
Carmack: Armadillo Aerospace in “hibernation mode” - pvarangot
http://www.newspacejournal.com/2013/08/01/carmack-armadillo-aerospace-in-hibernation-mode/
======
ChuckMcM
The part I find fascinating about Carmack's comments are the 'sliding into
NASA mode'.

NASA, and contractors working for them, has this culture of how these things
are done. And if you hire people with experience, then they probably got that
experience in a NASA shop, and when you get enough of them your culture tends
to revert to what they are comfortable with, and that leads it into the same
"zone" as NASA.

I see that in startups and small companies, where the employees bring their
'imprinted' culture with them, whether its a power point heavy culture from
Oracle or a 'lets try this' sort of culture from Google, or the "secret sauce"
culture from Apple.

I was convinced this was going to be what happened to SpaceX but they seem to
be resisting assimilation so far. I hope it can last as I think they need to
break some of those cultural binds to get to where they want to be.

I hope John gets a chance to write up the good and bad aspects of how things
were done to help future space company employees avoid the bad ones.

~~~
_delirium
An interesting aspect is that NASA gets criticized from both sides. Here
Carmack is basically criticizing NASA for not taking enough risks, being too
cautious in the meticulous engineering instead of whipping out a saw and
trying something. But whenever something goes wrong and there's an inquiry,
the inquiry always blames NASA for being too seat-of-the-pants, not doing
enough proper engineering and analysis of safety margins, not following
procedures to the letter, etc., etc.

~~~
Arjuna
_" Here Carmack is basically criticizing NASA for not taking enough risks
[...]"_

I understand your point, but I think it's important to take this in the
context of what type of risk is being discussed (i.e., payload-only).

 _" We got to the point, where, we were scraping by, I mean, we had an
operating profit, but it was doing contract work for other people, and I
reached the conclusion that we just weren't going to get where we needed to go
with that.

There's this tempting thought, that, if you work for contracts people, and you
pick the right contracts, you'll be developing things that you wanted to
develop anyways, that it will help you towards your goal. [...] It wasn't
working for us. We were keeping the lights on, we were building rockets, but
they weren't the tasks, the things that we needed to do."_

That was about 2 years ago. They got side-tracked. They moved away from their
core competency of what they needed to do, and started taking on outside work
for what they thought would supplement their efforts, but it ended up moving
them away from where they needed to be, and the added process requirements, as
John said, _" [...] it definitely slowed us down."_

Clearly, when you go into human spaceflight mode, you are going to want to
have a lot of well-defined, rigorous process in place. However, they were
dealing in payload-only scenarios at this point, with entities that knew the
"at risk" status of the launches. In John's words:

 _" They were sort of like, 'at your own risk'... you can put 'em up, you
might get your payload back, but there's a good chance we're gonna crash.
[...] They knew it was at-risk, and we didn't take their money when we didn't
make a successful flight."_

Given what they were doing (i.e., payload-only), this is the context in which
he was saying that, _" [...] NASA loves seeing all this stuff, it gives
everybody that's contracting a good set of warm fuzzies to get stuff you hold
in your hands on the engineering documents [...]"_

I do not know this as fact here, as I am speculating, but it is possible that
they were simply in the mode of iterating to their best ability, with the
concept of operations being, "Let's rapidly prove what we can do in the
payload launch and recovery area, and once we get funding, we can scale up the
process and procedure aspects required for human spaceflight."

It would be interesting to hear John's comments on this topic, for sure... but
in summary, from the context of his comments, I think his line of reasoning
was perhaps, "Why are we taking on all of this contract work and getting
slowed down in process for payload-only scenarios, when we could be building,
launching, iterating and learning?"

------
snorkel
I've always admired Carmack's candid insights. Rather than put up a PR facade
instead he readily admits that he feels Armadillo stumbled because he took his
hands off the wheel, failed to mass produce test rockets, and the staff spent
too much energy coordinating with NASA rather than doing R&D. Very helpful
pointers for entrepreneurs.

