Tag Archives: Armadillo

A Small Step for Rocketry

“Rockets are special” is an interchangeable meme with “rockets are expensive”. Well, hopefully they get less special. Armadillo’s been making progress, from the latest update: For the very first time, a complete system was operated without the presence of any … Continue reading

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LOX Film Cooling

It works! Armadillo did the important, expensive and meticulous scientific research: During a tour of the shop I was explaining how our particular rocket engines worked. While doing this I discovered that an injector we had performed no less than … Continue reading

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A New Competitor for Armadillo?

For propelling the Rocket Racer? [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmbnzCV4vUc&feature=player_embedded] 😉

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The Sandman

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Congratulations and Thanks

To Armadillo, Masten Space Systems, Unreasonable Rocket, The X Prize foundation and all the people in these organization and others! I was watching the webcasts a large portion of the weekend. A month ago, only one team, Armadillo, had ever … Continue reading

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There Are Rockets – and There Are Vehicles

Watching the armadillo 201 m hop http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2009_10_24/2009_10_24_boosted_hop.wmv NASA’s Ares-1X http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html and Masten Space’s Xoie L2 flight http://twitter.com/NGLLC09 Two of these are elegant controllable reusable vehicles, able to take off fly and land in various weather conditions and corn fields. One … Continue reading

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Masten

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3wdeDJtYf0&feature=player_embedded#t=227] Made huge strides in the last few days. A half-L1 done. They might be able to compete with Armadillo on L2, though I’m somewhat skeptical since they’re only going to assemble the new L2 vehicle soon. Suddenly looks like … Continue reading

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Lunar Lander Challenge 2009

Armadillo finally won L2 already. Masten and Unreasonable are still flying for second place I think (I’m not 100% clear on the rules) today! Spacetransportnews is the place to watch all this. (Or it has the links collected.) It’s historical … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Homebuilt, industry, Lunar, Motivation, RLV:s, Suborbital | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Fed Up

I’m quite that just right now. It will pass. Perhaps. There’s been some discussion in various places about both NASA and potential future launch vehicles. Everything’s just so static in a large sense. Completely hopeless. I’ll throw in the towel … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Demotivation, ESA, ISRU, Motivation, NASA, RLV:s, Suborbital | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

X-Prize cup 2007, a test for reusable rocketry

Well, as has been noted in the newspace circles, Armadillo Aerospace failed to win the lunar lander challenge even after coming very close in 2006 already, and being even closer this time. Their report text is here and videos and … Continue reading

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