Armadillo Aerospace’s third bid to win the Level 1 Lunar Lander Challenge failed this morning, again apparently because of continued engine problems. The vehicle appeared to fly well on the first leg of the flight, although the engine may have suffered a hard start on liftoff. On the return flight, the vehicle apparently lifted off briefly (although that was hard to tell from observers on the flightline) and suffered another hard start; Armadillo did a powered abort and landed back on the pad seconds after liftoff. Shortly thereafter they scrubbed for the morning.

It appears that Armadillo will try again to win the Level 1 this afternoon, as they try to diagnose the problems with the engine that have plagued them this weekend. Pixel is available for Level 2, presumably, but right now it appears Armadillo will focus on winning Level 1.

Here’s a video I shot of the final Mod flight of the day Saturday, which suffered the engine problem that prevented it from landing successfully. The lander is out of view for the second half of the video, hidden by the terrain (including an unfortunately-placed bush), but you can hear the audio of the play-by-play of the flight and the audience reaction when it was announced the vehicle had not landed safely.

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.

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”.

At a couple of recent conferences, including the ISDC just over a week ago in Dallas, John Carmack said it would take “very bad luck” for Armadillo Aerospace to not win prize money in this year’s Lunar Lander Challenge. This weekend, Armadillo demonstrated why Carmack has been so confident. On Saturday Armadillo flew a “complete LLC 1 [Lunar Lander Challenge level 1] operational profile” at the Oklahoma Spaceport using its Pixel vehicle, doing two 90-second flights between two pads, both times landing within a meter of the center of the pad. All the parameters of the flight fell within the requirements for the prize, making Armadillo the first time to clearly demonstrate that it can win at least the level 1 purse at this October’s competition. “If it weren’t for the X-Prize Cup doing the management of the NASA prize, we would have won it last weekend,” Carmack wrote. “I understand the reasoning behind tying it to an event to help promote the industry as a whole and provide more opportunities for other teams to catch up with the front runner, but as the front runner, I would rather have the check…”

John Carmack gave an extensive status report on Armadillo Aerospace at the Space Access conference yesterday. Armadillo’s near-term emphasis is on preparing for the 2007 Lunar Lander Challenge, having made some upgrades to Pixel and Texel, such as stronger landing legs. They are also working on their modular vehicle approach: putting together progressively more capable vehicles by adding identical modules, which consist of a pair of LOX/ethanol propellant tanks mounted on top of an engine. A four-module vehicle would be just powerful enough to send a small payload to 100 kilometers; such flights could take place by the end of this year or early next year from Spaceport America in Armadillo’s best-case scenario. A nine-module version, with a capsule on top, could be used for commercial human suborbital flights; Armadillo is looking to building a barebones capsule but also is in talks with an unspecified company to develop it. Farther down the road Carmack envisions an orbital vehicle with two or three stages and as many as 64 modules, something that has raised more than a few eyebrows among industry insiders. “When I talk about these larger-scale operations to most of the people in the industry, I always get ‘that look’, whenever I talk about 64 engines or 64 modules,” he said. “It’s an initial knee-jerk reaction, but when you come down to it, I don’t think it’s justified.”

Along with the technical plans, Carmack also addressed the business side. Armadillo has always been difficult to classify: they have significant facilities and equipment, but rely almost exclusively on volunteer labor, and have been funded mostly out of Carmack’s checkbook, to the tune of $3 million to date (with a burn rate of about $500,000/year). Is Armadillo a fledgling business or just an expensive hobby? Carmack did say that they have been looking at a number of commercial opportunities, and while not many of them “have turned into real money” they are seeing an increase in outside revenue over the last few years. With Carmack saying that he can continue to support Armadillo’s efforts out of his pocket “until the bottom drops out of the videogame market”, he doesn’t seem to be in a big rush to close deals, and said that even with a huge infusion of money it would be difficult for them to go more than two or three times faster than their current pace. “When the capability is demonstrated, the business case is just going to close itself.”

“We’re absolutely going to be carrying people to space, whether it’s next year or the year after,” he said. He admitted that he has made similar statements in the past, but this time “we are making steady, incremental progress towards that.”

For some more details about Carmack’s talk, check out postings at HobbySpace and Transterrestrial Musings, including some additional commentary from Sam Dinkin.