SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight • Hacker News Board

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#201

Post by wozniacki » Fri, Oct 31, 2014, 10:34 PM UTC

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.

For what its worth - and not necessarily to draw parallels with the Cygnus CRS Orb-3 mishap - Russia successfully launched an unmanned Soyuz rocket and Progress 57 cargo ship with supplies for the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, hours after the catastrophic explosion destroyed a similar mission in the United States.[1]

The cargo ship was expected to and successfully docked with the ISS later in the day.[2]

[1] Russia Launches ISS Cargo After US Craft Explodes

http://www.voanews.com/content/russia-launches-iss-cargo-mis...

Russian supply ship poised for launch Wednesday

http://spaceflightnow.com/2014/10/28/russian-supply-ship-poi...

[2] Russian Progress M-25M docks with the ISS

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/10/russian-progress-iss-...

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#202

Post by ghostunit » Fri, Oct 31, 2014, 10:37 PM UTC

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…

I find this dogma of "Eventually we will conquer space and make it accessible to all mankind" dangerous in the extreme to the actual, all-too-present predicaments we have here on real Earth such as climate change, environment devastation, fossil fuels/minerals/water depletion and the accelerating destruction of the web of life that makes possible your even being able to breathe.

You are all prey to the "religion of progress".

Your dogma is that space travel is not only possible, but a given, something the universe has put somewhere for us to find and make ours.

Except that, basic hard laws such as the speed of light, the laws of thermodynamics, etc. say NO. And it's only your religious thinking that allows you to handwave all that with a "we always find a way".

For all we know, in this universe it may be impossible to bypass or even bend those laws. Yet, you're betting the future of the species on old Star Trek fantasies.

As you said, the conditions and difficulty for modern space travel are in the extreme and pushing all of our sciences to their limits. And for what? just to get to... the moon. I don't want to scare you, but if that seems far to you, see how much bigger the distance to anything else in the solar system is, nevermind anything outside it.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#203

Post by prof_hobart » Fri, Oct 31, 2014, 10:40 PM UTC

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…

>Seeing only the first paragraph, I already know that some rubber in the hybrid engine detached blocking the nozzle and causing the whole engine to explode.

Can I ask how? What is in there that tells you that?

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#204

Post by termain » Fri, Oct 31, 2014, 10:42 PM UTC

marze wrote: post #198

termain wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The most stupid thing they've done is stay with an experimental rubber/nitrous hybrid engine this whole time, instead of switching to liquid/liquid engine, a well proven technology." 1. They didn't stay with rubber/nitrous. 2. Like the sort used on Antares? "Seeing only the first paragraph, I already know that some rubber in the hybrid engine detached blocking the nozzle and causing the whole engine to explode." But…

"2. Like the sort used on Antares?" I think Paul McCartney was about 23 years old when the engines powering that Antares launch vehicle were fabricated in Russia in their race against the Americans to the moon. An antique liquid/liquid vs an inadequately qualified hybrid: no winners.

I think they're a little newer than that, but that's a good point. Still, I'm not sure either engine was inadequately qualified.

I'm not sure what constitutes adequate qualification, though. Both engines were ground tested at least some. And in Virgin's case, this flight was one of tests.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#205

Post by duckingtest » Fri, Oct 31, 2014, 10:42 PM UTC

atlantic wrote: post #120

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason for everybody to stay home and do housekeeping, then there's a big beautiful universe out there. Dare to dream big!

If we can't even save our own home world, there is every reason to believe that we will do damage elsewhere. That being the case, best to stay home until we grow up a bit.

Earth doesn't need saving, it's perfectly fine. Regardless, in a world with practical interstellar travel local damage is irrelevant - the universe is infinite. Milky Way alone contains at least 100 billion planets.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#206

Post by learc83 » Fri, Oct 31, 2014, 10:42 PM UTC

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #129

kashkhan wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>there's no need not in this day and age to have test pilots. Good point. What does the FAA say about unmanned rocket powered flight tests?

Not sure, but SpaceX has performed plenty of them.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#207

Post by stcredzero » Fri, Oct 31, 2014, 10:45 PM UTC

ninjaplease wrote: post #196

venomsnake wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costs are fixed. It is up to the culture to choose whether to pay in blood or treasure.

Are you a professional quote maker?

It is a nice sounding quote, though it may have factual problems until you get to programs with large numbers of iterations.

Speaking of which, your username was coined by a traditional drummer/singer friend of mine. Do you know her?

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#208

Post by abandonliberty » Fri, Oct 31, 2014, 10:49 PM UTC

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…

We must never forget that progress, social or technical, is built on people dedicating or sacrificing their lives.

Wikipedia lists: 19 Test Pilots 18 Astronauts in spaceflight 11 Astronauts in training

The death tolls for social progress are vastly greater.

These people choose to dedicate and risk their lives drive us forward.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#209

Post by cstross » Fri, Oct 31, 2014, 10:52 PM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #125

cstross wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it could happen with chemical rockets -- if we abandon the idea of sending canned monkeys beyond the atmosphere. We can afford to send up a couple of hundred tons of prokaryotic spores every year until the cows come home, with solar sails to get their packages up above solar escape velocity. Over a few decades or centuries that's a lot of unicellular organisms to scatter on the direction of exoplanets; we c…

Ethically speaking, sending non-sentient foreign organisms to an unknown planet that might already be inhabited falls somewhere between spamming and attempted genocide. No, thanks. I prefer to believe that this task is what our intelligence is for .

I completely agree with you on the spamming point. But disagree on the intelligence side ...

Bacterial colonization is a useful argument for interrogating the "we must colonize spaaaace!" folks' intentions. I mean, why exactly must we colonize space?

"Before the sun leaves the main sequence of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram/the Earth is hit by a comet or irradiated by a GRB" is a meaningless argument. These events happen on a time frame of hundreds to thousands of megayears; while the mean life expectancy of a mammalian species is on the order of one to ten MYa, and for a hominid species like us, it's well under one MYa. These arguments don't hold water. Furthermore, we coevolved with our biosphere and we're really badly adapted to existence without a large subset of it: calling for human space colonization is implicitly a call for terraforming/transporting a viable terrestrial biosphere to other worlds. Which brings us neatly back to bacterial colonization, because that's part of the package deal.

While I can't refute the quasi-religious imperative implicit behind the rhetoric for space colonization, I wish its proponents would recognize that it's essentially a faith-based ideology!

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#210

Post by 7952 » Fri, Oct 31, 2014, 10:56 PM UTC

jedmeyers wrote: post #174

7952 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair space flight has some significant advantages from an environmental perspective. Earth observation satellites are essential for understanding how the atmosphere works and how the planet is changing. Also, the unique constraints of space have lead to the development of sustainable technology such as solar panels, fuel cells, and better water purification.

Who cares? Let's feed the poor first and worry about bigger stuff later. Reminds me of a story about a letter written by Sister Mary Jucunda from Zambia to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. ( http://www.meaus.com/whyExplore.html )

Well feeding the world is a more challenging problem than space flight ever will be. It is not like you can just sign a massive check and deploy some engineers and suddenly poor people in Africa will have enough to eat. But the comparatively trivial challenge of space flight can provide real benefits. Weather satellites can let farmers and governments plan ahead. A single remote sensing satellite can map desertification (which destroy farm land), and track floods (which destroy crops).