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 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 Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program, which is designed to support flight opportunities on commercial suborbital vehicles for a variety of research purposes. The flights will take place at Spaceport America in New Mexico (for Armadillo) and Mojave Air and Space Port in California (for Masten) this fall and winter, reaching altitudes of between 5 and 40 kilometers.

The announcement coincided with a “Flight Opportunities” panel at the AIAA Space 2010 conference Monday afternoon in Anaheim, California. As it turned out, it wasn’t much of a panel session: most of the scheduled panelists were unavailable for one reason or another, but officials from the CRuSR program and the NASA Office of the Chief Technologist (CRuSR’s parent organization) were present and offered some additional details beyond what was in the NASA release. For example, the $475,000 awarded was split roughly evenly between the two companies, with one getting approximately $250,000 and the other approximately $225,000. (I was later told that Masten got the slightly larger award.)

The NASA press release mentioned that the vehicle will be carrying antennas to support the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) navigation system for the FAA, but that will not be the only payload they will carry. Dougal Maclise said at the panel session that the vehicles will also carry a “flight monitor” from NASA Ames to measure the flight environment of the vehicles, including acceleration and vibration. A third payload is a “particle agglomeration” experiment from the Space Sciences Lab at the University of California Berkeley tat has previously flown on the ISS. The key requirements for all the experiments, he said, is that they be “self-sufficient, autonomous, and expendable”.

The flights will begin as soon as October, with Armadillo flying out of Spaceport America; the Masten flights will begin late this year. Those two companies were pretty much the only ones who could meet CRuSR’s requirements to perform test flights, even at relatively low altitudes, within six months of contract award (a requirement in the solicitation). Virgin Galactic has not yet started glide tests of SpaceShipTwo, let alone powered flights, while XCOR Aerospace will not be ready to begin vehicle tests in the next six months. (Blue Origin’s status is more secretive, as usual for them, but there’s no evidence they are in an active flight test program.)

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 [...]]]>

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 a Mod vehicle on a boosted hop to an altitude of about 2,000 feet (600 meters), similar to flights they’ve done in the past. This time, though, they turned off the engine on the descent for about five to seven seconds before relighting, as can be seen in this video. One difference between the Armadillo and Masten flights is that the Mod deployed a drogue during the time the engine was off, apparently to keep the vehicle from tumbling; it worked, although the vehicle did appear to swing around quite a bit. Once the engine was reignited and the drogue released, the vehicle made a normal descent and landing under rocket power.

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 [...]]]>

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 at least 100 kilometers altitude, with Space Adventures selling the seats, starting with its existing customer list of about 200 people, including several former astronauts.

The presentation, featuring Space Adventures president and CEO Eric Anderson and Armadillo Aerospace founder John Carmack, offered few technical or schedule details about their plans. There is no finalized vehicle design yet: a video shown in the presentation showed a number of differenent Armadillo concepts, from a cone sitting atop four propellant tanks with a central engine to the “fishbowl” concept Armadillo showed off in 2008 for the short-lived suborbital joint venture between Armadillo and the Rocket Racing League. Carmack also offered no timetable for the beginning of tourist flights, although he did note the company hoped to be flying unmanned scientific payloads to altitudes of approximately 100,000 feet (30 kilometers) in the next year, and to 100 kilometers altitude in the following year.

Instead, the presentation was examining in more general terms the companies’ plans, including why Space Adventures, who has made a name for itself for nearly a decade by arranging flights to the International Space Station, would get into the suborbital spaceflight business. Anderson noted that when Space Adventures was founded in the late 1990s, its focus was on suborbital spaceflight at a time when many vehicle developers were saying “we’re only two years away,” he recalled. “We didn’t have any idea at the time that we would be fortunate enough to be able to launch private citizens to orbit before suborbital flights,” he continued. Later, Space Adventures considered working with a Russian company to develop a suborbital vehicle called Explorer, which he said they abandoned because “frankly, it got too expensive.” As Armadillo made progress with their vehicles, “I was just so impressed” with their efforts he was convinced they were the company that could really reduce the cost of space access.

