Speaking of Armadillo’s John Carmack, in his team’s latest update, he provides his own unvarnished assessment of the various companies in the suborbital spaceflight sector. The Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic partnership “is the safest bet for success”, but cautions that Virgin may need the field to itself in order to make a profit on SpaceShipTwo: “If a more highly operable vehicle is competing, SS2 probably won’t ‘earn out’.”

Some other summarized assessments:

• Blue Origin: “It looks like they want to play in the orbital space, and perhaps don’t want to get bogged down competing in suborbital space. I think that is a mistake.”
• Rocketplane Global: “They have burned through tens of millions of dollars of funding, and nothing has ever left the ground. Would another ten or twenty million dollars do it? I doubt it very much.”
• SpaceDev: “I also think the hybrid powered VTHL DreamChaser is about the worst design for commercial suborbital flights. They aren’t going to build it on their own dime, and it looks like it would be a very expensive development project that would end up with quite high operating costs if it was ever completed.”
• XCOR: “I think they can probably do it” with Lynx.
• Astrium: “Oh, please.”

And his own assessment? “I still think there is a chance we might be first, depending on how Scaled chooses to play things.”

A session of the Space Access ’08 conference last night dealt with “paths to rocket piloting”: how can people who are interested in piloting a number of the new suborbital vehicles under development prepare for getting those jobs. Some companies have turned to test pilots and/or former astronauts, but if this industry does grow, the pool of potential pilots will likely have to expand beyond that narrow niche. A number of the panelists, including several private pilots, talked about preparations such as acrobatic and high-performance aircraft flying that would have relevance to suborbital spacecraft.

A dissenting opinion came from John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace. He argued that the glamour associated by many with being a rocket-powered vehicle pilot will fall far short of reality. “I don’t think this is going to be an exciting career to go into,” he said, saying that the work involved with flying these vehicles is not like the “stick-and-rudder” work associated with conventional aircraft, especially for VTVL vehicles like Armadillo’s. “It’s going to be like being an elevator operator,” something that is just not that exciting. Armadillo’s suborbital vehicle design, the “six-pack” vehicle, does not even have a pilot on the vehicle: the vehicle is controlled from the ground; the single person on board does not any flight duties.

The latest Armadillo Aerospace project update has the usual detailed technical descriptions of engine and other vehicle work. At the end, though, John Carmack includes some illustrations of a proposed single-person suborbital vehicle, using a “six pack” of modules. Carmack talked about this concept last year at Space Access ‘07, including the transparent bubble where the passenger would lie (and float around at apogee). Here’s one illustration:

Carmack warns not to “read too many technical details into these concept renderings”, but it still looks pretty interesting. Half the Armadillo team will be at Space Access ‘08 to provide more details on this concept and their other work.

The X Prize Foundation, as anticipated, issued a press release Sunday evening reviewing the past two days of the X Prize Cup. The release plays up the fact that Armadillo nearly won the level 1 prize Saturday afternoon despite a busted engine; the release cites fuel line contamination for the igniter problems experienced by Armadillo on Saturday. There’s not much new information about Sunday afternoon’s hard start and fire, which still eludes an explanation. “This weekend, we’ve had more problems that [sic] we’ve had in the last six months,” Armadillo’s Neil Milburn says in the release. “We know what went wrong, but not why.” The release also revises the attendance upwards to “more than” 85,000.

Here’s a video I shot of Armadillo Aerospace’s first leg of their attempt Sunday morning to win the Lunar Lander Challenge. Due to poor camerawork on my part the lander goes out of frame for a few seconds during its descent. You can see the lander hover for the final seconds of its flight to reach the 90-second mark; it appears it’s on the ground because of intervening terrain, but it’s still in the air.

Armadillo team members Russ Blink and Phil Eaton were manning the Armadillo staging area late this afternoon, as the 2007 X Prize Cup wound down. Eaton confirmed that they had suffered another hard start, this one more violent than their previous ones. While fuel valves closed off in time, the downward force of the hard start yanked the wiring for the liquid oxygen (LOX) valves loose before the valves could close, keeping them open at about 20%; that’s what fed the fire. Beyond the engine chamber, Eaton said that they had some wiring damaged and other minor miscellaneous items to repair, but said that, if needed, they could fly the same vehicle again in a week or so.

While they do know what happened, they still don’t know why it happened. The design, Eaton said, has flown 30 times before without anything like this happening. As Blink put it, “I can’t believe we were lucky 30 times.” Further work is needed to track down exactly what was different this time in New Mexico compared to all their previous successes elsewhere.

