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The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

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Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#31

Post by mc32 »

dchest wrote: post #16
mc32 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other flaws too. Like pretending to bike to the spaceport on the day of, but it was actually filmed the week before and when called out, they said, oops, you're right, sorry! It's like when Guy Fiery in his hot rod. He pretends he rolls up to the place in his 70s hot rod, but actually it's just rolled out of the truck that lugs it around from location to location and he opens the door, sits, gets filmed get…

Biking to the spaceport was in the promotional video released a few days before the flight (where they announced "astronauts"), obviously it couldn't be filmed on the flight day.

But on the day of the flight on the stage he went along pretending he’d biked there.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#32

Post by andyxor »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #20

Let's hope Elon Musk gets cold feet and doesn't fly on that ship. SpaceShipTwo is a pretty atrocious design, safety-wise, compared to what you can accomplish with a capsule and vertical rocket for suborbital spaceflight. https://www.space.com/elon-musk-will-fly-on-virgin-galactic

I hope Musk values his self-imposed mission enough to not take that risk. If he actually takes that flight it would be the single biggest threat to the future of space exploration.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#33

Post by walrus01 »

dboreham wrote: post #13
mc32 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other flaws too. Like pretending to bike to the spaceport on the day of, but it was actually filmed the week before and when called out, they said, oops, you're right, sorry! It's like when Guy Fiery in his hot rod. He pretends he rolls up to the place in his 70s hot rod, but actually it's just rolled out of the truck that lugs it around from location to location and he opens the door, sits, gets filmed get…

Also those shows where they view three houses, then buy one, all in the same week : in reality the producers find someone who has just bought a house, then they make the show using that house and two other random houses, and lo and behold they find a house they like!

Wait until people hear about the person I know who was a contestant on "The Bachelor", who is in fact already happily married. Reality TV is fake? The ocean is wet! Sewage is smelly! and other shocking news, film at 11.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#34

Post by anonAndOn »

Invictus0 wrote: post #29
mc32 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other flaws too. Like pretending to bike to the spaceport on the day of, but it was actually filmed the week before and when called out, they said, oops, you're right, sorry! It's like when Guy Fiery in his hot rod. He pretends he rolls up to the place in his 70s hot rod, but actually it's just rolled out of the truck that lugs it around from location to location and he opens the door, sits, gets filmed get…

> It's like when Guy Fiery in his hot rod. Better than driving on a real road whilst talking to a camera off to the side, no? Every car scene in every movie and TV show is "fake" too, just so you know.

Steve McQueen wants you to hold his beer.[0]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJZ-BHBKyos

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#35

Post by spywaregorilla »

ElFitz wrote: post #19
s5300 wrote: post #10

Wow. Despite his ever growing amount of haters, Musk & Co. do really seem to be placing safety fairly high up on their priority list, if not at the top where Musk says it is. Branson... does not particularly seem to be doing so. I'm unaware if he's ever repeatedly claimed safety is Virgins top priority though. Wonder how things go down in Bezos land.

A funny thought. Given - how easy it supposedly would be to find someone to bribe with the inheritance one would get from someone like Bezos and Branson, - how many people work on getting these rockets into space and those men back - how complex and fragile rockets are - how dangerous the whole endeavour is commonly believed to be - that they both came back alive Can we assume that all these murder mystery tv shows a…

You would need the inheritee and the engineer to both be willing to commit murder and run the calculus that the money is more valuable than the risk of them going to jail and losing their inheritance forever, which is probably a really bad bet given one of them is a spacex engineer or something and the other is, what, an heir to the bezos fortune?

Silly

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#36

Post by bryananderson »

I recommend Schmidle’s recent book “Test Gods” if you are interested in Virgin Galactic and test piloting. Schmidle is not an engineer and I would have enjoyed a deeper dive into Virgin Galactic’s design choices, but it is a great book about (among other things) the tensions that emerge when a complex technical project is overseen from a distance by utterly nontechnical, PR-oriented upper management. The company’s communications and business strategies make a lot more sense knowing that the people calling the shots do not comprehend in the slightest how their product works.

For many reasons (some alluded to in this article, many more in the book), SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. Engineering leadership has done what they can to make the vehicle safer (at the cost of performance), but the intractable issue is that any one mistake by a pilot is likely to be fatal (and already has been, in the 2014 accident). Voices like Stucky and Ericson who wanted to acknowledge the inherent danger of the vehicle (which doesn’t mean grounding it) have been ignored and ultimately removed. The company’s business requires the vehicle to be understood to be safe by the public. The chickens will come home to roost.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#37

Post by rpmisms »

mongol wrote: post #28
jedberg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit to Musk here for being smart enough not to get in one of his own rockets (yet).

Is that really to his credit though? Should he not be prepared to risk his own life, just like those of his employees?

I think it's worth pointing out that Virgin is literally trying to enable space tourism, which is just a side effect for SpaceX. Branson was testing and advertising his product, Elon would be taking valuable time away from his mission.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#38

Post by onethought »

mongol wrote: post #28
jedberg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit to Musk here for being smart enough not to get in one of his own rockets (yet).

Is that really to his credit though? Should he not be prepared to risk his own life, just like those of his employees?

His employees haven’t got in those rockets either.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#39

Post by amatecha »

walrus01 wrote: post #33
dboreham wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also those shows where they view three houses, then buy one, all in the same week : in reality the producers find someone who has just bought a house, then they make the show using that house and two other random houses, and lo and behold they find a house they like!

Wait until people hear about the person I know who was a contestant on "The Bachelor", who is in fact already happily married. Reality TV is fake? The ocean is wet! Sewage is smelly! and other shocking news, film at 11.

Who was already married, the "bachelor" or the contestant trying to win his marriage? or both? lol

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#40

Post by aaaxyz »

HPsquared wrote: post #15
krapp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The egos of the rich fuel the engine of civilization, and the blood of the poor grease its wheels.

I think it's a bigger category: the egos of the powerful. The rich are a subset.

That's a bit of a tautology isn't it?
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