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Carmack: Armadillo Aerospace in “hibernation mode”

• astrodust 13y ago
  Why not just sell the technology and IP to another company that wants to make use of it?
  • norswap 13y ago
    Because he hopes to be able to return to it one day. I don't think he's in it for the advancement of science or the industry, but rather for the kicks of it. It's his hobby.
    • astrodust 13y ago
      If he's got anything unique that could help further the effort to make space travel viable, it'd be nice to see it at least licensed. Armadillo did a lot of work on various launch strategies.
• speeder 13y ago
  That is very sad, I had lots of hopes for them, and for the rocket racing league too!
• ChuckMcM 13y ago
  The part I find fascinating about Carmack's comments are the 'sliding into NASA mode'. NASA, and contractors working for them, has this culture of how these things are done. And if you hire people with experience, then they probably got that experience in a NASA shop, and when you get enough of them your culture tends to revert to what they are comfortable with, and that leads it into the same "zone" as NASA. I see that in startups and small companies, where the employees bring their 'imprinted' culture with them, whether its a power point heavy culture from Oracle or a 'lets try this' sort of culture from Google, or the "secret sauce" culture from Apple. I was convinced this was going to be what happened to SpaceX but they seem to be resisting assimilation so far. I hope it can last as I think they need to break some of those cultural binds to get to where they want to be. I hope John gets a chance to write up the good and bad aspects of how things were done to help future space company employees avoid the bad ones.
  • smackfu 13y ago
    I'm also curious to see how SpaceX makes the transition to producing man-rated production vehicles. When someone at NASA says "prove this is safe", that forces a lot of the structure and painstaking process back in.
    • kiba 13y ago
      SpaceX's rockets are already "man rated" by default, or is designed to be man-rated.
      • smackfu 13y ago
        True, I guess the Falcon-1 was their non-man-rated testbed.
    • trafficlight 13y ago
      Elon wants his rocket to be man-rated so he can ride it to Mars. The fact that NASA needs to get the ISS is just gravy.
  • tptacek 13y ago
    I've seen that phenomenon a couple times with people from Microsoft; I wonder if it's true of Googlers in some other way, too.
    • bentcorner 13y ago
      I'm curious, what behaviors (for good or bad) do you see that people of Microsoft bring to other companies?
      • snarfy 13y ago
        In my experience 1. Put all the code into the database 2. Everything is or should be xml
        • 13y ago
• vermontdevil 13y ago
  Perhaps it's time to go back to 'volunteer' mode and putting everything under open source. That way dedicated hobbyists might have the opportunity to take what Armadilo to the next level without dealing with NASA's bureaucracy. Just a thought. I'm sure there's a reason it won't happen though.
  • georgemcbay 13y ago
    That would be nice, but it would only directly be of use to very dedicated hobbyists with a lot (millions/USD) of money to burn on their hobby and lots of time to deal with regulations (and I don't say that in the typically dismissive libertarian way, as I believe FAA and other regulations as they relate to launching rockets of significant size are a good thing to have even if they probably go overboard).
  • jlgreco 13y ago
    I don't know if they have been dealing with stuff that would be covered by it, but ITAR might be a problem for open sourcing it all. " (a) Rockets (including but not limited to meteorological and other sounding rockets), bombs, grenades, torpedoes, depth charges, land and naval mines, as well as launchers for such defense articles, and demolition blocks and blasting caps. (See § 121.11.) http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/itar/p121.htm http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/itar/p121.htm They were apparently working on sounding rockets? Not sure.
    • vermontdevil 13y ago
      Would be nice if FAA would set up an experimental rocketry like Experimental Aircraft segment. I understand realities of our govt paranoia will not allow it happen. It's a shame. Homebrew cars, motorcycle, airplanes etc have a long tradition in the US and we benefited enormously from that. Rockets are a natural next step. Or we won't have Zefram Cochrane ;)
      • jlgreco 13y ago
        I'm normally against this sort of thing on principle, but I think there is actually a legitimate concern when it comes to rockets. The only real difference between rocket technology and missile technology is intent. This said, I think we are approaching an era when the publicly available rocket science becomes "good enough" for effective missile use, rendering continued restriction pointless. Currently the North Koreans have some serious trouble getting stuff up there (a single satellite, orbited very poorly), so the restrictions for rockets actually seem effective, but once they've figured it out (and it is only a matter of time), then I don't think there will be much point to continued secrecy. It would kind of be like China trying to keep the silk worm under wraps today. That cat is out of the bag.
• losethos 13y ago
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• danielweber 13y ago
  I know he says otherwise, but Armadillo never really struck me as a business out to make money. It was more a business to help develop workers and technology. The Carmack Prize, while not a part of AA, I think represents a philosophy in trying to encourage more thinkers into becoming hobbyists and more hobbyists into doing real stuff, which provides an excellent training environment for people to go onto other space companies.
• snorkel 13y ago
  I've always admired Carmack's candid insights. Rather than put up a PR facade instead he readily admits that he feels Armadillo stumbled because he took his hands off the wheel, failed to mass produce test rockets, and the staff spent too much energy coordinating with NASA rather than doing R&D. Very helpful pointers for entrepreneurs. I don't care about these setbacks, I still have hopes for Armidillo and I think Carmack will realize his dream of VTOL rocketry eventually. He's taken the right approach of addressing a hard problem that no one is solving, and he is solving it very methodically. It's only a matter of time before the last obstacles are cleared.
