September 24 and 28, 2002 meeting notes

 

Lander modifications

 

I made a separate aluminum plate to bolt the CPU board to, and mounted it to the electronics box with PVC grommets.  This should keep the board from flexing, and provide some vibration and shock isolation.  The memory SIMM is probably still a weak point for us, but there isn’t much we can do with this board.

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/shockMount.jpg

 

We now run power and ground to the CPU/PC104 stack through three independent routes: two separate lines at the power connector, and also through the PC104 pins at the top of the stack.

 

We built a manual cutoff box for the manned flights.  The box has a switch and a self-contained 27 volt power supply, so if it is switched, no matter what the electronics box is doing, the main engine valve will close in under a half second.

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/killSwitch.jpg

 

When it is in auto-land mode, the flight control software now goes to full down throttle as soon as it detects a 2.5G acceleration, which seems to be a reliable hit-the-ground determination.  Previously, the bouncing accelerations would cause the computer to hunt the throttle around trying to maintain a steady rate of descent, which would cause it to bounce back up in the air a little bit.  Forcing the throttle down as soon as impact is detected reduced this quite a bit.

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/prepFlights.mpg

 

There is a related effect that happens at liftoff, where the accelerations induced as the vehicle leaves the ground slightly unevenly make it look like it is accelerating faster than it is, causing the computer to throttle down earlier than it should, making it waste a bit of time bobbing on the ground before finally lifting off.  I will probably do something to address this in the future.

 

 

Man in the air!

 

We were finally ready to let someone get on the vehicle.  We were at this point a year ago with the previous generation (single tank, red tubes) vehicle, but development always seemed to be pushing us to change and improve the lander in some way, when we weren’t working on the other propulsion research.  Our criteria was always that we had to have two absolutely perfect ballasted flights with zero changes before a person could ride.  Usually, after two flights we would either find a problem, or find something that we wanted to improve.  We finally reached a point where everything is operating to our satisfaction.  I was tempted to do something about the liftoff throttling, but we decided that it is good enough as is.

 

Another factor that has kept us cautious is that Anna, my wife, was our designated first passenger.  This was her rather crafty ploy to make sure that we pay a whole lot of attention to safety.  It would be one thing for Russ to break a leg in an accident, it would be a completely different thing to break one of Anna’s legs!  Although she had been suited up and ready to fly on several past occasions that we canceled, Anna was scheduled to be out of town this weekend.  Since we seemed to be operating responsibly, she ceded her position to Russ for the first flight, rather than make us wait until she got back.

 

Anna prepping for the canceled flight last weekend:

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/AnnaPrep.mpg

 

We had an ambulance on site, just in case.  This is surprisingly inexpensive, and should be considered by anyone doing something potentially dangerous.

 

The vehicle is chained securely to the ground, with chain wrapped around the main frame in two places, and connected to two big eye bolts sunk in the concrete.  Nylon rope is wound through most of the chain links to act as a shock absorber, rather than let the chain come up hard.

 

Russ wore goggles, ear plugs, and a filter mask underneath the helmet, and had a hazmat suit on to protect against any peroxide spray.  We have a 3” energy absorbing foam pad on the seat, and a 1” pad on the back.

 

Dry weight was 525 pounds, and we loaded 50 pounds of peroxide.  The flight was perfect.  Auto-land was initiated six seconds after throttle up.  There was one bad sample from the altimeter recorded, but it didn’t have any impact.  We could have had a couple more seconds of air time at this load, but it was best to keep everything very conservative.

 

Russ reported that the flight was smooth, but the landing thud was noticeable.  I have been trying to get a quote from Enidine for custom wound wire rope isolators to give us a more cushy landing.  If I had a cleaner signal from the altimeter, I could have the flight control software touch down almost arbitrarily softly, but right now there is enough uncertainty that asking for a slower rate of descent would leave the total speed basically in the noise margin.

 

A few seconds in the air a few feet off the ground is not very significant by itself, but the point is that most of the systems necessary for much more significant flights are demonstrated.  Looked at in the best light, it is a reusable, four axis stabilized, liquid fueled, manned rocket.  Our single man suborbital space shot vehicle is expected to only be about twice the dry mass of this vehicle (but with a LOT more propellant, including kerosene), and will not be all that much more complex.

 

It was tempting to fly more, but we are starting to hoard our peroxide because we are down to our last three drums, and we don’t have the supply resolved yet.  We will learn a lot more flying the tube vehicle to a couple thousand feet than doing yet another lander hop.  When we get a good supply in, we will do some full-load lander flights with the pilot doing the joystick control.

 

The video:

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/firstMannedFlight.mpg

 

The telemetry:

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/mannedTelemetry.gif

 

 

Group photo, from left to right: Neil Milburn, Phil Eaton, Russ Blink, Joseph LaGrave, John Carmack, Matt Ross

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/groupShot.jpg

 

 

Misc

 

We finished all the plumbing and wiring for the high flow regulated system that we will be testing with the 1,000 lbf regen biprop soon. 

 

We got the new fiberglass nose and tail cones for the tube vehicle, and mounted the rocket tower to the top, which will pull the parachute out.

 

We got seven new 6” engine shells in.  These have a slightly larger (2”) throat, and have a full 2” radius of curvature on the throat, instead of our previous fairly sharp angle.  We will be building the next vehicle frame to use four large differentially throttled engines instead of a single large engine with four pulsed attitude engines.

 

Our cavitating venturis from Fox Valve finally arrived, after we had wrapped up most of our testing on the 2” motors.  Sigh.  We may go ahead and do some tests with them on one of the remaining aluminum chambers that need to be flood cooled.