By Iain Finer, 2011-03-16
When it comes to amateur rocketry you have two types of people: those who say they are going to do something but never pull through; and those that actually do something, and make some real rocket hardware and fly it.
Armadillo Aerospace located in Texas, led by famous gaming designer John Carmack is doing exactly this and flying all in house built vertical takeoff vertical landing (VTVL) rockets and engines, from the early days of the Ansari X-prize, Armadillo has formed into a well rounded company doing some very serious rocket activities.
Armadillo are nearing completion of their "tube rocket", which will fly to 100,000ft (~30km) and be recovered on its initial test flights. While their next step will be to get it 100 km high ("space"), John Carmack put forward a discussion on the arocket mailing list detailing a 100kft micro prize. To get more people bridging the gap between space, focusing on reliability and recovery.
"$5k for the next ground launched rocket flight above 100,000' with GPS log and successful recovery. It isn't much of a prize, so think of it as if I am sponsoring the nice public report on the flight."
Another USD $2,000 from Paul Breed of Unreasonable Rocket, and then a further $3k from other arocket subscribers has the total prize pool now at $10,000 USD.
To win you just have to follow these simple rules:
- Publicly register the effort on aRocket with some reasonable description of the vehicle at least 30 days before the first attempt.
- Announce the location and dates of the launch attempts, so we all get to share the anticipation and drama.
- Supply a GPS serial log of the flight with at least one report above 100,000'.
- The vehicle must be recovered essentially intact, within 24 hours of the launch.
- There must be good video of at least the launch. Ideally there would be video of the entire flight to recovery, but it isn't required.
- A report on the vehicle and operations suitable for publishing in a magazine must be made publicly available.
Armadillo's own flights don't count, but other new space companies such as Masten etc are invited to enter, as long as they are (in John's words) "willing to write up a sufficiently detailed public report, they can claim it."
The current New Zealand record is approximately 45,000 feet for a model rocket
So where does this leave the everyday Joe Bloggs and garage tinkerer like me and no doubt you? It actually leaves us in a good position to get that big rocket project off the drawing board and get it built with some very good incentive!
Even if you don't win, the amount of information, skill and knowledge gained will be priceless. But it is about time all those serious amateur rocket builders started breaking that 100kft mark more frequently, and what better way to get that started but to try to win this prize!
Watch this space for a New Zealand bid!
Anyone in the Canterbury area who is interested in this can contact Iain Finer via his N-Prize entry site.