Armadillo Aerospace

The company Armadillo Aerospace is a small group of private investors, whose aim is, among other things, to implement private, manned ( suborbital ) spaceflight.

The project is led by John Carmack, a computer game developer who is known for example for the development of the first-person shooter series Quake. This invested in July 2004, 1.5 million U.S. dollars in the project. All the original members went professionally for another occupation and participated on a voluntary basis at the Armadillo project. Now, however, many workers are employed regularly. Armadillo Aerospace funded for a long time completely even, were, however, in 2006 announced that it has signed an agreement with Nvidia.

The project was originally designed to produce, the Ansari X Prize. 2008, the project won $ 350,000, as the team had taken the first place in the first level of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. A year later it was the second level of competition in second and won $ 500,000.

The logo of the project is a masked armadillo (English Armadillo ) called Widget.

In August 2013 John Carmack announced that the project would be placed temporarily (including after the crash of the rocket STIG -B) on ice, but he " actively looking for external investors to accommodate the development of new rockets again. "