61–70 of 312 posts
Its very sad but inevitable. At this cutting edge of technology and human endeavour, accidents are bound to happen.
It's not inevitable, as evidenced by all the other accidents that have been... evited. You just don't hear about those. (Yes, evited is a word, it's just weird.)
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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…
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.
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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.
"The best of both worlds" has an often overlooked twin sibling.. "The worst of both worlds"
In other words, you can build a great sports car, or a great dump truck. But there's no way to build a great sports car that is also a great dump truck.
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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…
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?
We should start building on Mars without humans. If our machines can't do that yet, then we should invest in them until they can.
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…
The engine has been the bane of SS2. The original rubber/N2O design was problematic enough that Virgin switched from rubber to a plastic. Apparently this was the first powered flight to use the new fuel. While the design lacks complicated turbopumps and cryogenic fuels, it does have one drawback: the N2O is contained in a pressure vessel. If that tank is damaged while still full (or close to), bad things can happen.
Is this a case of not seeing safety's big picture? Cutting accidents in half (or by whatever) is great, but not if that means the remaining accidents are fatal. A more frequent controlled failure is a much better scenario, but I imagine hurts the bottom line too much.
I'm wary that for-profit companies aren't going to invest enough in private manned spaceflight's safety when there's a profit incentive at work dictating otherwise. At least without a fair bit of regulation.
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Yes, looking at the twitter feed, multiple sources state that it blew up. This means that either the tank (which takes up the whole rear half of the vehicle) failed catastrophically (unlikely; CF-wrapped tanks tend to develop hairline cracks which slowly leak out) OR the engine exploded. What's interesting is that the SS2 engine fuel was swapped out very recently for a new thermoplastic polyamide solid fuel for bette…
static wick failure, minor fuel leak, big bang. That said, I really have no clue about how these things work. That's just one scenario I could see leading to a midair explosion.
(And it's pretty hard for a leak of anything to explode much when there's nowhere for it to build up. Limited internal space, wind rushing by...)
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Its sad, sure. Sorry for their loss. But people take far greater risks for far less reason. Monster Truck rallys. Motorcycle racing. Skiing. We don't change national priorities every time somebody dies at those activities. SO lets keep it in perspective, and salute the brave folks who are trying to expand human boundaries.
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.
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 a tragedy, obviously. But the program is about six years behind schedule, been going for 10 years. 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. I know first hand that groups with such engine expertise have approached Virgin and been turned down.
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. The pilots should have refused to fly until Virgin had 10 consecutive motor qualification tests at full duration, not ride on a ship with a half-baked motor that has seen constant modifications during the last year.
In the software development world, a "death march" in a program behind schedule does not result in loss of actual life, not so in manned spaceflight.
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…
Our resources would be better spent elsewhere. I know that this opinion is anathema on a tech-heavy site such as this one, but I must nevertheless express my respectful disagreement. It would be far, far more productive for the species to dedicate resources towards CO2 and CH4 reduction in the lower atmosphere.