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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

#51

Post by the-pigeon »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #35
ElFitz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And reality isn't a heist movie.

Most heirs are not going to attempt to murder for the money. They normally are already enjoying that wealth. And if the money maker stays alive it just grows even more.

Now even if they have a motive. How are they going to connect to the right engineer? They likely don't have the skills to even identify an employee that could deliberately sabotage the system.

And you likely couldn't do it with just one employee. There's at least one other person reviewing their work. And tons of inspections and tests you'd have to hide it all from. So you'd end up with a heist movie.

That said, the groups that could do things like this are state actors. But then we are talking about a very well funded group that can afford to spend years placing people in key positions. And then we get back to motive. Only state actor that would really want to hold back SpaceX or Blue Origin would be China. But the reaction from such sabotage could go a lot of ways. Not worth the resources.

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

#53

Post by adamredwoods »

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!

https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/06/house-hunters-true-...

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

#54

Post by JohnFen »

rpmisms wrote: post #44
timmytokyo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violating airspace regulations isn't gutsy. It's irresponsible and selfish. It puts others at risk.

Life is risk, sometimes with other people's lives in the balance. Violating their airspace, in this context, was absolutely gutsy, and dangerous, and stupid, but all of them have massive balls and my respect.

What about that is deserving of respect?

Edit: This was an honest question, and I was hoping for an answer that would help me to understand. It's a shame that this is getting downvoted rather than someone enlightening me.

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

#55

Post by adrr »

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!

I was on people court as one of the audience members that they interview after the case. I never saw the court case, they just grabbed random people off the street and gave them scenario of the case and asked for their opinion.

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

#56

Post by JohnFen »

HPsquared wrote: post #21
aaroninsf wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would unpack "gutsy" with its overtones of grudging admiration, into a lot harsher terms related to toxic narcissism and what amounts to a pissing contest between competitive men. I suspect there is a natural evolutionary curb on the somewhat sociopathic qualities at work, whereby bravado is kept in some check by self-culling being commonplace.

If something has positive side-effects, can it be called toxic?

Of course. Plenty of toxic things that you want to avoid have positive side-effects. Including chemical toxins.

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

#57

Post by dimitrios1 »

mc32 wrote: post #11
bigtones wrote: post #2

Brilliant well written article. Not without bias, but you can see through the words on the page and into the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man. Branson did put his life on the line to achieve that accolade though, which was a gutsy move.

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…

OK. That's it! I draw the line at Guy Fieri slander!

That's not fakery. That's every classic car owner's dream. You get to show off the hot rod and not put miles on it. I am sure he does plenty of joyriding in that thing. Guy is anything but phony. He is actually one of thee more wholesome dudes on television ATM. We need more Guy Fieri's.

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

#58

Post by snedfree »

the-pigeon wrote: post #42
mongol wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

SpaceX employees haven't gone to space. Just NASA astronauts on SpaceX rockets. And this privately paid for mission coming up. I don't think it's the CEO's job to be a test pilot. I think that's pretty crazy actually. I know someone who is a test pilot. He's trained a long time to do it. You want someone in the craft that is an expert at both piloting spacecraft and the engineering of the craft. Musk is certainly no…

None of these CEOs have been test pilots-- rather, test passengers.

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

#59

Post by IggleSniggle »

bryananderson wrote: post #36

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 co…

> 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.

This comment reminded me of another story from a previous aerospace era (blimp cruise liners aka airships), the summary of which is:

> A British Lord wanted to build the best airship in the world – and so he had two rival design teams battle it out to win the juicy government contract. Competition is supposed to bring the best out of people, but run in the wrong way it can cause people (and the things they make) to fall apart in the most horrifying ways.

https://timharford.com/2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-4-the-dea...

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

#60

Post by paganel »

laurent92 wrote: post #41
paganel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hope those billionaires won't dare to force for their faces to be put on future postal stamps, I grew up as a kid having Laika [1] on them, I wouldn't want for future postal-stamp collector kids to have to look at the faces of Branson or, God forbid, Bezos. [1] https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/postage-stamp-mongolia-circa...

Isn’t that the principle of football and space conquest: Giving plebs something to dream about, so we can shove them with ads and admiration for absurd ideas (like nationalism or love for any idea, maybe sovietism, patriotism, Richardbrandsonism, or for the belief that we’re in together pushing for a better world).

> Giving plebs something to dream about

To be honest I don't think the current "pleb" generations dream about space conquest anymore (I'm part of that "pleb", of course), people have gotten accustomed to the idea that everything relatively close up there is either very dark of very cold or both, so why all the fuss about some piece of rock located in those dark and cold places?

Unless we discover some new laws of physics and the accompanying new technology I think we should put firmly in our heads that's no way for us as a species to get passed our solar system, so maybe we could better use the "space exploration" resources for something closer to home.

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