Who would want to download and view a 28 MB video of a rocket hovering 
on the spot (more or less) for 192 seconds. I certainly did!!!.

        > 
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2007_05_12/192secondHover.mpg

John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace's latest effort.
This level of performance puts them in the very very real league.

So impressively consistent it could almost get boring after a few 
minutes were it not for the slowly eroding concrete base its hovering 
over providing light relief as it slowly disintegrates and showers the 
support vehicle in debris.



        Russell


_______________

We did a 192 second flight today, coming down for a nominal shutdown
with propellant still remaining.  We did another 90+ second flight
afterwards to make sure nothing was harmed.  Discovery Channel Canada
was there to shoot the testing, and everything went off like
clockwork.  I'll get a video up tomorrow, but it isn't all that
exciting with Pixel just sitting up there for over three minutes...

and:

This was carrying a full gold box arrangement and over a 25kg
payload.  We can still trim a bit more weight, and we now know that
we need to slightly shrink our main injector fuel elements for
simultaneous depletion, so we have quite a bit of margin.  We have
put over ten minutes of flight time on this engine just in the last
two test sessions (over five flights), and it is still good as new.

 http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2007_05_12/192secondHover.mpg

 It does have a pretty good slosh wiggle, and it had some difficulty
 holding altitude halfway through at the knee of the blowdown pressure
 to mass ratio, but we are pretty happy with it, and confident that we
 can repeat it as necessary.

 John Carmack

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