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 done even a lunar lander challenge flight from one pad to another. And now there are three. Never mind multiple flights by Masten, both L1 and L2!

The future might be markedly different from present. How about something like testing space telescope instruments in 100+ km VTVL or HTHL flights? Reliable and routine access to space, even though at start for only a brief time in hops, could change everything. You would get everything back intact. Unlike with sounding rockets where recovery seems often so uncertain…

There are some aerodynamic issues still though that I’ve been expounding on for a long time.

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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 is not.

Masten Space 180 second vehicle Xoie just before attempt

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Xombie NOW

Live stream just went up at http://qik.com/video/312581

they should be flying at 45 past whatever hour it is now in your time zone. Now on the pad loading propellants and helium.

EDIT:

And they did it! Congratulations! Also great accuracy.

The live cellphone video of the second flight was shot from quite close: http://qik.com/video/3126566

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Masten

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 there are two viable big VTVL sounding rocket companies!

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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 in a sense. These rockets will serve as the basis for reusable sounding rockets, possibly high altitude tourist vehicles and later orbital system lower or upper stages. When the operations are routine and landings safe, the cost per flight goes down orders of magnitude, compared to ordinary rockets.

A new era for rocketry is dawning.

 

Update: This is the twitter account to follow: http://twitter.com/mastenspace

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