Rival
space groups are vowing to push forward on vertical takeoff and landing rocket
technology to vie for prize money in a NASA-sponsored lunar lander prototype competition.
Last
week's Wirefly X Prize Cup held in Las Cruces, New Mexico saw multiple flights
of just one craft trying to snag a chunk of a $2 million purse under NASA's
Centennial Challenges program.
Flying
its rocket-propelled "Pixel", lone contestant, Armadillo Aerospace of Mesquite,
Texas, made repeat attempts to claim a cash award--only to be thwarted by
landing difficulties and related hardware woes. [see video]
While
Armadillo Aerospace rocketeers left empty handed, they are keen on re-flying at
the 2007 Cup. But given the intervening year, other teams are likely to enter
flight vehicles too.
On the levels
The
Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge rules call for a rocket-propelled craft with an assigned
payload to climb vertically, reach a defined altitude, fly for a pre-determined
amount of time and then vertically land on a target that is a fixed distance
from the liftoff point.
After
remaining at that spot for a period of time, the vehicle must re-fly, stay
aloft for the same amount of time, then land again on its original launch pad.
There
are two distinct levels to the challenge.
The
primary differences between a Vertical Lander Challenge and the Lunar Lander
Challenge are the minimum time of flight (90 seconds versus 180 seconds); the
surface terrain at the landing sites (flat compared to rocky); and the degree
of difficulty presented for precision landing.
For
both Level One and Level Two, the vehicle has the option to refuel before
conducting the required return level to the original starting point.
Square and tight
"I
don't have any complaints about the way the event was handled, once the
fundamental decisions were made," Carmack told SPACE.com. "It would be a
lot better for us if it wasn't tied to an event...because we would be able to go
try again next week after engineering some much better landing gear and getting
an accurate [landing pad] survey."
Undaunted
by problems experienced during Pixel's flights, Carmack is resigned to claim X
Prize Cup money.
"We
could have won this year with a little good luck, but by next year we will be
so well prepared that it would take crushing bad luck to keep us from winning,"
Carmack emphasized.
"We
flew great...we just didn't land so well," Carmack also recounted on his
company's website.
Following
Pixel's last flight at the Cup--veering off course into the ground just after
liftoff--Carmack considered it "down for the count"--no longer to be flown. But
on closer examination, Pixel may not be dead after all--and a twin craft, Texel, is also flight ready.
"The
tanks and frame [of Pixel] still seem square and tight. We are going to
hydrotest everything, and possibly re-weld the computer mounting points and the
other things that are broken," he reported. "I still want to do side-by-side
vertical drag racing demos with the pair of vehicles."
Carmack
related that his "official bet" is that there will be no more than one other
competitor next year, "and it may well just be Armadillo again," Carmack
reported.
Hover tests
Another
group, Masten Space Systems of Santa Clara, California is the closest to being
flight qualified, Carmack suggested, "but they still need to fly their very
first test vehicle, then design, build, and test a more potent vehicle to even
be able to compete for the Level One prize."
Both
financial and engineering hurdles prevented the Masten group opposing Armadillo
in this year's Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. But they are now marching
ahead in readying their flight hardware.
"Our
flying test platform, XA 0.1, should be doing its first hover tests in the next
few weeks at our test area at Mojave Airport [in California]," said Masten's Michael
Mealling, Vice President for Business Development.
"Once
we have put it through its paces and figured out how to break it we will finish
assembly on XA 0.2 ... which would have been our Lunar Lander Challenge Level One
vehicle," he told SPACE.com.
Accelerated timelines
After
XA 0.1's first test flight in the next few weeks, Mealling said that the group
will be flying that hardware on a regular basis--both for the practice and to
try out various potential failure modes such as loss of the vehicle network,
stuck valves, as well as pressure failures.
"Masten
Space has always been about building a business carrying payloads and people
into suborbital space. That means we were always going to build something like
the Lunar Lander Challenge vehicles, it was just a matter of when," Mealling
added.
In
trying to meet the deadline of taking part in this year's Lunar Lander
Challenge, Masten Space Systems accelerated their timelines by almost a year.
"As
many in this business will tell you, though, the largest hurdles often aren't
technical. They're financial and regulatory," Mealling noted. "That means we
are actively looking for sponsors and financial partners to come along for the
ride."
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