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Its very sad but inevitable. At this cutting edge of technology and human endeavour, accidents are bound to happen.
This is very bad. Not just for the family and friends of the poor guy who died, but for commercial manned spaceflight in general. SpaceshipTwo is considered the 'simplest' and 'safest' of all the upcoming manned commercial vehicle. It has many features that should help keep it reliable. For example, instead of a real liquid rocket engine, it uses a hybrid engine; it has almost no moving parts apart from a valve or tw…
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All of those you said are very true. It's also worth mentioning that that very 'safe' engine has already killed three people, and injured three others during a cold-flow test. Very tragic. see for details: http://www.knightsarrow.com/rockets/scaled-composites-accide... or the "Test program accident" at the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RocketMotorTwo
You are right. Hybrid engines are not looking like the safe & reliable middle-ground between solid & liquid engines that they were made out to be.
What this weeks events show us is that space travel is hard. Really hard. Most systems operate in extreme conditions, sometimes bordering on the improbable. Thousands, sometimes millions of horsepower in an engine smaller than a car, cryogenic liquids at -200 degrees celsius cooling a nozzle that is 3000 degrees celsius 5 millimeters away, heatshields designed to absorb obscene amounts of heat, the list just goes on…
> cryogenic liquids at -300 degrees celsius Absolute zero is -273 °C.
What this weeks events show us is that space travel is hard. Really hard. Most systems operate in extreme conditions, sometimes bordering on the improbable. Thousands, sometimes millions of horsepower in an engine smaller than a car, cryogenic liquids at -200 degrees celsius cooling a nozzle that is 3000 degrees celsius 5 millimeters away, heatshields designed to absorb obscene amounts of heat, the list just goes on…
> This is commendable, and is what drives the human race forward. Without these fearless men we wouldn't have gone to the moon. We wouldn't have explored the depths of the ocean. We wouldn't have flown the skies. That's one way of looking at the matter. Another is that without this untrammelled technological evolution (I hesitate to use the word "progress") we wouldn't be living through the greatest mass extinction e…
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Totall agree. These people are the modern day seafarers. Heading out into unknown waters.
Someone dying is devastating. Trying to conquer space a handful of people at a time is the slow and dangerous way of accomplishing this task. We should be building machines to explore the solar system. This can be done for a fraction of the cost, time, and it will allow him to allow us to iterate quickly. In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now than if we move slowly trying…
There are a lot of people like that. Mountain climbers. Surfers. Volunteer soldiers. Alaskan crab fishermen.
You don't see anyone proposing that crabbing be banned until we can develop automated machines to do the job, right?
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They just switched to a new liquid powered engine because their hybrid engine was not powerful enough. This was the first powered test flight with their new engine, and given the information so far it sounds like it exploded in-flight. Very, very, tragic. edit: I'm wrong. They simply switched to a new type of fuel for their hybrid engine.
I hadn't heard about that, thanks for the info. I dug up this article: http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/10/08/work-continues-hybrid...
What this weeks events show us is that space travel is hard. Really hard. Most systems operate in extreme conditions, sometimes bordering on the improbable. Thousands, sometimes millions of horsepower in an engine smaller than a car, cryogenic liquids at -200 degrees celsius cooling a nozzle that is 3000 degrees celsius 5 millimeters away, heatshields designed to absorb obscene amounts of heat, the list just goes on…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is commendable, and is what drives the human race forward. Without these fearless men we wouldn't have gone to the moon. We wouldn't have explored the depths of the ocean. We wouldn't have flown the skies. That's one way of looking at the matter. Another is that without this untrammelled technological evolution (I hesitate to use the word "progress") we wouldn't be living through the greatest mass extinction e…
I think you'll find that it hard to argue that the efforts of exploration are linked to our industrial pillage of the planet.
More recently Oil is currently driving a lot of exploration into the oceans and other remote regions.
PS: Not that I think we should all just stay home, but whitewashing history is stupid.