US rocket maker Armadillo Aerospace is talking to investors to restart work on its reusable vehicles after suspending development following January’s launch failure.
Founder John Carmack, who had been funding the suborbital venture by cash set aside…
US rocket maker Armadillo Aerospace is talking to investors to restart work on its reusable vehicles after suspending development following January’s launch failure.
Founder John Carmack, who had been funding the suborbital venture by cash set aside from his video game business, told a conference in Dallas that he had “expended my crazy money on Armadillo”.
He said: “The situation we’re at right now is things are turned down to a sort of hibernation mode where we’ve still got people maintaining the shop. We are talking to some other investors, and if anybody wants to kick in a couple of a million dollars to build rockets give me a call.”
Armadillo had been focusing on a vertical takeoff, vertical landing suborbital vehicle similar to SpaceX’s Grasshopper, and had a deal with space tourism company Space Adventures to market passenger flights.
Carmack had been personally funding the venture for the last two years to enable it to focus on these goals, putting an end to contract work with space agencies and universities that had seen it turn an operating profit.
However, he said since then the company had developed slower than expected.
“We should have made multiple vehicles at once”, he said, adding: “That was our critical mistake in the last two years, because we should have been able to put more of these together.”
Armadillo lost one of its STIG-B rockets during its most recent test launch in January, after its parachutes failed to deploy following blast off from Spaceport America in New Mexico.
If the company is unable to find an investor, Carmack said it would likely lie in hibernation until “there’s another liquidity event where I’m comfortable throwing in another million dollars a year into things”.
Â
