Private Firm Launches Primitive Rocket!

No kidding!

Link?

Slashdot’s got it.

John Carmack’s Armadillo Aerospace did it. — Yes, he’s that John Carmack. :smiley:

Movies of it on the Armadillo site.

w00t!

I’m trying to keep myself from bursting into fits of uncontrolled laughter and glee. We’re finally at the point we should have reached twenty years ago!

It isn’t much right now: It’s a ‘lawn chair’ attached to hydrogen peroxide engines that levitates a bit under the pilot’s control.

And the moonshot began with a flying bedstead.

:smiley:

It stayed aloft and perfectly controlled for six seconds.

The Wright brothers started out with a few feet under perfect control.

:smiley:

They plan a manned supersonic flight and an unmanned space shot for 2003!

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

:smiley:

I know that it’s a highly iffy proposition right now. I know that Armadillo is on a rocket and a dream right now, and that it is a long way from a flying lawn chair to a spaceshot. I know that odds are, this will not pan out and us groundhogs will be looking at NASA’s incompetencies and bloat for a long while to come. I know that we should have been making these steps in the private sector in the 1980s, when Apollo-era computing power was in the reach of private investors and the beneficiaries of the junk bond boom were flush with wealth.

“To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead.”

Dum spira, spiro.

Ad astra per aspera.