John Carmack and the Armadillo Aerospace team failed in their first attempt to win the Lunar Lander Challenge Level 2 Competition. According to several blogs from the site, the QUAD vehicle had an engine abort at ignition and tipped over, damaging the vehicle and cancelling the Armadillo flight program for this year’s competition.

It seems an engine burnt through while throtteling up due to a stucked fuel valve. When the vehicle tipped over, some fuel line linkage was damaged, as well as a GPS navigation box atop the vehicle. While Armadillo had another engine with them, they decided more testing was needed to understand and correct the problem.

Live blogs are available from:

http://www.livescience.com/blogs/author/leonarddavid/

http://spacefellowship.com/News/?p=7124#more-7124

http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php

And we now have video of the flight attempt from YouTube:

Armadillo Crash at LLC Level 2
Tagged on: