Private Rocket Pioneers Compete In Challenge In New Mexico

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) – Aspiring rocketeer John Carmack is bringing Pixel back to New Mexico, confident his prototype lunar lander can take home a $500,000 award.

Pixel is the craft that Carmack’s company, Armadillo Aerospace of Mesquite, Texas, entered in this weekend’s Northrup Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge during the X Prize Cup festivities at Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo.

“It will be nice having it all over, one way or another,” he said. “We feel we’re ready, but you always could have used a little more prep time.” The X Prize Cup is a convention for private rocket enthusiasts, a celebration of their growing trade.

The show, now in its third year, brings together companies that hope to build and launch private space exploration vehicles and wide-eyed space enthusiasts who marvel at the conceptual machines that one day might take tourists into space. Exhibits will feature mockups of NASA’s new crew exploration vehicle and X Prize winner SpaceShipOne.

The fledgling Rocket Racing League, which bills itself as an airborne version of NASCAR, will display its rocket planes. After two years at the Las Cruces airport, the event was moved to Holloman. As such, it will have a distinct Air Force flavor, complete with jet flyovers and exhibits featuring former and current military aircraft.

Holloman is home to the F-117A stealth fighters and the new F-22 Raptor, both among aircraft on display. But one of the weekend’s highlights figures to be the lunar challenge, where teams compete to fly a spacecraft capable of transporting cargo and crew between a lunar orbit and the lunar surface. NASA is one of the event’s partners.

To win the $500,000 prize in the Level 1 event, a vehicle must take off vertically and rise 50 meters, fly 100 meters and hover over a landing pad, then descend and land within 90 seconds. The craft also must complete the flight in reverse. Put another way, the vehicle must travel the length of a 120-yard football field – from the back line of one end zone to the back of the other – at a height slightly higher than the Statue of Liberty. Then do it again.

There’s also the Level 2 event, which pays $1.5 million. To win that, a craft must be airborne no more than 3 minutes and land on a simulated lunar surface, then successfully complete the flight in reverse. Carmack, who founded id Software and built a modest fortune as a computer game programmer, established Armadillo Aerospace in 2000 and began planning and building craft aimed at spurring commercial efforts to reach space.

That’s where Pixel comes in. At last year’s X Prize event, Pixel crashed during landing when its shock absorbers broke. Carmack installed modifications, adding rubber bumpers to protect the craft, and he’s confident the improvements will spell victory. “My official odds are 90 percent for winning Level 1 and 60 percent of winning both Level 1 and Level 2,” he said.

Carmack is “certainly willing to continue putting my own money into it” but would welcome the prize money because it would allow his company to expand facilities, provide salaries for volunteers and invest in additional research. There’s another reason for his confidence. Last summer, Pixel successfully performed the Level 1 flight in Oklahoma and completed two tethered test flights for the Level 2 requirements at an airfield north of Dallas.

“I certainly wish they could have paid us when we did the free flight, but I understand the reasoning of having to do it at the X Prize show and raising awareness,” Carmack said. “Now we just have to accomplish it.”

By TIM KORTE Associated Press Writer

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

— Formatted and posted to KVIA.com by Miguel Martinez