Armadillo Aerospace Update Thread

[douglas100]

Excellent!

I wonder if anyone knows whether there is any roll control on this vehicle?

[Robotbeat]

Excellent!

I wonder if anyone knows whether there is any roll control on this vehicle?

Doubtful. You don't need it really, especially with fins for passive roll limiting.

[A_M_Swallow]

Well done.

[Lars_J]

Excellent!

I wonder if anyone knows whether there is any roll control on this vehicle?

Doubtful. You don't need it really, especially with fins for passive roll limiting.

I have no doubts that better roll control will be added for future flights.

[Robotbeat]

Excellent!

I wonder if anyone knows whether there is any roll control on this vehicle?

Doubtful. You don't need it really, especially with fins for passive roll limiting.

I have no doubts that better roll control will be added for future flights.

Well, eventually... But remember that there are full orbital flights which don't even have roll control for some of the stages.

[billh]

Excellent!

I wonder if anyone knows whether there is any roll control on this vehicle?

There are two tiny roll control fins about two thirds of the way up the vehicle. Armadillo has talked about them before in various places. Clearly they're still working out the bugs. 

[zaitcev]

There are two tiny roll control fins about two thirds of the way up the vehicle. Armadillo has talked about them before in various places.

Similar roll control fins are found at many guided missiles; in many cases they are used for directional control as well: the missile is given a steady rotation, and the fins are moved together as appropriate to the phase of the spin. Also, Angara's URM-1 (flown twice in KSLV-1) includes roll control fins, but they are attached at the tail compartment. From what I heard from military missile developers, a care must be taken not to stall these control surfaces by excessive angle.

[Jason1701]

Great news! They were actually several times as high as Blue Origin.

The Blue Origin site says they reached 45,000 ft:

Successful Short Hop, Setback, and Next Vehicle

Working their way toward the Karman line...

EDIT: Oops, Armadillo reach 137,500 ft, which is indeed several times as high. Even more impressive!

It's never been clear whether BO's vehicle actually blew up at 45k or if that's just where they terminated the thrust.

[david1971]

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=376

"Armadillo is expecting to fly over 100,000' next month, and I am not trivializing any aspect of the effort. If we get the vehicle back intact, we ahould be attempting a 100km flight on the next trip."

[Robotbeat]

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=376

"Armadillo is expecting to fly over 100,000' next month, and I am not trivializing any aspect of the effort. If we get the vehicle back intact, we ahould be attempting a 100km flight on the next trip."

The rocket did get banged up (parachute only partially deployed, I believe). Don't know if they'll go to 100km.

[Moe Grills]

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=376

"Armadillo is expecting to fly over 100,000' next month, and I am not trivializing any aspect of the effort. If we get the vehicle back intact, we ahould be attempting a 100km flight on the next trip."

You sound like an insider.
So did the STIG actually reach 137,500 ft altitude?

If so - damaged or not upon return (things can be fixed; or improved copies can be made) - you have reached a point where I'm considering asking the moderator of this thread to move Armadillo Aerospace to the ("Other Launchers" webpage) suborbital-flight thread.

[NotGncDude]

Great news! They were actually several times as high as Blue Origin.

The Blue Origin site says they reached 45,000 ft:

Successful Short Hop, Setback, and Next Vehicle

Working their way toward the Karman line...

EDIT: Oops, Armadillo reach 137,500 ft, which is indeed several times as high. Even more impressive!

It's never been clear whether BO's vehicle actually blew up at 45k or if that's just where they terminated the thrust.

These two rockets are very different beasts so I would not compare them (even though to I am not terribly impressed by Blue Origin's performance to date). STIG is closer to a sounding rocket and these fly to 500+ km regularly.

[savuporo]

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=376

"Armadillo is expecting to fly over 100,000' next month, and I am not trivializing any aspect of the effort. If we get the vehicle back intact, we ahould be attempting a 100km flight on the next trip."

You sound like an insider.
So did the STIG actually reach 137,500 ft altitude?

If so - damaged or not upon return (things can be fixed; or improved copies can be made) - you have reached a point where I'm considering asking the moderator of this thread to move Armadillo Aerospace to the ("Other Launchers" webpage) suborbital-flight thread.

John Carmack posts updates now and then to the ARocket list. ( and sometimes twitter )

According to hist latest post, they did get GPS readings up almost to a 140kft altitude. Apparently the rocket was "pretty banged up" after landing, due to the main parachute rip.
They are also working on a full update for their website.

EDIT: oh and yes this was a sort of actual suborbital launch, they flew a small payload

The vehicle housed a scientific payload as well. The experiment was designed, built, tested, integrated, and performed by a team of undergraduate students at the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics in the College of Engineering at Purdue University. The experiment studied a liquid and gas flow process that is sensitive to the gravity and acceleration levels encountered during spaceflight.

[Robotbeat]

I'd prefer this thread stay here instead of moving to the "Other Launchers" thread way at the bottom.

[PMN1]

Wonder if Top Gear have heard where the STIG has gone?

[asdyt]

Stiga launch report.
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=377

[tigerade]

Stiga launch report.
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=377

Good read.

[Lars_J]

Yep, and here's the relevant section about the roll issue:

As you can see in the video, the rocket wobbled at around cloud level, which was a combination of atmospheric turbulence combined with the rocket going through the transonic regime. The roll control vanes high on the rocket had good authority on the roll rate, but experienced a control inversion from 460-480m/s. That control inversion, likely from a shockwave reflecting off the cable fairing, meant that as the vanes moved to reduce the roll they actually increased it.

Given unexpectedly increased roll control in the wrong direction the rocket did a snap roll, which increased the roll rate beyond the software's preset roll rate limit. Upon exceeding that limit, the rocket went into a preprogrammed mode to maximize the burn by locking the roll vanes and engine gimbal to center. The roll rate dropped and Stiga continued on unguided, watching the GPS to ensure that it was not exceeding the preset maximum range.

[Robotbeat]

Really great report... This part was interesting:
"The rocket's position over the pad had been held well; at 18,000 feet above launch pad the rocket was only thirty feet away from being perfectly above the pad. However, once the gimbal was locked the vehicle began a slow arc over. 38.5 seconds into the burn, when the vehicle hit the maximum range of 7km, the engine was shut down and the vehicle was left to coast to apogee. A full burn would have been closer to 50 seconds."

Within 30 feet of the launch pad at 18,000 feet... that's pretty good!

Also, looks like they could go to the Karman Line on their next flight which could be pretty soon, since it sounds like most of the rocket, as a function of how hard it is to replace, is still usable or reparable for the next flight, even though they had a hard landing. Really cool. Hope they can launch again soon.

It's interesting that they could send commands as it was coming down, including commanding a dump of the LOx.

I do wonder if they've considered a different design of a ballute, such as one filled via the pressurant gas (should be useful at lower air densities).

[go4mars]

I do wonder if they've considered a different design of a ballute, such as one filled via the pressurant gas (should be useful at lower air densities).

"The ballute isn't worth fixing, but we have a new design in progress. We're working with some folks who are interested in ballute research, and hopefully will be able to trade expertise on supersonic decelerators for the data created by actually flying them."