Unreasonable
Rocket is a team currently focused on
the Northrop-Grumman
Lunar Lander Challenge contest. The
team consists primarily of Paul Breed and
his son. Though they did not manage to get
a vehicle into the 2008
NG-LLC event in New Mexico last October,
they did make huge strides towards development
of a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL)
rocket vehicle.
The NG-LLC requires a VTOL vehicle to rise
up from a pad with only rocket power to
50 meters in altitude, move horizontally
100 meters and then come down for a landing
on a second pad. After refueling the vehicle
must return along the same path back to
the original pad. All of this must happen
within 150 minutes. There are two competition
levels. In the first level, the total time
in the air must be 90 seconds, in the second
level 180 seconds. (The second level also
involves a pad with a lunar terrain-like
rocky surface.)
The video below, first shown at the Space
Access 2009 conference, is a compilation
of engine and vehicle tests by Unreasonable
Rocket. (More videos from their projects
can be found in this YouTube
gallery.) You can see that after a great
deal of experimenting and testing they eventually
achieved stable hovering while tethered
to a crane. For more details , see Paul
Breed's slides
(50MB pdf) from his presentation at
SA'09.
It appears that in 2009, the NG-LLC competition
will include Unreasonable Rocket as well
as Armadillo Aerospace, which won the first
place purse for Level 1 in 2008, and probably
one, maybe two other teams. This year the
flights will not take place at one location
on one date but instead a team will select
a time and place of its choosing. The best
team performance by the end of the competition
window, probably at the end of October,
will win the purse for the particular level.
(The second place purse currently remains
for Level 1 and both first and second purses
remain for level 2.)
Unreasonable Rocket expects to continue
rocket development after the NG-LLC and
to pursue high altitudes and eventually
suborbital space flights. The team TrueZer0
also was a very small group with a small
budget that managed within less than a year
of starting development to send a vehicle
to the 2008 NG-LLC event. Though their vehicle
failed during its flight, they nevertheless
impressed many people with how much they
accomplished. I hope that the achievements
of these small teams can inspire many amateur
and student groups elsewhere to pursue fully
reusable VTOL rocket projects.
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