Jul 112010
Hands down.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7sdHzY3xFA&
Four views of a recent Armadillo Aerospace test “hop” of their VTOVL rocket vehicle.
It’s things like this that keep that last tiny little spark of hope alive in me. If we can somehow manage to survive the Obamaconomocalypse, so that rich folk can continue to invest in space travel, then we jsut might make it as a civilization, even with a wholly neutered NASA.
15 Responses to “The Best Thing You’ll See All Day”
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That is pretty damned COOL!!! Clearly not something nasa(yes, lower case intended) would not be interested in, since it clearly works.
*deep sigh* The future may not be a sewer in the ghetto.
It looks like something out of a science fiction movie, but it’s for real! I love it.
That was really something!
Talk about a precise landing!
For planets with a dense atmosphere (like Earth) I still prefer aerodynamic recovery systems like wings and parachutes. An engine failure 100 feet before touchdown should not result in a catastrophic crash.
I wonder how long it’ll take them to get to the DC-X stage of 20 years ago.
In a way, they’re pretty much there. DC-X was special not because it was big, but because:
1) it demonstrated reliable VTOVL tailsitter performance
2) It demonstrated non-NASA-like refurb and turnaround capabilities.
They’re pretty much there *now.* Scaling it up to a manned or payload carrying suborbital vehicle would be an impressive feat, but they’re closer to that now than they were to what they have now when they had nothing.
When Lockheed won the X-33 competition I asked the Deputy Program Manager for NASA why McDac lost and he said one of their biggest problems was to construct the composite sphereical tank that was bigger than any existing autoclaves at the time.
They were also sold on Lockheeds multi-lobed tank design, which of course was the killer in the end.
The McDac design made some neat looking models, I personally like the early design. That was another problem, MD’s design kept changing like Boeing’s X-32. I made the updated design and hand delivered it to jPL for the announcement, swapping out their earlier concept. I tried to get Gene to tell me who won, but even he didn’t know.
On the day of the selection only five people knew and he asn’t one of them. In this pick, Al and Dan are unvieling my 1/50th LM X-33 model. Dan kept the model. I made four sets at that scale of the three designs. I have one of the X-33 LM’s left
here’s the model being unvieled:
http://i421.photobucket.com/albums/pp291/retrorocketmodels/scan0002.jpg
Don’t fear space enthusiasts. There are groups doing work outside of public scrutiny on things far more exciting then potential Lunar Landers. 🙂
Blap… hate to say it, but I’ve heard that before. Lots of times.
Perhaps in 2012 there will be hope, where hope is not a Four-Letter Word.
Jim
That’s interesting… the model has the vertical fins on it; I thought those were added a while after the decision for Lockheed had been announced, and were one of the reasons it didn’t meet its weight requirements.
No. The X-33 design was pretty well fixed. The full-scale VentureStar had fins that migrated to the wingtips, wings that grew much larger, and payload which had to migrate outside the vehicle since the inside had to fill up with more propellant.
Multilobe tanks are not inheirently a bad idea. But what killed X-33 was multilobe tanks made out of composites. Thanks to the wonders of cryopumping, these tanks had a tendency to delaminate and tear themselves to flinders, while similar tanks made out of lithium-aluminum alloy did not (but they weighed more).
X-33 taught the aerospace industry all sorts of wonderful lessons. Sadly it also taught the lesson that demonstrators for planned *operational* vehicles should not be reliant upon technologies that haven’t been fully developed or even understood yet. Either the Rockweel or McD designs would have been vastly more likely to have worked, because they relied less upon bleeding-edge tech.
>..these tanks had a tendency to delaminate and tear themselves
> to flinders, while similar tanks made out of lithium-aluminum
> alloy did not (but they weighed more)….
I heard they found the aluminum-lithium tanks would actually have been lighter in that configuration?
Also the composite would work – but they didn’t want to spend the money for a big autoclave for a dead project?