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The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight
201–210 of 269 posts
Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight
#202Richard Branson does seem to be a little accident prone:
https://thebookofman.com/body/adventure/sir-richard-branson/
“On my first time skydiving, there was one cord that opened the parachute, and one that got rid of it. I pulled the wrong cord by mistake. I was falling through the air before an instructor managed to yank my spare ripcord.”
Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight
#203Richard Branson does seem to be a little accident prone: https://thebookofman.com/body/adventure/sir-richard-branson/ “On my first time skydiving, there was one cord that opened the parachute, and one that got rid of it. I pulled the wrong cord by mistake. I was falling through the air before an instructor managed to yank my spare ripcord.”
Why would there be a cord to get rid of an unopened parachute?
Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight
#204[flagged]
I mean, it beats eating horse dewormer.
Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight
#205Richard Branson does seem to be a little accident prone: https://thebookofman.com/body/adventure/sir-richard-branson/ “On my first time skydiving, there was one cord that opened the parachute, and one that got rid of it. I pulled the wrong cord by mistake. I was falling through the air before an instructor managed to yank my spare ripcord.”
Why would there be a cord to get rid of an unopened parachute?
I don't know how it was in 1986, but today you have 3 "chords". One in the back is the primary chute and hopefully the only one you need. On the front you have two. One cuts the primary, whether or not you've opened it, and the other deploys the secondary.
Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight
#206[flagged]
[flagged]
Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight
#207Richard Branson does seem to be a little accident prone: https://thebookofman.com/body/adventure/sir-richard-branson/ “On my first time skydiving, there was one cord that opened the parachute, and one that got rid of it. I pulled the wrong cord by mistake. I was falling through the air before an instructor managed to yank my spare ripcord.”
Why would there be a cord to get rid of an unopened parachute?
Should the main chute be tangled and you want to deploy a reserve probably
Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight
#208Brilliant 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.
Funny too because no one cares,few months after the event and it’s all water under the bridge. People remember Yuri Gagarin, not these people.
I'd wager that if Branson had died on the flight, people would remember it
Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 team…
Hmm, that certainly colors a rumor I've heard about Apple. That they'll have two or three teams compete on a new product... but they won't tell the teams that they have competition until final demo day.
I cannot reveal the source or the company but a major household-name automotive company would have several teams working on projects, with one pre-selected as the "real" one and the others not told their work would be discarded. The idea being that this way you can multiply the size of each engineering team and starve the competition of competent engineers. The fact this system exists was not disclosed to the engineers in order to prevent them from quitting. I know this from an engineer who quit after accidentally meeting a member of another team within the company working on the exact same project.
Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight
#210This highlights why having automated pilots in spaceships is so critical. Software can be tested more thoroughly than humans, and cannot override safety protocols. If the rules say to abort, the software aborts. Humans get to say "I think we'll be fine", and put lives on the line.
Automation is critical, but also the ability to override software that fails is critical, too. Armstrong overrode the failed LEM computer to land safely. Of the 3 737MAX software stab trim runaway incidents, only one crew followed the stab trim override instructions and saved their plane. Pilots are never perfect, and neither is the software. Need both watching each other.
Reading https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/apollo-11-moon-landing-..., I don’t see the computer fail.
Also, if he followed that 1201 alarm, it seems they would have been safe, too, but they wouldn’t have gotten on the moon.