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It seems like we’re missing the crucial step of how it all turned out OK. 2 paragraphs earlier they’re saying how red lights ought to ‘scare the shit out of you’ and ‘it’s too late once it turns red’.
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.
Well, no.
All for the best marketing position for the near-space tourism business that Virgin (and, in competition, Blue Origin) is launching and each promoting with the media frenzy around their respective founder-on-board demo launch.
I didn't get why the orange or red light is scary. Because it could mean landing in the desert when you are a glider?
It doesn't go terribly well.
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Oh dang, for real? That's super weak if true! Also, no wonder they have hundreds of episodes... I'd be curious if you have any links/etc. on the subject to share!
It still amazes me that anyone still believes that the pictures they see on TV are in any way real. 100% of content on TV is fake. I used to say except the news, but now I'm not even able to trust that. If it's a commercial, definitely fake. If it's a TV show, 100% fake. Games shows shoot 5 episodes in a day, so when they say "last week's winner" it was last hour's.
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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!
Worth noting that Virgin Galactic is currently the only private space program to have killed anyone so far. This quote is from before the fatal 2014 crash, but the FAA makes it pretty clear that a virgin galactic had a cavalier attitude towards crew safety[0] back then too. Combined with this article, that paints a picture of Virgin Galactic as a genuinely unsafe company that is going to kill a lot of people if it’s not stopped. Manual processes, no safeties, high pilot work loads, and rockets do not mix well.
0 - This was caused by a design that explicitly assumed that highly trained test pilots were incapable of making mistakes. The design required manual activation, had no failsafes, and the pilots were not told that activation at too low a speed would cause the vehicle to break apart. A breathtakingly bad design for a spacecraft.
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…
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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.
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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.
Do people driving 150mph on the freeway deserve to get respect and have others comment about size of their balls?
The ballsy part that deserves respect is pushing the envelope on safety, executing perfectly, and playing it off like it's nothing.