I talked briefly with John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace late this afternoon to find out what happened with their failed bid to win Level 1 of the Lunar Lander Challenge. He said that while they had a fine flight on the first leg of their bid, they found the injector clogged again during preparations for the return flight. They tried to clean it out in the field, but when they finally ignited the engine they had a hard start. Carmack said he initially feared that the hard start destroyed the engine, but it continued to fly, so he decided to get the vehicle over to the other pad as fast as possible and hover, hoping the engine would last 90 seconds. It turns out the engine finally failed at the 82-second mark, causing the vehicle to crash-land but not causing any major damage. Dust did not play a factor in the failure, he said; they’re able to fly by instruments very accurately.

Carmack said they will have to replace the engine chamber and a gimbal actuator, but that can be done easily using the spare parts on the other Mod vehicle. They’re also trying to get to the root of the injector problem, which may be caused by fuel contamination. Among the solutions they’re considering is using a filter provided by another LLC team, Unreasonable Rocket. Carmack remains confident that they can win at least Level 1, with a 70% chance of success tomorrow. If they succeed in the morning window, they’ll try for Level 2 in the afternoon; he estimates that they have “only” a 30-40% chance of winning Level 2 if they try Sunday afternoon.

Armadillo came seven seconds and a few meters, it appears, from winning the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge Level 1 competition Saturday afternoon at Holloman AFB, NM. The first leg of the flight was flawless, as Mod rose up, translated, and landed on the other pad without incident. After some delays preparing the vehicle for the return flight (a technical issue during propellant loading and pressurization), Mod rose up for the return trip. The vehicle got back to the home pad quickly and hovered over it to build up its flight time to 90 seconds. However, the vehicle appeared to land seven seconds early and tipped over, perhaps because it came down on the edge of or off the pad. The reason for the incident isn’t clear right now, but it may be linked to a loss of visibility caused by kicking up huge clouds of dust during the final hover phase. Also unknown is any damage mod may have sustained.

Armadillo has two more chances, Sunday morning and afternoon, to win the Level 1 prize; if they are able to fly and win the Level 1 prize Sunday morning they can still try for Level 2 in the afternoon.

Armadillo Aerospace just left the staging area to head to the launch pad for their second attempt at the Lunar Lander Challenge Level 1. The problem that forced them to scrub the first attempt was with their igniter, which failed to work at the pad this morning. They found foreign debris in the igniter–perhaps shaken into place during the journey from Dallas to New Mexico–and took the vehicle back to the pad to clean it out. The igniter is working well now and they are confident that they’ll be able to win at least the Level 1 challenge by Sunday afternoon. As John Carmack put it, “It would take extraordinarily bad luck not to walk away with at least the Level 1 prize.”

Armadillo Aerospace’s first attempt to win Level 1 of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge was scrubbed Saturday morning. Details right now are scarce, but apparently the team encountered some kind of technical problem with the Mod vehicle at the pad that could not be fixed there. As far as we know they will try again early this afternoon in the second (and final) window of the day.

I’ve uploaded on Flickr some photos from the media day Friday at the X Prize Cup. There’s a mix of people at the press conference, LLC vehicles on display, and planes practicing their routines for the weekend air show. Oh, and the parachutists who landed on the tarmac a few dozen meters from where a group of us were standing around the LLC exhibits.

As for the Lunar Lander Challenge, the centerpiece of the X Prize Cup: Armadillo Aerospace will be flying its Mod vehicle for the Level 1 challenge and the larger Pixel vehicle (which flew last year) for Level 2. If all goes well, Mod will fly Saturday morning and Pixel will fly Saturday afternoon; if both are successful then they may do some demo flights on Sunday even though they’ve captured the prizes. Should they be unsuccessful Saturday morning, they will keep trying again to win Level 1 before going on to Level 2, according to Armadillo’s Neil Milburn.

Representatives of several other teams are here as well, including Masten Space, Unreasonable Rocket, and SpeedUp. During the press conference, they estimated that they spent anywhere from a little over $100,000 to $3.5 million (what Armadillo has spent since inception), with 45,000 person-hours spent in aggregate by the teams alone in pursuit of the prize.

I’m in the media building at Holloman AFB, having gotten out of a press conference a little while ago about the X Prize Cup and related announcements. A few highlights:

Rocketplane Global, as expected, unveiled its new design for the XP suborbital spaceplane. The company is no longer using Learjet hardware for the vehicle, deciding instead to use a new design that is superficially similar in shape to the old one (with the exception that the V-tail has been replaced with a T-tail, and with more windows in the fuselage), but able to accommodate five passengers plus a pilot. They’re using a different jet engine, the J-85, but the same AR-36 rocket engine under development by Polaris Propulsion. The vehicle also features new landing gear similar to that used by the F-5 fighter. The interior will be designed by Frank Nuovo, a designer who has worked with clients ranging from Nokia to BMW.

