Rocket Man

摘要

On a hot june evening at a ram-shackle former gliderport 30 miles east of Dallas, John Carmack's rocket engine lit up with its blue flame spewing from the nozzle. The unearthly howl rose to a scream as Carmack throttled it up to its 2,200 pounds of thrust. Then it burped, the flame died and a shower of alcohol spewed over the tarmac. Mission failure is the smell of a vodka truck hitting a tree.rnCarmack, the 38-year-old multimillionaire software whiz behind the videogames Doom and Quake, is a pesky gnat among the do-it-yourself racketeering crowd. Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos and PayPal cofounder Elon Musk have lavished more than $100 million each on their space launch efforts. Carmack has spent only $3.5 million on his Armadillo Aerospace, but he's had more launches than Bezos and Musk combined. He's attacking rocketry the way he would assemble software: design, build, test and repeat in rapid-fire succession to quickly determine what works and what doesn't.