Armadillo Aerospace

Armadillo Aerospace, start-up testing of the Pixel

The company Armadillo Aerospace is a small group of private investors whose aim is, among other things, to realize private, manned ( suborbital ) space flights .

The project is led by John Carmack , a computer game developer best known for developing the first-person shooter series Quake . In July 2004, he invested US $ 1.5 million in the project. All original members had other jobs and participated in the Armadillo Project on a voluntary basis. In the meantime, however, numerous employees are regularly employed. Armadillo Aerospace has long been fully self-financed, but announced in 2006 that it had signed an agreement with Nvidia .

The original goal of the project was to win the Ansari X-Prize . In 2008, the project won US $ 350,000 as the team took first place in the first level of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge . A year later it passed the second level of the competition in second place and won US $ 500,000.

The logo of the project is a masked Armadillo (Engl. Armadillo ) called Widget.

In August 2013, John Carmack announced that the project (after the crash of the STIG-B rocket, among other things) would be temporarily put on hold, but that he was "actively looking for external investors to resume development of new rockets." Employees their own company, Exos Aerospace Systems and Technologies , which in 2015 was also able to acquire the crucial technological resources of the Armadillo project. The aim of the new company is to further develop the STIG-B rocket into a reusable SARGE system, which is supposed to carry up to 50 kg payload such as experiments and small satellites into an orbit at a maximum height of 100 km.

Web links

Commons : Armadillo Aerospace  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Former home of Armadillo Aerospace (English) ( Memento of 14 April 2016 Internet Archive )
• Exos Aerospace - Blog (English)
• Pixel crash causes disillusionment at NASA at heise.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ At a table with Mister Doom: An interview with John Carmack from id Software. TomsHardware.de, September 22, 2011.
2. ^ NVIDIA Sponsorship, Launch Permits, Flying the Quad. Armadillo Aerospace, August 7, 2006 ( December 15, 2013 memento on the Internet Archive ).
3. ↑ Armadillo rocket takes $ 350,000 prize. NBC News , October 26, 2008.
4. ^ Lunar Lander Challenge Awards. US Office of Space Commerce, November 5, 2009.
5. ↑ Carmack: Armadillo Aerospace in “hibernation mode”. NewSpaceJournal.com, August 1, 2013 (English).
6. ↑ Exos Seeks To Revive Armadillo Rocket Technology. SpaceNews.com, May 11, 2015 (English).