While neither Armadillo nor Carmack discussed the cost of the project, they did confirm that Space Adventures was providing Armadillo with funding to support it, at least in part. Alluding to past partnership announcements that failed to pan out, Carmack said, “One of my new rules on this is that I’m not going to get up and talk about something unless a check has cleared.” And since Carmack was getting up and talking about this, he confirmed, “Space Adventures has actually paid Armadillo Aerospace to begin developing a new suborbital vehicle.” Carmack said later that under their agreement, Space Adventures will pay Armadillo unspecified amounts upon achiveing certain milestones in the vehicle development effort. “The amount of money that has changed hands here is not trivial, but it’s not enough to fund the vehicles,” he said. “It isn’t enough money to pay for these vehicles, it’s enough money to make me think about not pursuing other contracts.” He added that he expected to kick in more of his own money into the venture, but also looked to getting funding from NASA’s Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program for flying scientific payloads.

The timelines that they did reveal suggest that Space Adventures and Armadillo will not be the first to market for commercial suborbital space tourism, given the progress being made by companies like Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace. Carmack addressed this as well, in the process perhaps raising the hackles of some of his competitors in the audience at the ISDC. “It’s a fool who doesn’t think he has any competition,” Carmack said. On Virgin, he said, “I think they have explicitly not chosen the most cost effective solution on this. I don’t think they will be able to compete on price, eventually, but some people will prefer their experience.”

Carmack was critical of XCOR from a funding standpoint. “I believe that, if fully funded, they could build a vehicle that could fly, that could service passengers,” he said. “I do not believe they are fully funded.” He then issued something of a warning to other companies, after earlier noting that Armadillo planned to accelerate its development plans and hire more people. “I think one of the best things about having the other companies in the industry is that it’s developed some very skilled and talened people, and we’re probably going to steal some of them.”

Carmack also said he felt Armadillo’s VTVL vehicle was a superior approach to a winged vehicled like SpaceShipTwo or Lynx. A ballistic reentry, he said, is better than a winged reentry, noting one fatality from the X-15 program. Launching a winged vehicle, he added, is “a lot harder than making a ballistic vehicle fly right up.” Thus, for greatly reducing the cost of suborbital spaceflight, “the powered [vertical] landing has significant benefits.” After the presentation I talked briefly with XCOR COO Andrew Nelson, who said, “People will want a lot of different experiences. We believe that most people will want something involving wings.”

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 [...]]]>

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 ago,” he said, with most of the core team now full-time employees and the company making an operating profit. But the business they’re doing with organizations ranging from the Rocket Racing League to NASA can be “distracting” to their core efforts. “It is kind of getting in the way of building the things we want to build for the vehicles we want to build,” he said. He said he didn’t want to become yet another small aerospace company, “always chasing around their friends and contacts” looking for work.

Carmack, though, has something going for him that many other companies in NewSpace or elsewhere don’t have: some personal wealth. He said his financial situation changed for the better when he sold id Software last year. “Armadillo really was operating at the limit of what I could personally provide,” he said. “It was the limit of what my wife would let me put into it.” He said he’s now able, and willing, to invest more into the company, even though he said he’s proud that it it’s operationally profitable now. “So I probably am going to step up” spending this year on internal projects, he said, even if that means not being profitable.

One area of focus for Armadillo will be resuming a series of “boosted hop” test flights of their vehicle. They started this after the Lunar Lander Challenge was complete, reaching altitudes of 4,000 feet (1,200 meters). “However, while the boost to 4,000 feet was successful, the landing wasn’t,” Carmack said, showing a video of the flight test. With the engine throttled down and the vehicle descending at a speed of about 120 mph (200 km/h), they lost attitude control and the vehicle fell, landing on its side with quite a thud, but no fireball. They now understand that problem and plan resuming boosted hops first at their home site, Caddo Mills airport in Texas, where they can go to 6,000 feet (1,800 meters). From there they’ll go to Spaceport Oklahoma for flights of up to at least 20,000 feet (6,000 meters); higher flights will require going to Spaceport America in New Mexico.

Carmack expressed optimism that Armadillo was close to having all the key technologies needed for a complete suborbital vehicle. “What we’ve got, what we’ve been flying, is pretty damn close to what we need for a reusable suborbital vehicle,” he said.

Carmack also briefly addressed one controversial event from last year: finishing second in Level Two of the Lunar Lander Challenge after a judging decision gave Masten Space Systems one more flight attempt, which they used to make a flight that won first place and $1 million. Despite the experience, he heaped praise on the overarching Centennial Challenges program. “I have to say, Centennial Challenges has to be some of the best money that NASA has ever spent,” he said. But, he added, “I still am bitter about how things finally went down at the end there… No Christmas cards for them.”