X PRIZE Foundation Announces Competitors for Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge
June 20, 2007
Team Armadillo Full NG-LLC Level One Flight
June 4, 2007
"We did a full propellant load flight at our local test site, and finally, everything worked perfectly for it. It went into auto-land after 190 seconds of hovering, and shutdown was completely nominal. Everything was fine with the vehicle. The fuel was almost depleted, but there was quite a bit of lox remaining, so we are making a new injector that reduces the fuel flow by cutting the film cooling in half. This will improve both Isp and equalize propellant distribution, but the engine will run hotter. If we have a problem with this, I will put all the film cooling back and just modify the size of the main fuel element holes. We are still planning on moving to a lightweight honeycomb electronics box to save weight, and we are carrying quite a bit more than the required 25kg of payload after we charge back our safety systems and “gold box” AV equipment, so in final flight form we should have over 210 seconds of flight time, which is plenty of margin."
You can read the rest as well as view photos and video on their site here
|