241–250 of 269 posts
This 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.
A random cosmic ray burst can't bit-flip a human brain. Software works best supervised in a coddled environment.
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 team…
> Unlike its American competitor in the Space Race, which had NASA as a single coordinating agency, the USSR's program was split among several competing design bureaus led by Sergei Korolev, Kerim Kerimov, Mikhail Yangel, Valentin Glushko, Vladimir Chelomey, Viktor Makeyev, Mikhail Reshetnev, etc.
https://www.groundzerobooksltd.com/pages/books/80639/union-o...
> “ A private program can’t afford to lose anybody,” Branson said. 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 genu…
>activation at too low a speed would cause the vehicle to break apart. A breathtakingly bad design for a spacecraft. I do hope you know that outside its designed flight envelope, almost any space craft / rocket / airplane breaks apart pretty fast.
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Yes, the red light is supposed to mean that they failed to boost enough to be able to glide back to their target runway. But... they did anyway? Apparently? Something is missing from this account.
Typically warning lights appear when the thing they warn about is impending, not that you've past the point. Otherwise they would be useless, except for existential mockery.
For an aircraft/spacecraft, red indicators should be used to inform the user to the most critical factors; stall warnings, fuel state warnings etc. And most importantly, the user should be able to act on these warnings, otherwise they're just too much noise and not enough signal.
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I always wanted a street navigator that would say: "you should have turned left back there" followed by a random insult in various languages. Much like every human navigator I've ever had who has been as unhelpful as possible.
Satnavs are actually too polite - explicitly telling the driver that they went wrong (sans insults of course!) is useful information that could avoid a lot of confusion. I imagine the reason that this is not done is the same reason as lots of sound engineering is compromised - marketing dweebs.
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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 know that was effectively true at Nokia in the 2000s, but that was more a sign of corporate dysfunction than a deliberate "battle to the death". (I worked at Nokia in 2010, and the last project I was on turned out to be one that was literally being worked on by four other people across the world, as it turned out.) I don't think I've ever heard that about Apple, though, at least as standard (even unofficial) operat…
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It's not that he should or shouldn't have, it's that once you make that decision, certain consequences become likely. I place it more on the author trying to paint a victim narrative, given the guys board resignation (he knew his fate), and the fact that the author directly benefitted from the decision that got him fired.
> It's not that he should or shouldn't have > I place it more on the author trying to paint a victim narrative, If he should have, he's a victim; if he shouldn't have, he's not. If you "place it more" on the author trying to paint a victim narrative, you're explicitly saying that it is about whether he should or shouldn't have, and that you think he shouldn't have.
The author has an interest in making him a victim of Virgin Galactic, because if he's not, that makes him largely a victim of the author's published writings.
Separately, I'm saying that there's no universal truth to "should have" or "shouldn't have". It's a personal moral and ethical judgement call, and is complicated by differences in professional opinion. The author makes it seem like a clear A/B choice, and it's not.
Disobedience is more black and white, and requires pretty substantial justification.
Assessing risk can be one of the most difficult and contentious aspects of engineering. People are going to disagree.
This isn't a case of "safety at all costs". It's an inherently risky business and discipline. To some extent he is comfortable putting test pilots and others lives' at risk, because that's ultimately his job.
Barring some absolute smoking gun (ie violating written risk policies versus differences of professional opinions), I think he made a deliberate choice that precludes victim hood.
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?
For reference, here's a video of a Boing 727 landing in the desert: https://youtu.be/kJZ1eHU_JZg?t=51 It doesn't go terribly well.
Nice reversal of the way things normally happen!
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> Not only did he quit his VP job when he saw these safety problems Agree, great guy, putting his ethics ahead of his career > but he went around giving interviews about them Hmmm, gets a bit murky here. If he wanted to save lives, there's a very clear path to alerting the FAA. But he didn't do that. This sounds a bit more like he was trying to save his career. Which brings in question why he quit in the first place,…
> If he wanted to save lives, there's a very clear path to alerting the FAA. Is there? I doubt you can just call up the FAA and be like, "hey, my former employer is going to get people killed." The FAA will naturally call the employer and the employer will naturally defend themselves, calling the ex-employee a kook. You probably need to generate awareness of the issues in public and show the FAA you're not the only e…
It's a thing, trust me, and works a lot better than you assumed above. You absolutely don't need an article in the NY Times to initiate an FAA audit.
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Yes, the red light is supposed to mean that they failed to boost enough to be able to glide back to their target runway. But... they did anyway? Apparently? Something is missing from this account.
Typically warning lights appear when the thing they warn about is impending, not that you've past the point. Otherwise they would be useless, except for existential mockery.