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SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

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Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#101

Post by javert »

notastartup wrote: post #52
JanSolo wrote: post #18

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…

sad. also manned flight to mars to colonize it like Musk says seems impossible for at least a couple decades.

The accidents this week seem to have no bearing on that.

It may or may not be true, but it's the same thing it was last week.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#102

Post by Turing_Machine »

melling wrote: post #78
phkahler wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. One man on mars for a day will be more informative than all the remote hardware we've sent so far. There is no substitute for being somewhere in person.

Is that your opinion, or do you have some facts to support that statement? As part of the program, we should be building better machines and not crawling along at 12 inches a day, of course.

Well, sure. Just look at all the jobs that are still being done by humans. Even fairly simple and formulaic jobs like working in a fast food restaurant are still in the human domain (that may be starting to change, finally, but it hasn't happened yet).

For that matter, look at the problem of operating an autonomous vehicle right here on Earth. Everyone from DARPA to MIT to Carnegie-Mellon to Google has been working on that one for the last sixty years or so. It's now gotten to where it kinda works. Sorta. In some conditions.

Remote control doesn't work well when there's a large speed-of-light lag between the earthbound operator and the vehicle. Mars is 6 minutes away, round trip, minimum and that's about the best case. For the outer planets, forget it. The Jupiter system is at least an hour round-trip (not that we'd be landing people on Jupiter itself, but there's a lot of interesting stuff in the system).

Your vehicle is toast long before you figure out that there's a problem.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#103

Post by seanflyon »

melling wrote: post #65
Turing_Machine wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people want to do stuff now , not a hundred years from now, and they don't insist on perfect safety. The test pilots were fully aware of the risk, and I honor them for it. 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?

I didn't say ban manned space flight. We keep trying to restart our space program by sending people to Mars. I think we should start a more extensive national unmanned space program. For example, if the Hubble, or its replacement, needs to be fixed, we should have an unmanned answer, for instance. We should start building on Mars without humans. If our machines can't do that yet, then we should invest in them until t…

Are you suggesting we send several generations of robots to Mars first? That's a great idea and exactly what we have been doing for decades.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#104

Post by melling »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #68
slg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't really fair comparisons as they are several orders of magnitudes less dangerous than space flight. My quick estimates say that roughly 1-3% of people who try to get to space die during some point of the journey. Some quick Googling put the fatality rate for skiing at roughly .00002%. If 1% of people who tried skiing died, you could bet there would be national discussions about it.

About 0.4% of people working in the Alaska crab fishery die on the job, and people seem to be relatively okay with that. And it's much, much better than it was years ago. I know people who were crabbers in the 80s --- stories that would curl your hair (or straighten it, if it's already curly). http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/13/pf/dangerousjobs/index.htm

I think you're kind of missing the point. The Alaska crab program doesn't come to a complete stop for a couple years while there's an investigation and an attempt to make it safer. It won't be on the cover of the NYT. You don't need to go to Congress and request an additional $1.7 billion for another ship.

We are moving into Space at a snail's pace because we keep insisting on spending lots of money to try and send humans there "safely", and that's not really working out so well for us.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#105

Post by kstenerud »

revscat wrote: post #74
tomrod wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until when? The next large asteroid? The next close-by gamma burst? The sun goes nova? Let's go see the universe, and take life along with us.

That's not going to happen with chemical rockets. Until a radically different propulsion system is developed the only planet we have is this one.

And so we just tell everyone in the space agency "Sorry guys, but we can't do any more space stuff besides ground-based telescopes until we come up with a better propulsion system. So we'll keep about 100 of you on board to come up with that and the rest of you are fired."

Meanwhile, all of the derivative research (effects of zero gravity, life support systems, shielding, re-entry, etc) stagnates. And I guess we should dismantle our satellite systems as well, since they require rockets to achieve orbit.

Maybe we should ban all cars while we're at it, since they pollute our environment. We should shut down the evil factories, too, so no electric cars, either.

Yup, we can just sit in a circle, singing kumbayah while we wait for that miraculous perfect power source that someone else will develop for us. Then, and only THEN, can we continue with "progress".