Eaton was optimistic about the long term. “Each time we fly we do a little better, learn a little bit more,” he said. He vowed that Armadillo would be back next year with some new and improved vehicles to go after the prize.

Brett Alexander, the executive director for space and X Prize Cup for the X Prize Foundation, brief the media a little while ago about the status of Armadillo’s final, failed flight. Some key points:

• There’s still little in the way of technical information about the engine failure this afternoon. There was not a catastrophic explosion but instead a fire that burned for about a minute or so. “Pieces” came off the vehicle, such as cables, but the overall structure appears to be intact. The vehicle will be moved to a hangar shortly.
• There don’t appear to be any plans for any further official briefings about the accident or event in general, although there will be a closed technical debrief with the judges, Armadillo team, and others this afternoon. The X Prize Foundation plans to publish a statement later today/tonight with more details.
• There were no injuries caused by the fire. The closest people to it were an Armadillo team in a van an unspecified distance away; at the time of the fire they walked away from the site. Fire engines were called in, but the fire put itself out before the trucks arrived.
• Alexander said that despite Armadillo’s failed bids to win a prize purse, the event in general was a success. Armadillo showed considerable flexibility in trying to win the prize, and the static displays by the other LLC teams and other exhibitors got a strong message about the industry out to the public.
• Holloman AFB officials estimate the combined attendance over the two days of the show at 80,000, twice the size of the last air show two years ago, and higher than the 60,000 X Prize estimated would attend. In addition, the education day on Friday attracted 6,000 people.
• Northrop Grumman, who has a two-year deal (2006 and 2007) to sponsor the competition, was “very pleased” with the event even though no one won; they have yet to decide whether to renew their sponsorship. Wirefly, who sponsored the overall Cup last year, pulled out rather late because of financial problems with the company, Alexander said, citing publicly-announced developments regarding that company.
• The combination of the LLC with a conventional airshow worked well, he said. The airshow events helped fill in what would otherwise be dead time between prize events during the day (although there were still quiet periods with little going on, particularly during the times Armadillo was preparing its vehicle for flight.) X Prize is looking at options for next year’s event, which include returning to Holloman; a decision will be made in the next few months; they are obligated under their agreement with NASA to hold an LLC competition once a year through 2010, in one manner or another.
• Two or three other teams came close to participating this year, although none got to the point of doing untethered flights, like Armadillo has been doing for a year. Alexander believes that more than one team will be ready to participate next year.

Armadillo Aerospace has apparently suffered another, and this time catastrophic, hard start upon engine ignition, dashing their chances of winning any part of this year’s Lunar Lander Challenge. This time the hard start took place at the beginning of the first leg of the flight (not the return leg, as was the case this morning and yesterday afternoon), and created a spectacular fireball that appeared to significantly damage the vehicle. What caused the hard start this time around isn’t clear–Armadillo thought it has solved the problem that plagued the earlier events–but according to X Prize officials, Carmack has ruled out trying to fly Pixel in a third window this evening. That brings this year’s Lunar Lander Challenge to a close, with no teams winning any money; the full $2 million will be available for Armadillo and other teams next year.

The latest as of about 12 noon MDT:

According to both X Prize and Armadillo personnel, the Mod did not suffer a hard start at the beginning of the first leg of its morning flight (as well as the beginning of its afternoon flight yesterday); only the return legs have suffered these hard starts. According to Armadillo’s Phil Eaton, their current working theory is that a slight change in the injector design, involving a different kind of O-ring, may be keeping alcohol vapors from dissipating as rapidly as they did in the past; the vapor build-up may still be present when the engines are ignited for the return flight, causing the hard start.

Still undecided is whether there will be a third flight opportunity late this afternoon. There are coordination issues with both the FAA and the Air Force that have to be worked out to see if they can fly after the air show ends, no earlier than 6 pm MDT. Since sunset is at 6:30 pm and civil twilight at 7 pm, that means the flights would take place either in twilight or darkness. Eaton said that won’t be an issue for them.

Eaton also said that regardless of whether Mod wins the Level 1 challenge this afternoon, they plan to use Pixel for a Level 2 attempt in the third window. One obstacles: competition judges have to rule whether a swap of Pixel’s engine from Mod back to Pixel would be allowed under the rules.

The latest from the media center: Armadillo will try again this afternoon (start time: 12:45 pm MDT) for level 1 of the Lunar Lander Challenge. They have replaced the engine on Mod with one cannibalized from Pixel. There is also the possibility of a third window late this afternoon, around when the air show ends at 5 pm MDT. No definite word yet from challenge managers about whether that will happen and, if so, how (for example, will the public and media be allowed to stay and watch?)