credit: J. Foust)

Armadillo Aerospace is one step closer to flying a rocket into space after receiving a launch license from the FAA on Thursday. During a brief presentation at the NewSpace 2012 Conference in Santa Clara, California, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation George Nield awarded Armadillo a suborbital reusable launch vehicle license for its STIG-B rocket. Nield noted that this is only the third such licensed awarded by the FAA, after ones given to Scaled Composites and XCOR Aerospace, and is the only currently-active suborbital RLV launch license.

Neil Milburn, Armadillo’s vice president of program management, praised the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) for the speed in which it awarded the license. “AST is allowed by law 180 days to review your license [application] and say yea or nay,” he said. “This time around they did it in 63 days, which I’m pretty sure is a record.”

Armadillo is planning the first launch of the STIG-B the weekend of August 25-26 at Spaceport America in New Mexico, with of goal of reaching an altitude of 100 kilometers. While previous launches of Armadillo’s STIG rockets were done under waivers, the performance of the rocket, as well as the fact that the launch is generating revenues from payloads onboard (it’s carrying experiments for Europe’s Vega Space and the University of Purdue) required a full-fledged launch license. The launch would also qualify Armadillo to carry payloads for NASA’s Flight Opportunities program.

The rocket itself is still coming together at Armadillo’s Texas facility. “It should be together as a complete vehicle in the next ten days,” he said. There’s also a series of verification tests, integration of the experiment payloads, and hot-fire tests of the engine planned before the launch. Last weekend, he said, they were in Arizona doing drop tests of the vehicle’s recovery system, which includes a steerable parafoil to bring the vehicle back to the launch site. “There’s a lot of work to do in the next three, four weeks.”

Milburn said they eventually plan to fly STIG-B on a monthly basis, building up experience that they will fold into their later plans for a suborbital crewed vehicle, Hyperion. “One of the things we wanted to do with the STIG family of vehicles is to use it as a flying testbed for all of the technologies we need to fly the Hyperion-class vehicle,” a two-person suborbital vehicle. “Our philosophy has always been to learn your lessons at the lowest possible cost with the smallest possible vehicle as quickly as you can. And fly often, because that’s when you find out where all the weak areas are.”

On June 21, 2004, Scaled Composites made history in the skies above the just-renamed Mojave Air [...]]]>

Mike Melville raises his arms after exiting SpaceShipOne following his suborbital flight on June 21, 2004. To the left, in the yellow shirt, is Burt Rutan; in the blue shirt and cap is Paul Allen. (credit: J. Foust)

On June 21, 2004, Scaled Composites made history in the skies above the just-renamed Mojave Air and Space Port in the high desert of Southern California. Scaled’s White Knight carrier aircraft took off from the airport, with the SpaceShipOne suborbital spaceplane attached underneath. After climbing to an altitude of 14,300 meters (47,000 feet) at 7:50 am PDT, the White Knight crew released SpaceShipOne, which fired its hybrid rocket motor several seconds later. With Mike Melvill at the controls, SpaceShipOne ascended towards space, achieving a peak altitude of 100.124 kilometers (328,491 feet) before gliding back to a runway landing at Mojave. That flight was the first time a commercially-developed crewed spacecraft flew into space—if only briefly crossing the 100-kilometer Kármán Line that is a commonly-used demarcation of space.

That flight, and the two that followed in late September and early October of 2004 that claimed the $10-million Ansari X PRIZE, were supposed to be the beginning of a new era of commercial spaceflight. The strong public interest in the flight, the two dozen other teams competing for the prize, and the entrance of Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Galactic locked up a deal with Scaled and its funder, Paul Allen, shortly before the X PRIZE-winning flights, all foretold the beginning of an era when suborbital spaceflights, for tourism or other applications, would be relatively common, at least when compared to the small number of orbital launches that take place worldwide each year.

That future, though, has been on hold for a while. The final SpaceShipOne flight, on October 4, 2004, remains to this day the last commercial suborbital human spaceflight. Rather than putting SpaceShipOne into service, as many imagined would happen to the prize-winning vehicle since the $10-million prize purse was only a fraction of its development cost, Scaled and Allen instead put the vehicle into the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, where it hangs today next to another prize-winning vehicle, Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis. (Allen later revealed that the tax writeoff from the donation, coupled with the prize money and technology licensing fees from Virgin, allowed him to get a “net positive return” on his investment in the project.) Development of its successor, SpaceShipTwo (SS2), has gone on slowly, and other ventures working on suborbital vehicles have also seen little progress.

This lack of progress also has its own form of Boyle’s Law, in this case named after MSNBC science reporter Alan Boyle. “When it comes to private spaceflight, the future always seems to be two years away,” he quipped in May 2007, summarizing the state of the industry. At that time, for example, Virgin was planning to put SpaceShipTwo into commercial service by late 2009, a date it missed. Rocketplane Global also planned to start test flights of its suborbital vehicle by 2009, which it also missed because of Rocketplane’s financial issues that eventually forced the company into bankruptcy.

Now, though, the future may be a little closer than two years off. Virgin and others are making progress—slower than they might have liked, but progress nonetheless. Customers may not be flying into space commercially this year, but their future flights may now be more like a year off.

