231–240 of 312 posts
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I rather suspect fossil fuel usage, deforestation, etc. won't be an issue on Mars.
That's great; but Mars, and even the solar system, is not "the universe".
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It took 54 years to go from the Wright Brothers first flight to the Boeing 707. It took 53 years to go from Yuri Gagarin's first flight (one orbit) to this suborbital flight test.
It only took 8 / 9 years between Gagarin's flight and landing men on the Moon. That's remarkable. It's depressing to think how much closer we'd be to humans on Mars if we had focussed all the Afghan and Iraq war money on space research.
Since this sub-thread has invoked tourists and the implied safety and convenience of a commercial operation that carries passengers and other payload. Tourists are payload, test pilots are ... test pilots.
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 p…
This is not true. For travel within the solar system the speed of light is no more than a nuisance delaying communication. The laws of thermodynamics don't stop space travel. No one is saying "we always find a way" to do the impossible. We are saying "we always find a way" to do that thing that we already know how to do and have demonstrated lots of times, only this time we need to make it cheaper.
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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. Does this same concern apply to plastic-based fuel? It does seem like a terrible idea to have people in the rocket the first time you try a new fuel mixture. "During the nine months since the previous rocket-powered test in January, Virgin Galactic switched Spac…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_start
Another - nitrous oxide can become explosive in gaseous phase. If enough of it became gas, the oxidizer tank may have exploded.
There are also inherent instabilities of hybrids - higher pressure accelerates the burn, which increases pressure, which...
We'll know more after they finish the investigation.
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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?
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…
I agree that, for all we know, it was the catastrophic failure of a rocket engine that was not tested enough that killed a pilot and that they should have tested the engine for much longer than they appear to have.
I imagine they switched to this design because it's supposed to be a better one.
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Not sure, but SpaceX has performed plenty of them.
Not so much over the US, though.
1:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_(rocket)#Flight_tes... 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Launch_history
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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.
Your forgetting the countless times that a test pilot has saved the aircraft/spacecraft from destruction. If it was unmanned and flown by computer, it would have been a fireball. At least one shuttle flight would have been lost if the crew didn't fly manually to correct for a malfunction. STS-4 PIO'd on landing and would have crashed if auto-stabilization wasn't overridden by the pilot.
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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?
It is not a nice quote, it's douchey, reductionist, and mostly nonsense. What on earth does "costs are fixed" mean? I also did not realize there was an inverse relationship between "blood" and "treasure". Are we pirates? In case you aren't trolling me, my snark was a reference to http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-this-moment-i-am-euphoric I don't know your friend, but my username is pretty stupid, so if she wants to t…
I didn't say it's a nice quote. I said it's a nice sounding quote, and I did mean that in the LessWrong sense of "false sagacity." In terms of tone, you sound a bit like a troll to me.
"Blood and treasure," is a phrase used to refer to money and lives/health of personnel.
And no, I was not trolling you. Please read my previous comment as factual, with very subtle nuance in the 1st sentence.
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That's great; but Mars, and even the solar system, is not "the universe".
I suspect we're likely to solve greenhouse gas emissions long before we're able to get humans out of the solar system.