Armadillo Aerospace was John Carmack's rocket company, whose site documented its Lunar Challenge flights and development updates.
HN commenters mention it as Carmack's rocket-building venture, noting it was active for six to eight years and citing it in space-industry discussions.
"... For most blogs and content all we need is simple text :) so light, so clean. ..."
Plan files?
Back when linux was new and lots of servers started popping up, .plan (dot plan) files ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol where the blogs of that era. Easy to read, quick to load you get a heads up of what was going on via text - a lot like HackerNews. And the best .plan files to read had to be iD & John Carmack.
3/23/1997 - Damaged F40
Someone ran into my F40 in the
parking lot, then took off. Words
cannot do justice to how I feel
right now.
If anyone knows a tall white male
in the dallas area that now has
red paint and carbon fibre on their
tan pickup truck, turn the bastard in!
Not only did you get the best technical insight in to programming they where more personal than blogs, funny even. No ads. No cutting edge design to get in the way of the information. Plan files don't really exist now. Carmack closed his down in 2005 ~ http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc/Recent%20Updates and now blogs like the rest us. An archive exists at http://www.scribd.com/doc/14193/John-Carmack-Archive-plan-1999?from_related_doc=1 Port 79 and plan files went the way of telnet and the Dodo. Btw it was reported the esteemed Rtm and his pesky worm exploit ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm that had a part in plan files demise. After exploiting a buffer overflow in fingerd (among others) [0] "too risky", ISP admins claimed.
[0] Not…
Valid questions, but there are some 'known' unknowns which is to say you can't even start if you can't get some way to manipulate the moon on to the surface of the moon. There is a variety of material on the surface [1] which removes the need for excavation. Economically one would want to post process raw regolith into the desired materials to improve the profitability of sending mass back from the moon to earth.
But what I like about these guys is that they're in kick down the door and get a search warrant later mode. There is a demonstrated capability in the Falcon9 project to get an earth/lunar/lunar-surface mission together. If you borrow the Merlin engine from SpaceX for your rover, autonomous landing in a gravity well with a power variable engine is a solved problem. [2] So most of the questions vis-a-vis "How do I get something on to the surface to mine?" is an engineering / cost problem rather than a 'create from whole cloth' problem.
The 'knotty bits' in this particular endeavor are then three;
a) Do we deliver a return capability to the surface (aka a return craft) or do we create it on the surface from materials we find there?
b) What is the energy infrastructure, solar? nuclear? And do we build it on site or do we transport it?
c) Of the prioritized targets (in terms of value per lifted ounce of the surface and into low earth orbit) what are the extraction techniques for each and their repeatability?
That would be a helluva lot of fun to play with wouldn't…
In a way you are both right. There are currently two aspects of the American space industry.
One, the moribund aerospace giants that are largely just making the same old rockets, entrenched in their job creation programs.
And two, the new space companies, which are making suborbital rocketplanes and cheap boosters. At present, they may not look impressive because of small steps they are taking, but you just have to look at Scaled's Space Ship Two to realize that radical innovation in their design is not dead.
This has been a long time coming, and there has been a dark age in aerospace.
If you are interested, in my view the seminal event in the new space industry was the Delta Clipper Program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X).
And now there are some really impressive companies trying to make space truly viable for everyone. Some of those companies are.
XCOR Aerospace: http://xcor.com/
Scaled Composites: http://scaled.com/
Masten: http://masten-space.com/
Armadillo: http://armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home
Aside from aerospace. While I agree that there have been game changers like the cell phone, I do agree with Kasparov that there is an atmosphere of risk aversion. For instance I don't see any daring research programs like when DARPA funded Engelbart's augment research that led to Human User Interface objects like the mouse. And that disturbs me. Often visionaries look very crazy or at best very hard to understand because they are operating…
The funny thing is that the people making their money in software and entertainment: John Carmack, Elon Musk, Larry Page, James Cameron, etc... are the ones getting us to space and re-igniting the space program that the general population lost interest in funding a long time ago.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57419801/asteroid-mining-venture-backed-by-james-cameron-google-ceo-larry-page/
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home
http://www.spacex.com/
I say: Let the people with big ideas and great implementation skills make all the money they can legally. They're the ones we want to fund so they can pursue new interests and create new markets.
James Gosling: Liquid Robotics http://www.liquidr.com/news_events/press/2011/2011-08-30-gosling.html
John D. Carmack: Armadillo Aerospace http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home
I'm tempted to throw in Google's Sergey Brin (Larry Page too?) for Google Glass.
And I'm sure there are a few others. Elon Musk just shows up more in the news due to his success.
Also, not all billionaires are technically inclined geeks.
Wow, thats cool. So it just uses thrust vectoring to move around and hover? It would have to be pretty advanced to cope with the rotation forces of the impeller.
Seeing this fly reminds me of Armadillo Aerospace's Pixel:
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home
But obviously Pixel is intended to fly into space and is rocket powered..