Armadillo Aerospace "Out of Money"
Carmack: Armadillo Aerospace in “hibernation mode”, NewSpace Journal
“Armadillo Aerospace, the suborbital vehicle company founded and funded by video game designer John Carmack, has kept a low profile in recent months. The company did not participate in the recent Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Colorado, an event where Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace all had special sessions. The last news from the company was in late February, when it reported on the launch of its STIG-B rocket at Spaceport America in early January. That launch failed when the main parachute snagged and didn’t deploy properly, causing the rocket to hit the ground at high speed.
There is a good reason for that silence over the last five months: the company is, for the time being, effectively out of money. “The situation that we’re at right now is that things are turned down to sort of a hibernation mode,” Carmack said Thursday evening at the QuakeCon gaming conference in Dallas. “I did spin down most of the development work for this year” after the crash, he said.”
Shame. Where’s Google when you need them?
Senator Shelby warned us about this “fiction of privately funded commercial launch vehicles.”
… or those not located in Huntsville, Alabama.
If you’ve ever heard John Carmack speak about space, it’s almost instantly recognizable that he’s a sincere believer, and not simply a fanactic who had lots of money. I feel sure he’ll be back in the game.
John Carmack said
Looks like NewSpace companies need separate R&D teams and Operations & Production teams.
This is bad news. Armadillo has solid engineering and experience, provides unprecedented detail on their website, and understands costs in a way NASA does not. I do not understand why NASA cut ties with them on the Morpheus, but perhaps NASA thought they already knew everything Armadillo knows. If I were Carmack I would be sending out proposals to the NASA and DOD SBIR programs as fast as I could type. Considering the proposals that have been funded, I believe Armadillo can do a whole lot better.