Armadillo Aerospace

100 Years of Powered Flight

Armadillo Aerospace — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:15:52 GMT

Spider Liftoff #1

Armadillo Aerospace — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:18:02 GMT

Our first liftoff, when we learned our original batteries didn’t have the juice to hold four solenoids open at one time.

Spider Liftoff #2

Armadillo Aerospace — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:15:20 GMT

The next week’s flight with stronger batteries. A clean liftoff, but we tipped it over after yanking on a tether.

Material Test

Armadillo Aerospace — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:03:39 GMT

We did our own test to find out what would happen if there was a peroxide spill on various types of clothing. Wear cotton. Leather is, uh, “exciting”.

Jan '02

Armadillo Aerospace — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:55:00 GMT

A good motor test, with complete catalyzation after the first second. Some chuffing is still present.

Free Flight

Armadillo Aerospace — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:54:09 GMT

A short hop of the small lander.

Lifting Test Stand

Armadillo Aerospace — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:47:39 GMT

Not exactly a crash, but this was a startling incident anyway. We had been testing engines of up to 100 pounds thrust for a long time, but when we fired a 400 pound thrust engine, the test stand damn near took off. We have it securely bolted down now.

Splat

Armadillo Aerospace — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:47:22 GMT

The joystick on the computer had a lapse of communication, we believe due to an internal reset, that caused it to not change the throttle position as it was being moved, then jump all the way to full throttle two seconds later. After the engine was shut off, I was able to reengage the attitude engines, so it landed completely straight, about the best vertical crash you could ask for. We now use an anti-static strap when running the remote joystick, and we have much stronger tether attach points on the vehicle.

Flip

Armadillo Aerospace — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:46:10 GMT

The computer hung almost immediately after takeoff here, leaving one attitude engine firing, causing a powered flip maneuver. The problem was due to a loose bare-wire screw terminal that gave power to the PC104 stack. We soldered that power line directly to the board after this, and we are moving away all wire screw terminals to ring terminals in new work.

Big Crash

Armadillo Aerospace — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:45:21 GMT

This was a test of the man sized lander with full pilot ballast. We had flown a lighter load before, but we had increased the size of the central engine metering jet in preparation for the full load. Unfortunately, we had also switched to a higher concentration peroxide mix that gave significantly more power than we were expecting. The vehicle was going to fly away even at the minimum throttle setting, so we had to intentionally cut power. Future flights will have throttling of the central lift engine instead of doing all throttling with the side engines.

First Straight Edited Shorter

Armadillo Aerospace — Tue, 27 Jan 2004 17:44:00 GMT

This was version 1.1 of the small lander, which was still controlled by the cheap Gyration gyros that had severe problems with shocks, so the computer was set to kill all thrust if the rate ever went very high. The legs caused enough shake when slowly lifting off the ground that it was hitting the limiter all the time, so the only way to cleanly get it off was to hop it off with a lot of throttle. There was a lot of latency in the remote piloting path due to several factors, so it didn’t react quickly enough to throttle down commands, and when it hit the tether chains, the gyros got jerked, causing the engines to shut off and let it crash back to the ground. I hunted down all the latency sources in the piloting loop before the next flight, and later moving to fiber optic gyros removed the jerk problem completely.

Space Access ’02

Armadillo Aerospace — Tue, 30 Apr 2002 18:22:00 GMT

Space Frontier ’01

Armadillo Aerospace — Fri, 30 Nov 2001 18:32:00 GMT

Early Motor Test

Armadillo Aerospace — Wed, 07 Nov 2001 18:41:00 GMT

An early motor test that showed very poor catalyzation.

Big Lander - Short Hop

Armadillo Aerospace — Sat, 01 Sep 2001 18:02:00 GMT

A short hop of the big (man sized) lander.