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#106

Post by cstross »

tdicola wrote: post #89
DanBC wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apollo program, which was well managed and had no in-flight failures that resulted in loss of life The flaws in Apollo One were so severe the three crew died on the launchpad. Describing that tragedy as "no in-flight deaths" is accurate but misses some important information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1

Not to mention there were certainly other problems with Apollo like mission 13, or 11 barely landing before running out of fuel (computer problem forced Armstrong to take manual control and find a new landing spot at the last minute). Ultimately though Apollo was just too big and expensive a program to maintain, for better or worse.

... Also, there was Neil Armstrong's ejection from the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle in 1966:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle

(And I see another test pilot, Joe Algranti, also had a very close call flying a second-generation LLTV -- ejecting 0.6 seconds before it crashed!)

NASA came very close to losing more astronauts during mission prep for Apollo, in addition to the Apollo 1 crew. (Even if we leave aside the four astronauts killed in T-38 crashes in the 1960s.)

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#107

Post by Turing_Machine »

melling wrote: post #104
Turing_Machine wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 0.4% of people working in the Alaska crab fishery die on the job, and people seem to be relatively okay with that. And it's much, much better than it was years ago. I know people who were crabbers in the 80s --- stories that would curl your hair (or straighten it, if it's already curly). http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/13/pf/dangerousjobs/index.htm

I think you're kind of missing the point. The Alaska crab program doesn't come to a complete stop for a couple years while there's an investigation and an attempt to make it safer. It won't be on the cover of the NYT. You don't need to go to Congress and request an additional $1.7 billion for another ship. We are moving into Space at a snail's pace because we keep insisting on spending lots of money to try and send h…

"x The Alaska crab program doesn't come to a complete stop for a couple years while there's an investigation"

Neither will Virgin Galactic.

"You don't need to go to Congress and request an additional $1.7 billion for another ship."

Neither does Richard Branson.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#108

Post by x0054 »

sliverstorm wrote: post #92
marze wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some say this is an "inevitable" result of pushing boundaries. No. This is the result of a poorly managed program. What they are doing is much easier than the Apollo program, which was well managed and had no in-flight failures that resulted in loss of life, while accomplishing an infinitely harder task. This is a tragedy, obviously. But the program is about six years behind schedule, been going for 10 years. The mos…

Some say this is an "inevitable" result of pushing boundaries. No. This is the result of a poorly managed program. Some of the boundaries that are being pushed are how much oversight, how meticulous, etc you have to be. In other words, how well you have to manage the program, how tight a ship you keep. Keeping a tight ship raises costs, and isn't the big emphasis of all this privatized space travel on reducing costs?

That's a really grate way to sell tickets: "We now know just how careless we can be to limit in flight explosions to just one per year!" You can't use the same attitude that's now common in software startups with space vehicles, or any vehicles for that matter. "Ship now and fix problems later" does not work with real world products, and to be honest, should be avoided in software as well.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#109

Post by kashkhan »

marze wrote: post #69
mixmax wrote: post #23

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…

Some say this is an "inevitable" result of pushing boundaries. No. This is the result of a poorly managed program. What they are doing is much easier than the Apollo program, which was well managed and had no in-flight failures that resulted in loss of life, while accomplishing an infinitely harder task. This is a tragedy, obviously. But the program is about six years behind schedule, been going for 10 years. The mos…

there's no need not in this day and age to have test pilots. If they use computers, they can debug the engine in flight conditions by running maybe ten times as many test flights.

Delays of months between flights are dangerous. Until you have a 1000-10,000 flights to build up operational data and envelope, this is a death trap causing unnecessary deaths.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#110

Post by apr »

zepolud wrote: post #31

Test pilots? In the 21st century? I find it absolutely reckless and inexcusable to require live humans riding on a prototype rocket when you have all the processing power needed to automate/remote manage the vehicle literally in your pocket. EDIT: To those downvoting, you should really check that all current spaceplanes have the capability to fly and land autonomously--Boeing X-37, Dream Chaser, even Buran was fully…

I think armchair quarterbacking is reckless and inexcusable. These people has been working on airplanes and space crafts for some time now and I would trust their judgment. Especially given that they put their own lives on the line.
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