I don't care about these setbacks, I still have hopes for Armidillo and I
think Carmack will realize his dream of VTOL rocketry eventually. He's taken
the right approach of addressing a hard problem that no one is solving, and he
is solving it very methodically. It's only a matter of time before the last
obstacles are cleared.

~~~
_delirium
It felt more bit shifting-the-blame to me than candid (but maybe he does
believe it). What happened is John Carmack started an aerospace company
thinking that he could parlay his success in writing game engines into shaking
up aerospace, but he couldn't. And now he's trying to blame it on the people
he hired, instead of admitting he failed. He seems to want to keep alive the
fantasy that only if only he had _really_ worked at it, his idea was right all
along, and it's only the subordinates tasked with implementing it who failed,
not him.

------
vermontdevil
Perhaps it's time to go back to 'volunteer' mode and putting everything under
open source. That way dedicated hobbyists might have the opportunity to take
what Armadilo to the next level without dealing with NASA's bureaucracy.

Just a thought. I'm sure there's a reason it won't happen though.

~~~
jlgreco
I don't know if they have been dealing with stuff that would be covered by it,
but ITAR might be a problem for open sourcing it all.

 _" (a) Rockets (including but not limited to meteorological and other
sounding rockets), bombs, grenades, torpedoes, depth charges, land and naval
mines, as well as launchers for such defense articles, and demolition blocks
and blasting caps. (See § 121.11.)_

[http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/itar/p121.htm](http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/itar/p121.htm)

They were apparently working on sounding rockets? Not sure.

~~~
vermontdevil
Would be nice if FAA would set up an experimental rocketry like Experimental
Aircraft segment.

I understand realities of our govt paranoia will not allow it happen. It's a
shame. Homebrew cars, motorcycle, airplanes etc have a long tradition in the
US and we benefited enormously from that. Rockets are a natural next step. Or
we won't have Zefram Cochrane ;)

~~~
jlgreco
I'm normally against this sort of thing on principle, but I think there is
actually a legitimate concern when it comes to rockets. The only real
difference between rocket technology and missile technology is intent.

This said, I think we are approaching an era when the publicly available
rocket science becomes "good enough" for effective missile use, rendering
continued restriction pointless. Currently the North Koreans have some serious
trouble getting stuff up there (a single satellite, orbited very poorly), so
the restrictions for rockets actually seem effective, but once they've figured
it out (and it is only a matter of time), then I don't think there will be
much point to continued secrecy. It would kind of be like China trying to keep
the silk worm under wraps today. That cat is out of the bag.

~~~
JabavuAdams
I don't know how much rational arguments enter into it.

The U.S. State Department has consistently avoided going to court on ITAR
questions, because some of its pronouncements seem clearly unconstitutional.
They'll never let it be tested, though.

There was a case where a civilian IMU, or some-such was used in a civilian
aircraft and then later used in a military missile. Because of the missile
use, it fell under ITAR and the U.S. aerospace firm that was using it in the
civilian vehicle was fined. This seems like a retro-active law which is
unconstitutional. It was easier for the firm to just pay the fine, rather than
litigate.

I'm lazy, and this is anecdotal, but this story seems to be well known in new-
space circles.

~~~
jlgreco
Well, I would say that rationality and constitutionality are two unrelated
issues. It seems quite probable that it is unconstitutional.

The general idea of restricting rocket technology as long as there are
"baddies" that still don't have it seems reasonable enough though.

------
krschultz
I think fundamentally, a million dollars a year is just not enough cash for
this kind of venture. All hardware is expensive. High performance hardware
with an innate chance of failing (rockets, submarines, airplanes) is even more
expense. Sales to the government are expensive and SLOW. If you are doing both
gov't + hardware, it's going to take some big bucks for relatively low reward.
There is a reason few have really "disrupted" one of the major defense
contractors. SpaceX is the closest, but even then, that's only 1 of many
different products the major defense contractors are building.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I disagree, somewhat. A million dollars a year can be a lot of money. But it's
very difficult to constantly maintain spending that money in the most
efficient way possible. And all it takes is making one big mistake to lock in
the development trajectory to a track that is very inefficient and suddenly
slows down with the given budget. At that point it becomes very difficult for
most organizations to fix things, because it means abandoning work that the
team has already planned for, partially completed, made commitments on, and so
forth. The only way to get back to the more efficient model is to make a
drastic hard-break and abandon a lot of current work. Though it might be very
non-trivial to recover the state of development back to a previous point. Such
an effort is also likely to be very demoralizing as well.

The trick is to have someone in a position of power making sure that such
"trajectory excursions" either never happen or are easily recoverable from.