While the new XP cabin is bigger, Rocketplane vice president and test pilot John Herrington said that the passengers, at least initially, won’t be allowed to float around the cabin once in weightlessness. His concern is that people will become disoriented trying to move around and could injure themselves and others. Down the road, it may be possible to remove a couple seats and allow the rear two passengers to float, he said.

Rocketplane officials, including Herrington and program maanger Dave Faulker, said that they believe they will be able to raise the money needed to develop the vehicle by the end of the year. They did not, though, disclose how much money they’re looking for. Current schedules call for flight tests to begin in 2010; AR-36 engine tests are scheduled to begin in the near future.

Rocket Racing League officials did announce three new teams, bringing the total number of teams to six. CEO Granger Whitelaw also confirmed rumors that their prototype X-Racer flew three times yesterday in Mojave, although he declined to offer many technical details regarding the flights, including their length and the turnaround time between flights. Whitelaw said that “exhibition” flights would begin at air shows in spring 2008, with actual competitive flights slated to begin in 2008-2009, depending on when they secure a TV contract and other sponsorships.

Teachers in Space announced that it wll soon start collecting applications by teachers for suborbital spaceflights. There will be two competitions: one for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) teachers, and one for K-12 teachers in general; both will have to submit either lesson plans or proposed experiments they would perform during their flights. (In an interesting twist, all the lesson plans submitted by will be posted online in an wiki.) The project has no application deadlines right now. The effort has commitments from five companies (Armadillo, Masten Space Systems, PlanetSpace, Rocketplane Global, and XCOR) to carry flights; Ed Wright’s company, the US Rocket Academy, has purchased a number of flights from XCOR Aerospace that is in the “double digits”.

The X Prize Cup gets started today with an education/media day at Holloman AFB that’s not open to the general public; the full event (open to the public and with free admission) is Saturday and Sunday. There’s a press conference scheduled for late this morning with several announcements planned:

• An unspecified announcement by the Teachers in Space project;
• An announcement by Rocketplane Global (the suborbital arm of Rocketplane Inc.) and Launch Magazine; this is expected to be the unveiling of the new Rocketplane XP design that is a move away from the modified-Learjet design the company had been pursuing in favor of something that is bigger and/or more affordable;
• An announcement by the Rocket Racing League. The league did announce this morning that three new teams had joined the league (one of which is led by former da Vinci Project founder Brian Feeney), but the expectation is that the announcement will be something bigger. RRL CEO Granger Whitelaw was a no-show during a panel session he was supposed to be a part of Thursday afternoon at ISPS; his replacement, another RRL official, said that Whitelaw was “off seeing his rocket fly”. There have been rumors that the cup might feature a video feed of an X-Racer test flight in Mojave; we’ll see…

Like with the ISPS, as time and technology permit I’ll post updates here and on Twitter during the day.

US-Canadian space transportation company PlanetSpace appears to have found an unlikely benefactor to help fund development of a planned spaceport for the company in Nova Scotia, Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail reported Friday. Lockheed Martin is reportedly offering to contribute $45 million over six years to help pay for the development of a spaceport on Cape Breton, about a third the cost of the overall project. It’s part of a complicated transaction that starts with a deal by the Canadian government to purchase 17 C-130 cargo planes from the company; as part of the deal, Lockheed has to invest the purchase price, $3.2 billion, in “the form of regional benefits”, according to the paper, and the spaceport showed up on Lockheed’s proposed list of investments.

The particular form of Lockheed’s contribution would be “to invest the money on Athena rockets that would propel the PlanetSpace craft into space”; as noted here earlier this week, PlanetSpace is studying the use of Lockheed’s planned-but-never-built Athena 3 rocket as a launch vehicle for PlanetSpace’s COTS proposal. PlanetSpace has hired a lobbyist, Fred Doucet (described by the paper as “former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s chief of staff and political troubleshooter”), to help the company secure the investment.

Bigelow Aerospace is reportedly planning to offer $760 million to any company that can provide crew transportation services to and from its planned orbital habitats, New Scientist reported Thursday. The offer is not in the form of a prize, like Bigelow’s earlier effort, America’s Space Prize, but instead a contract that would pay $760 million for eight flights. The article doesn’t have much in the way of further details, including how Bigelow would select the winning provider (or providers), and there’s been no formal announcement of the effort by the company itself. However, Robert Bigelow has talked on a number of occasions about the difficulties in finding transportation for his planned habitats, a concern he reiterates in the New Scientist article.

Speaking of Bigelow, the current issue of Wired magazine has a feature article about Bigelow Aerospace (which I read on the flight to New Mexico earlier this week and subsequently found online). The article doesn’t have much in the way of new insights on the company or Bigelow himself, and focused a lot on things like his fascination with UFOs and company secrecy (nevermind that the company is a lot less secretive now than a few years ago.)