* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

Armadillo Aerospace

Blobrana · L

Armadillo Aerospace, the space company of Doom creator John Carmack, impressed the crowd here Saturday by flying and landing a privately built lunar spacecraft over 90 seconds. By doing so, Armadillo completed the first of two parts of a NASA challenge worth $350,000 to simulate a flight on the moon.
On its second try, however, Armadillo didn't fare as well. The spacecraft, called the MOD, flew 50 meters vertically from the launch pad, then traversed 50 meters horizontally--required tasks of the first level of competition. But five seconds before landing on the flat-surface launch pad, the MOD tipped over in a cloud of dust.

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Blobrana · L

Best known for creating two of the world's most ground-breaking video games, Doom and Quake, John Carmack is quietly breaking ground in another nascent field: commercial rocketry.

Nearly six years ago, Carmack founded Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace to build next-generation vehicles for transporting people and payloads into suborbit. Still under development, his experimental rockets were put to the test at last month's X Prize Cup, as the lone competitors in a NASA-funded contest to build and fly a lunar vehicle.

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