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The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

newyorker.com

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

#251

Post by robertlagrant »

zhoujianfu wrote: post #92
TeMPOraL wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money and power are two sides of the same coin. Money is literally the unit of measure for power over other people - to the first approximation, a dollar in hand means you can make appropriate people do a dollar's worth of arbitrary work for you. The more money you have, the more you have of this kind of power mediated by economy. You can, in particular, use this power to have politicians do work for you (many ways o…

Rich is how much money you own. Power is how much money you control. They’re not as closely linked as you think. A managing partner of a $1B fund is more powerful than a person worth $10B on paper whose wealth is all tied up in a minority position in a company they are unable to sell the shares of. Or consider the power of Biden vs his personal net worth.

That's why being worth something on paper is not the same thing as money.

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

#252

Post by vermontdevil »

vermontdevil wrote: post #3

Telling they fired Sturckow when he was pretty outspoken such as this: In another e-mail, in 2019, he urged his fellow test pilots to be more transparent: “Failure to admit mistakes in flight test is a cancer that must be nipped at the bud.” Stucky, whom I wrote about in the magazine in 2018, had been particularly troubled by Mackay and Masucci’s unwillingness to take responsibility for what he perceived to be their…

My apologies. Not Sturckow but a different person, Mark "Forger" Stucky.

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

#254

Post by Dylan16807 »

dylan604 wrote: post #170
Dylan16807 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're claiming it happens every single game, you're applying the wrong number. Or are you backing your claim down to "100% of content on TV has some faked element in some episode eventually "? Because that's not a very useful claim.

TV is entertainment, and any faith in the images coming from it is undeserved. Is 100% hyperbole, yes, of course. Is the majority of content on TV fake and over produced, yes, of course it is. It used to be that the label news meant something, but the definitions have been blurred so that opinion shows are now touted as news. After the news label, anything else appearing on the boobtube is meant for entertainment. Be…

> Is the majority of content on TV fake and over produced, yes, of course it is.

That's not a very useful statement either because most TV is openly fictional.

You made a really strong claim and doubled down on it, but I'm not sure if you actually mean anything close to what you said.

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

#255

Post by ashtonkem »

darkcha0s wrote: post #212
vultour wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very difficult, and often impossible with all systems operational, to get a modern airliner outside of its flight envelope. I'd imagine a tiny glider with a rocket bolted on is a different story.

Most probably because that tiny glider with a rocket bolted to it, is pushing more / has more dangerous limits than a subsonic airliner. It's much faster to go outside the designed flight envelope if you're 3x supersonic at FL800 than cruising subsonic at FL320.

I don’t think anyone disagrees with the general assertion that rocket travel is more dangerous than airplane travel. The question is less “is this rocket as safe as an AirBus” and more “is this rocket as safe as other rockets?”

My issue with Virgin Galactic is that their rocket design is fundamentally unsafe. It requires a human crew flawlessly perform a high level of work load with minimal automation and safety interlocks. This isn’t something we’d accept with a commercial airplane, even with the much wider margins of error that those craft provide. For a rocket this is absurdly dangerous.

The designer in fact explicitly said he wants the pilots actually in control of the aircraft directly without automation, which is romantic but incredibly dumb during supersonic ascent, as the fatal crash shows.

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

#256

Post by bumby »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #239
jamiek88 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly these rules tend to get written in blood.

And if not enough blood has been spilled, the rules can't get written. Safety regulations aren't just written in blood, that's all they effectively can be written in.

>Safety regulations aren't just written in blood, that's all they effectively can be written in.

I think I may disagree with this. Safety regulations can be written in bloodless terms like probability but, due to all sorts of cognitive biases, people tend to not take them seriously until there is actual physical consequences for ignoring them.

E.g., reliability engineers can use real data to show the probability of something failing but often people will push past the point where its statistically "due" because they've yet to see it happen in their career. I don't know if this was the case, but imagine a distribution of possible foam shedding from the Shuttle. Some points are going to occur during a portion of the flight profile where they become dangerous. But because few (if any) engineers personally experienced that because the vast majority of shedding occurs in less risky moments, the shedding isn't actually viewed as a risk.

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

#258

Post by dang »

tsukikage wrote: post #204
tasogare wrote: post #201

[flagged]

I mean, it beats eating horse dewormer.

Please don't post flamebait, especially not flamebait tropes. And please don't take HN threads further into flamewar generally. This is entirely avoidable and should be avoided.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#259

Post by lamontcg »

bumby wrote: post #256
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if not enough blood has been spilled, the rules can't get written. Safety regulations aren't just written in blood, that's all they effectively can be written in.

> Safety regulations aren't just written in blood, that's all they effectively can be written in. I think I may disagree with this. Safety regulations can be written in bloodless terms like probability but, due to all sorts of cognitive biases, people tend to not take them seriously until there is actual physical consequences for ignoring them. E.g., reliability engineers can use real data to show the probability of…

Foam strikes happen all the time and we've never lost a craft, please stop making hyperbolic worst-case assessments about a non-issue, it won't help your career path (or mine).

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

#260

Post by unityByFreedom »

aerosmile wrote: post #249
unityByFreedom wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

https://hotline.faa.gov/ 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.

Color me skeptical that this would carry any weight against Branson, Musk or Bezos. That's just my perspective from the last decade as government agencies appear reluctant to act against the wealthier businesses without significant public support.
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