Virgin Galactic remains the most visible of the commercial suborbital companies, thanks in large part to the Virgin marketing machine. Technically, though, the company is making progress in recent weeks. SpaceShipTwo took to the air on a “captive carry” flight on June 8, the first time the vehicle was airborne since a trip to Spaceport America in New Mexico last October. The test log indicates that this flight was a “rehearsal for glide flight”, suggesting that SS2 will fly free again some time in the near future for the first time since last September. Those flights are a prelude to powered test flights by SS2, which have been waiting on the development of its rocket motor, called Rocket Motor Two (RM2). Just yesterday they performed a static test of RM2, the first such test at Scaled’s facility in Mojave (previous tests had been conducted by Sierra Nevada Corporation elsewhere in Southern California). “These tests provide an end to end test of all the vehicle’s rocket motor systems and additional confidence before committing the vehicle to powered flight test,” the test log states.

Late last month, Virgin also announced that it had secured an experimental permit for flight tests from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST). The permit is needed for Virgin and Scaled to perform those powered SS2 flight tests. “Scaled expects to begin rocket powered, supersonic flights under the just-issued experimental permit toward the end of the year,” Virgin stated in its announcement. First will be glide tests to study SS2’s aerodynamic performance with the additional weight of the rocket motor; those flights will start this summer and continue into autumn.

It’s possible, though, that Virgin could be beaten in commercial service by another Mojave-based company, XCOR Aerospace. XCOR is making steady progress on its Lynx suborbital vehicle with tests to begin later this year and the first “air under the wings”—in the form of a brief powered hop off the runway at Mojave—possible by the end of this year. A press release from XCOR yesterday about an agreement to provide flight training services to Excalibur Almaz indicated that its first Lynx flight is planned for “later this year or in early 2013″ with several Lynx suborbital flights per day by 2015.

There are other ventures as well. Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems are working on suborbital vehicles that take off vertically and land either by parachute (Armadillo) or under engine power vertically (Masten). These vehicles will be initially uncrewed, although Armadillo does have plans for a crewed vehicle and an agreement with Space Adventures to market those flights. Both companies have test flights planned for later this year. Blue Origin, whose public focus (or, at least, as public as the secretive company gets) has been on orbital spacecraft as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development program, still has plans for suborbital vehicles.

Eight years after SpaceShipOne first flew in space, the lack of progress can seem disappointing compared to the hopes and expectations of the crowd that gathered that sunny morning in the desert north of Los Angeles. But, perhaps, the future that we were promised that historic day is finally arriving.

On Saturday they were back at the Spaceport for another [...]]]> In early December, Armadillo Aerospace successfully launched its STIG-A suborbital rocket from Spaceport America, flying to an altitude of nearly 42 kilometers before successfully returning to Earth by parachute. Shortly after that December 4 flight they released a video of the flight, shown below:

On Saturday they were back at the Spaceport for another flight of the rocket. According to a press release issued by the New Mexico Spaceport Authority (NMSA) late Saturday, that flight was at least partially successful. The rocket lifted off as planned and again flew to nearly 42 kilometers, based on preliminary data. However, the release notes, the rocket’s “recovery system did not function properly after reaching its desired altitude however, the rocket was successfully retrieved after a hard landing within the predicted Spaceport America mission recover zone.” No other details about the launch, which was not publicized in advance at the request of Armadillo, have been released yet. Since the company has been open in the past about talking about tests that didn’t go as planned, though, we should hear more from them soon.

Since the NMSA press release is not up yet on the Spaceport America web site, I’ve included the text of the release below:

PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JANUARY 28, 2012

Armadillo Aerospace launches their third “STIG-A” rocket from Spaceport America

Upham, NM – New Mexico Spaceport Authority (NMSA) officials announced today a launch of a “STIG-A” rocket designed and built by Armadillo Aerospace. The launch took place from Spaceport America’s vertical launch complex on Saturday, January 28, 2012. The research and development test flight was a non-public, unpublished event at the request of Armadillo Aerospace, as the company is testing proprietary advanced launch technologies.

Saturday’s Armadillo launch successfully lifted off at approximately 11:15 a.m. (MDT), which was within the dedicated, five-hour launch window, and preliminary data indicates the rocket reached its projected altitude of over 137,000 feet.

The STIG-A’s recovery system did not function properly after reaching its desired altitude however, the rocket was successfully retrieved after a hard landing within the predicted Spaceport America mission recover zone.

Armadillo Aerospace plans to release additional information on today’s launch in the coming days after they have time to analyze their launch data further.

“This was the third test of the Armadillo “STIG A” reusable sub-orbital rocket technology to launch at Spaceport America. The last successful “STIG-A” was launched at the spaceport on December 4, 2011.

Today’s launch was the 14th launch from the Spaceport America vertical launch complex since 2006 and marks the 4th Armadillo Aerospace launch from the spaceport. Armadillo Aerospace has additional plans to launch from Spaceport America this year.

About Armadillo Aerospace
Founded in 2000, Armadillo Aerospace has an unequaled experience base with over 200 flight tests spread over a dozen different vehicles. The company has done work for NASA and the United States Air Force, and flown vehicles at every X-Prize Cup and Northrup Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge event, including those held in New Mexico from 2006 to 2008.
For more information, please visit www.armadilloaerospace.com.

About Spaceport America
Spaceport America has been providing commercial launch services since 2006. Phase One of the construction for the spaceport is expected to be complete in early 2012. Phase Two of the construction and pre-operations activities will follow, including the development of a world-class Visitor Experience for students, tourists and space launch customers. Officials at Spaceport America have been working closely with entrepreneurial space leaders like Armadillo Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, and UP Aerospace, as well as established aerospace firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and MOOG-FTS to develop commercial spaceflight at the new facility. The economic impact of launches, tourism and new construction at Spaceport America are already delivering on the promise of economic development to the people of New Mexico.
For more information, please visit: www.spaceportamerica.com