If there are any copyright issues with displaying these videos please let me know in the comments. I hope the old clips are OK to share since I can't find these on the internet anywhere now. I claim no ownership of them. All belong to Armadillo Aerospace and were recorded almost 2 decades ago.

This is the text for the video from videogame creator John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace from the earlytomid 2000's (video file properties say "modified in 2002"). This was actually later on in their series of parking lot experiments conducted outside the shop.

I really miss watching their early monopropellant (hydrogen peroxide) tests. These motors used a catalyst to start a chemical reaction and break up the peroxide into separate oxygen and hydrogen molecules and burn them as fuel. It was very fascinating to watch them over the years. This successful test may have been the most risky one. Keep in mind that pure Hydrogen Peroxide (near 100%) will go thought human flesh like acid. The stuff in your bathroom for treating wounds is only 3% pure.

Hope you enjoy this as I did.



(TEXT FROM ARMADILLO AEROSPACE)

"Man in the air! We were finally ready to let someone get on the vehicle. We were at this point a year ago with the previous generation (single tank, red tubes) vehicle, but development always seemed to be pushing us to change and improve the lander in some way, when we weren’t working on the other propulsion research. Our criteria was always that we had to have two absolutely perfect ballasted flights with zero changes before a person could ride. Usually, after two flights we would either find a problem, or find something that we wanted to improve. We finally reached a point where everything is operating to our satisfaction. I was tempted to do something about the liftoff throttling, but we decided that it is good enough as is.

Another factor that has kept us cautious is that Anna, my wife, was our designated first passenger. This was her rather crafty ploy to make sure that we pay a whole lot of attention to safety. It would be one thing for Russ to break a leg in an accident, it would be a completely different thing to break one of Anna’s legs! Although she had been suited up and ready to fly on several past occasions that we canceled, Anna was scheduled to be out of town this weekend. Since we seemed to be operating responsibly, she ceded her position to Russ for the first flight, rather than make us wait until she got back.

We had an ambulance on site, just in case. This is surprisingly inexpensive, and should be considered by anyone doing something potentially dangerous. The vehicle is chained securely to the ground, with chain wrapped around the main frame in two places, and connected to two big eye bolts sunk in the concrete. Nylon rope is wound through most of the chain links to act as a shock absorber, rather than let the chain come up hard.


Russ wore goggles, ear plugs, and a filter mask underneath the helmet, and had a hazmat suit on to protect against any (hydrogen) peroxide spray. We have a 3” energy absorbing foam pad on the seat, and a 1” pad on the back. Dry weight was 525 pounds, and we loaded 50 pounds of peroxide. The flight was perfect. Autoland was initiated six seconds after throttle up. There was one bad sample from the altimeter recorded, but it didn’t have any impact. We could have had a couple more seconds of air time at this load, but it was best to keep everything very conservative.

Russ reported that the flight was smooth, but the landing thud was noticeable. I have been trying to get a quote from Enidine for custom wound wire rope isolators to give us a more cushy landing. If I had a cleaner signal from the altimeter, I could have the flight control software touch down almost arbitrarily softly, but right now there is enough uncertainty that asking for a slower rate of descent would leave the total speed basically in the noise margin. A few seconds in the air a few feet off the ground is not very significant by itself, but the point is that most of the systems necessary for much more significant flights are demonstrated.

Looked at in the best light, it is a reusable, four axis stabilized, liquid fueled, manned rocket. Our single man suborbital space shot vehicle is expected to only be about twice the dry mass of this vehicle (but with a LOT more propellant, including kerosene), and will not be all that much more complex.

It was tempting to fly more, but we are starting to hoard our peroxide because we are down to our last three drums, and we don’t have the supply resolved yet. We will learn a lot more flying the tube vehicle to a couple thousand feet than doing yet another lander hop. When we get a good supply in, we will do some fullload lander flights with the pilot doing the joystick control."