  • aculver 13y ago
    In addition to being candid, it also never ceases to amaze me how normal he comes off, despite being John Carmack! I love the bit about how funding this company has always been a negotiation with his wife.
  • _delirium 13y ago
    It felt more bit shifting-the-blame to me than candid (but maybe he does believe it). What happened is John Carmack started an aerospace company thinking that he could parlay his success in writing game engines into shaking up aerospace, but he couldn't. And now he's trying to blame it on the people he hired, instead of admitting he failed. He seems to want to keep alive the fantasy that only if only he had really worked at it, his idea was right all along, and it's only the subordinates tasked with implementing it who failed, not him.
• krschultz 13y ago
  I think fundamentally, a million dollars a year is just not enough cash for this kind of venture. All hardware is expensive. High performance hardware with an innate chance of failing (rockets, submarines, airplanes) is even more expense. Sales to the government are expensive and SLOW. If you are doing both gov't + hardware, it's going to take some big bucks for relatively low reward. There is a reason few have really "disrupted" one of the major defense contractors. SpaceX is the closest, but even then, that's only 1 of many different products the major defense contractors are building.
  • JabavuAdams 13y ago
    Yeah. Some amateur rocketeers used to deride Elon Musk for spending more than $100M, claiming he was "old space", not "new space". But maybe, that's just the scale of the problem. I suppose progress depends on the unreasonable man, and all that, but if you're too unreasonable, you just hamstring yourself.
  • InclinedPlane 13y ago
    I disagree, somewhat. A million dollars a year can be a lot of money. But it's very difficult to constantly maintain spending that money in the most efficient way possible. And all it takes is making one big mistake to lock in the development trajectory to a track that is very inefficient and suddenly slows down with the given budget. At that point it becomes very difficult for most organizations to fix things, because it means abandoning work that the team has already planned for, partially completed, made commitments on, and so forth. The only way to get back to the more efficient model is to make a drastic hard-break and abandon a lot of current work. Though it might be very non-trivial to recover the state of development back to a previous point. Such an effort is also likely to be very demoralizing as well. The trick is to have someone in a position of power making sure that such "trajectory excursions" either never happen or are easily recoverable from.
• Arjuna 13y ago
  From the keynote: "But I was disappointed that it didn't turn out better. And I have, you know, a few theories on why it worked out that way. You know, the point that I try to avoid, is a hubristic point, is that I wasn't as involved with Armadillo in recent years. I had smart guys there that I felt were competent and I respected their directions, but, me not being there left me in the position of not wanting to second-guess the boots on the ground. When something would come up, and I'd be like... 'I kinda think you should be doing something the other way', but if I'm heads down on software, they're the ones there every day working on things. I didn't feel really justified... I never want to be that manager that's out of touch with what's going on in the engineering, that's just saying, 'Back in my days, we would have done it this way.' So I let my hands off the wheel there, and we can't make an A/B comparison about how important that may or may not have been, but there were some of the things that I term 'Creeping Professionalism' that came into it, where... in the old days at Armadillo, we were all about, OK, here's an idea, run down to the shop, grab the saws and the welding gear, slap something on the mill and, you know, you've got something next week and it's fabulous, but, as we did more contracting work, and as people got full-time, we would have big engineering drawings, lovely stuff comes off the plotter with all the information about it, we have our revision controls and our document systems, and of course NASA loves seeing all this stuff, it gives everybody that's contracting a good set of warm fuzzies to get stuff you hold in your hands on the engineering documents, to know that we had a preliminary design review... all this makes people feel good when they're paying for engineering, but it definitely slowed us down. Some of it may also have been the move to full-time employment, where, when we were all a volunteer team, when it was just me paying the bills, and everybody had a full-time job and we came here and we worked on rockets a couple days a week, everybody was really focused on getting the work done. If you know you're gonna be here for 5 hours, or here for 8 hours, there's just not a lot of time, you know, for goofing around. Actually, we had a little bit of that when more people, we sort of hit a critical level, when we had a couple more volunteers, and I noticed productivity actually dropping, we pared out some of the volunteers, and productivity went back up. So there was certainly some of that effect. When you get everybody and it's your job, you go in, and you know, you check your mail and browse the web a little bit in the morning rather than going first-thing down into the shop. I had this thinking that, OK, people are working 20 hours a week part-time, and they've still got a full-time job, we should be able to get 3 times as much stuff done when everybody is full-time, but it didn't work out that way at all, where, when rocketry was people's full-time job, they got other hobbies, and they did other things with their 20 hours a week on it, and then your 40 hours full-time a week is very rarely 40 really good hours for most people when you wind up having all the little things you do at work that are not really work. So, there's a number of things that may have contributed. And we're still tantalizingly close. One of the bad things, the things that we didn't do is we should have made series production, we should have made multiple vehicles at once. And we did this years ago with our modular vehicles, we made parts for 5 of them, and that served us so well. We got to crash every single one of them, but it wasn't that traumatic because we had more pieces there, and we just built another one. We desperately should have done that with these 2 rocket vehicles. That was our critical mistake in the last 2 years, because we should have been able to put more of these together. 'Creeping Performance' was another thing, where, we used to just make everything out of aluminum, it's not like the highest-tech material, but carbon fiber started creeping into our development systems here. We started heat-treating our own aluminum rather than just using thicker aluminum, and all these other things... this is chapter and verse from some of the errors that NASA has done over the years, and it's heart-breaking for me to see my own team following some of these problems."