Will they or won't they? Armadillo Aerospace's bid to win a piece of the $2 million Lunar Lander Challenge could go boom or bust, depending on the outcome of an 11th-hour rocket test scheduled in advance of the Wirefly X Prize Cup in New Mexico.
Rocket fans are following every twist and turn in Armadillo's tangled tale.
Armadillo Aerospace |
Armadillo's entrant in the Lunar Lander Challenge, a design called the "Quad" because of its four spherical tanks, fires its engine during a recent test. |
Under the leadership of millionaire video-game programmer John Carmack, the Texas-based Armadillo team is considered the best bet to bring home some of the money put up by NASA under its Centennial Challenges prize program. The Lunar Lander Challenge requires contestants to send up a rocket ship to an altitude of at least 50 meters (164 feet), have it hover over to a landing site about 100 meters (328 feet) away, touch down, then retrace its route back to the starting pad.
The challenge actually has two tracks: One calls for a 90-second hang time and a relatively flat landing site, and the other calls for 180 seconds in the air and a rocky, uneven, moonlike landing site. Most observers think Armadillo has a good chance to win the "easy" competition (with a $350,000 top prize), if not the "hard" competition (with a $1 million top prize).
That's assuming Carmack's team gets to compete at all. After months of deliberation, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an experimental launch permit to Armadillo on Tuesday. But the FAA said it still needed more flight data before the show could go on, in front of what could be 10,000 spectators or more at Las Cruces' airport. So the agency made the permit contingent on Armadillo conducting a hover test for FAA inspectors on Thursday, the day before the Lunar Lander Challenge gets under way.
Armadillo's rocketeers brought their Quad lander to Las Cruces overnight, and had hoped to do a tethered practice run today at Las Cruces' fairgrounds, near the airport. However, the area was doused by a steady rain this afternoon - putting a damper on the pre-test.
"They called it on account of rain," reported Ken Davidian, who is working on behalf of NASA's Centennial Challenges program.
That leaves Thursday as the final day for Armadillo to conduct an untethered test and prove to the FAA that it has the right stuff for safe and sane rocketry. Stay tuned for updates - from here as well as from Robin Snelson's Lunar Lander Challenge blog.
Update for 10:15 p.m. PT Oct. 19: Armadillo's Quad rocket has gained full FAA clearance to compete in the Lunar Lander Challenge. Here's the full story.
