The John Carmack Crash

[Jack Crossfire]

It's one of the greatest crashes of all time, remeniscent of early rocket tests, or modern Russian rockets for that matter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWUyRiiG4-I

The cause: accelerometers failed to detect landing -> GPS glitch -> uncontrolled ascent -> range safety cutoff

Accelerometer detected landing sux.

[willhaney]

Was there a pilot? John Carmack?

Will

[icebear]

From Wikipedia;
John D. Carmack II (born August 20, 1970) is a widely recognized figure in the video game industry. A prolific American programmer, Carmack co-founded id Software, a computer game development company, in 1991. Carmack was the lead programmer of the highly successful id computer games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and subsequent sequels to Doom and Quake. His revolutionary programming techniques, combined with the unique game designs of John Romero, led to a mass-popularization of the first-person shooter genre (FPS) in the 1990s.

Though Carmack is best known for his innovations in 3D graphics, he is also a rocketry enthusiast and the founder and lead engineer of Armadillo Aerospace. He has aspirations of suborbital space tourism in the short term, eventually leading to orbital space flights.

[kd7ost]

The system in the video above was unmanned.

Dan

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12522-crash-destroys-rocket-ahead-of-x-prize-contest.html