Amateur Rocket Team Claims and Wins Carmack Prize

An amateur rocket team (AeroPac 100k Team) has officially won the
Carmack Prize for being the first amateurs to launch and successfully
record a rocket flight above 100 kft AGL.

Details of their report can be found he

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B7w...EdKOHROcGRGbDA

Here (posted earlier today) is John Carmack's response
(reposted from the Arocket mailing list)


You win!



That is an excellent document that will be providing useful guidance to the community for many, many years. I am happy to pay out the prize money.



A couple comments:



I would have been scared for the integrity of the fin cans, but that seemed to work perfectly.



I’m not convinced that accelerometer apogee detection is ever going to be a good idea for flights this long and high. On the Armadillo rockets, we use GPS backed up by constantly adjusting timers.



John Carmack

So I guess that makes it as official as it gets.

For a history of the Carmack Prize, see this link:

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n....ws?news_id=376

A history of John Carmack is available on Wikipedia he

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack

All-in-all quite a week for Aviation & Space...

See also:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/15/us/nev...ght/index.html
http://www.usnews.com/science/news/a...rier-on-sunday

Dave

In article , nospam@
127.0.0.1 says...

An amateur rocket team (AeroPac 100k Team) has officially won the
Carmack Prize for being the first amateurs to launch and successfully
record a rocket flight above 100 kft AGL.

Details of their report can be found he

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B7w...EdKOHROcGRGbDA

Very interesting details in the above doc. It's a bit encouraging to
see that they won the prize with a rocket that had total impulse much
smaller than many previous high altitude rockets. The metric they used
for this was interesting.

Also interesting was their emphasis on "off the shelf" engines,
materials, electronics, and etc. Very few components on their vehicle
required what I'd consider a "machine shop" to create.

Congrats to the AeroPac 100k Team!

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer

Jeff Findley noted that:
In article , nospam@
127.0.0.1 says...

An amateur rocket team (AeroPac 100k Team) has officially won the
Carmack Prize for being the first amateurs to launch and successfully
record a rocket flight above 100 kft AGL.

Details of their report can be found he

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B7w...EdKOHROcGRGbDA


That's an extremely detailed report, but they've also got a handy
website at aeropac.org, with an interesting archive of their
newsletters.


Very interesting details in the above doc. It's a bit encouraging to
see that they won the prize with a rocket that had total impulse much
smaller than many previous high altitude rockets. The metric they used
for this was interesting.

Also interesting was their emphasis on "off the shelf" engines,
materials, electronics, and etc. Very few components on their vehicle
required what I'd consider a "machine shop" to create.

Congrats to the AeroPac 100k Team!

Congrats indeed!

/dps

--
Who, me? And what lacuna?