------
danielweber
I know he says otherwise, but Armadillo never really struck me as a business
out to make money. It was more a business to help develop workers and
technology. The Carmack Prize, while not a part of AA, I think represents a
philosophy in trying to encourage more thinkers into becoming hobbyists and
more hobbyists into doing real stuff, which provides an excellent training
environment for people to go onto other space companies.

------
Arjuna
From the keynote:

"But I was disappointed that it didn't turn out better. And I have, you know,
a few theories on why it worked out that way.

You know, the point that I try to avoid, is a hubristic point, is that I
wasn't as involved with Armadillo in recent years. I had smart guys there that
I felt were competent and I respected their directions, but, me not being
there left me in the position of not wanting to second-guess the boots on the
ground.

When something would come up, and I'd be like... 'I kinda think you should be
doing something the other way', but if I'm heads down on software, they're the
ones there every day working on things. I didn't feel really justified... I
never want to be that manager that's out of touch with what's going on in the
engineering, that's just saying, 'Back in my days, we would have done it this
way.'

So I let my hands off the wheel there, and we can't make an A/B comparison
about how important that may or may not have been, but there were some of the
things that I term 'Creeping Professionalism' that came into it, where... in
the old days at Armadillo, we were all about, OK, here's an idea, run down to
the shop, grab the saws and the welding gear, slap something on the mill and,
you know, you've got something next week and it's fabulous, but, as we did
more contracting work, and as people got full-time, we would have big
engineering drawings, lovely stuff comes off the plotter with all the
information about it, we have our revision controls and our document systems,
and of course NASA loves seeing all this stuff, it gives everybody that's
contracting a good set of warm fuzzies to get stuff you hold in your hands on
the engineering documents, to know that we had a preliminary design review...
all this makes people feel good when they're paying for engineering, but it
definitely slowed us down.

Some of it may also have been the move to full-time employment, where, when we
were all a volunteer team, when it was just me paying the bills, and everybody
had a full-time job and we came here and we worked on rockets a couple days a
week, everybody was really focused on getting the work done. If you know
you're gonna be here for 5 hours, or here for 8 hours, there's just not a lot
of time, you know, for goofing around.

Actually, we had a little bit of that when more people, we sort of hit a
critical level, when we had a couple more volunteers, and I noticed
productivity actually dropping, we pared out some of the volunteers, and
productivity went back up. So there was certainly some of that effect.

When you get everybody and it's your job, you go in, and you know, you check
your mail and browse the web a little bit in the morning rather than going
first-thing down into the shop.

I had this thinking that, OK, people are working 20 hours a week part-time,
and they've still got a full-time job, we should be able to get 3 times as
much stuff done when everybody is full-time, but it didn't work out that way
at all, where, when rocketry was people's full-time job, they got other
hobbies, and they did other things with their 20 hours a week on it, and then
your 40 hours full-time a week is very rarely 40 really good hours for most
people when you wind up having all the little things you do at work that are
not really work.

So, there's a number of things that may have contributed.

And we're still tantalizingly close.

One of the bad things, the things that we didn't do is we should have made
series production, we should have made multiple vehicles at once. And we did
this years ago with our modular vehicles, we made parts for 5 of them, and
that served us so well. We got to crash every single one of them, but it
wasn't that traumatic because we had more pieces there, and we just built
another one. We desperately should have done that with these 2 rocket
vehicles. That was our critical mistake in the last 2 years, because we should
have been able to put more of these together.

'Creeping Performance' was another thing, where, we used to just make
everything out of aluminum, it's not like the highest-tech material, but
carbon fiber started creeping into our development systems here. We started
heat-treating our own aluminum rather than just using thicker aluminum, and
all these other things... this is chapter and verse from some of the errors
that NASA has done over the years, and it's heart-breaking for me to see my
own team following some of these problems."

~~~
JabavuAdams
Nitpick: "serial production", not "serious production".

~~~
Arjuna
Thank you. I re-listened... it sounds like he is saying, "series production".
I've corrected.

------
astrodust
Why not just sell the technology and IP to another company that wants to make
use of it?

~~~
norswap
Because he hopes to be able to return to it one day. I don't think he's in it
for the advancement of science or the industry, but rather for the kicks of
it. It's his hobby.

~~~
astrodust
If he's got anything unique that could help further the effort to make space
travel viable, it'd be nice to see it at least licensed. Armadillo did a lot
of work on various launch strategies.

------
speeder
That is very sad, I had lots of hopes for them, and for the rocket racing
league too!

