Armadillo Aerospace

This trip has brought me some once-in-a-lifetime experiences. As far as I’m concerned some of them make me the luckiest guy around. Tonight was cool. Way too cool to summarize. Once again I’m going to reconsider my degrees and think about going back to college for engineering, physics, or chemistry, that way I can actually work on cool stuff. So what kind of cool stuff am I talking about? ROCKETS!

Tonight I was give a tour of what the guys at Armadillo Aerospace are up to. In October they competed at the 2006 X Prize Cup and they are hard at work preparing for the 2007 competition held in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Armadillo Aerospace was the only competitor in the Lunar Lander challenge. I learned that the possibilities are endless. Within time they could be sending privately funded rockets into orbit and sending people up in private flights. Now I don’t know much about science, but as I said, this is simply one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

Armadillo Aerospace is privately funded and operated by a small team of less than 10 people. I was able to get in touch with Russell, one of the founders who is friends with one of my mother’s cousins. So that’s how things like this work out. Russell is from Michigan and attended Michigan Tech University. Thanks for the tour Russell. Not sure how much I understood, but I would be happy to be on the team some day, at least sweep the floors of the shop.

Are there any fans of the games Doom and Quake out there? Heading up the company is John Carmack, who is one of the most highly recognized people in the video game industry. I always encourage people to find new hobbies and pursuit their hobbies to the fullest. John is a great example of this. He took his childhood hobby of rockets to the next level and is one of the biggest individual contributors to privately lead aerospace companies. It’s an honor to meet someone like John Carmack, who revolutionized much of the gaming industry. He may very well do the same for private aerospace. Carmack and id Software were awarded two Emmy Awards in January 2007 and he was named the 10th most influential person in technology in 1999 by TIME magazine.

It’s not often I come across things as great as this. This will go down as one of the biggest highlights of the trip. If they are offering private flights to space one day I’ll be sure to sign up.

P.S. Dave (to everyone else, that’s my mom’s cousin who got me in touch with Russell) thanks for the support and getting me in touch with Russell.