The guy that invented the computer games Doom and Quake, John Carmack, has devoted much of his copious free time in recent years to rocketry. And, as a multi-millionaire, he’s been able to throw a good deal of cash at his hobby.
Unlike PayPal squillionaire Elon Musk, he hasn’t turned it into a full-time job - his aims are more modest and somewhat different in scope. He’s trying to win the Lunar Lander challenge - which, in essence, involves flying a rocket between two launch pads 100 metres apart, including a hover of 90 seconds (or 180 seconds in the more ambitious version) - and then flying back again within two and a half hours.
While it sounds relatively simple, it’s not. Aside from the difficulties of hovering and landing a rocket under its own power (notice that the Shuttle glides in like an aircraft, and that rocket-slowed landings have proven highly problematic on Martian probes), the rocket has to be sufficiently robust to be able to be quickly fuelled up and go.
Carmack and his friends at Armadillo Aerospace have done it. While they haven’t won the money yet (they have to demonstrate the capability at the X Prize Cup rather than a time and place of their own choosing), they’ve got video of their little rocket performing the challenge mission.
If you read Carmack’s journal (on the site), he’s the quintessential hobbyist-tinkerer, rather than engineer - sometimes even I wince at some of the mistakes he’s made, and I’m a software guy, not hardware. But he’s built something that’s never been done before, on a budget that, by aerospace standards, is loose change.
What Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX is fascinating. I strongly disagree with libertarian thinking, but comparing NASA with SpaceX is enough to put doubts in the mind of an Internationale singing communist about the effectiveness of large government programs. When you think of what they could have done with all the money that was wasted on the space shuttle its enough to make you weep.
That is awesome.
*fires up old lunar lander game*