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SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

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Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#71

Post by joshstrange »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #61
sp332 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I believe the OP here meant not that this specific incident was inevitable but rather that the death of a private astronaut at some point was statistically inevitable.

As zepolud said elsewhere in this thread:

> current spaceplanes have the capability to fly and land autonomously--Boeing X-37, Dream Chaser, even Buran was fully autonomous and that was 25 years ago. There is simply no excuse for Virgin for being sloppy.

The point being there shouldn't have been human pilots in those seats in the first place.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#72

Post by Animats »

untog wrote: post #45
smackfu wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, "rocket" + "safe enough to carry tourists regularly" just seems like a difficult combination.

Many years ago, trying to combine "flying in the air" with "safe enough to carry tourists regularly" would be seen in a similar light.

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.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#73

Post by Turing_Machine »

mikeash wrote: post #42
atlantic wrote: post #30

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…

Instead of living through the greatest mass extinction event in the last few million years, we'd be living in harmony with nature, dying of now-curable injuries, starving to death when times are lean, seeing our mothers and wives and daughters die in childbirth, and living in profound ignorance of the nature of the universe. At least with the mass extinction there are prospects for fixing the problem.

There have been at least five mass extinction events that wiped out over 50% of the species on the planet. Possibly as many as twenty. The Permian-Triassic event supposedly took out 90-96%(!) of all living species.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#74

Post by revscat »

tomrod wrote: post #35
atlantic wrote: post #30

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…

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.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#75

Post by JanSolo »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #66
ggreer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So they traded sometimes dangerous moving parts that could lead to a mission fail to a rarely dangerous pressurized vessel that would lead to casualties? 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 muc…

I think it's very hard to make that determination. In spaceflight, all accidents are likely to be fatal. Also, I have no problem with a profit-motive; killing your passengers is very bad for business.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#76

Post by DanBC »

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…

> 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

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#78

Post by melling »

phkahler wrote: post #62
melling wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> 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.

Re: SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight

#79

Post by larrys »

jcrites wrote: post #50
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…

> Most systems operate in extreme conditions, sometimes bordering on the improbable. Indeed. Your statement reminds me of an insightful engineering article, "How Complex Systems Fail": http://www.ctlab.org/documents/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fai... . A few relevant observations from the article that resonate with me: > 1) Complex systems are intrinsically hazardous systems. > 4) Complex systems contain changing mixtu…

The other thing to keep in mind with new complex systems is that they will inevitably go thorough a phase where things are discovered over time.

At the start "n" is small 1 flight, 5 flights etc. It's pretty much a given that there will be failures it's just a matter of when and how critical a failure. The failures would be loaded toward happening early on and then fixed so that one particular failure shouldn't happen again. Something else might of course.

As an aside this is similar to why large companies have really long involved legal contracts. They are large enoug,h and have run into enough problems, (or employ attorneys who have) that they've seen it all and done it all and know what they need to do to protect themselves because of the statistical chance that in their large operation a particular problem will appear.

In other words more likely that with a footprint as large as McDonalds there will be a customer that get's scalded by coffee and files a lawsuit than the local coffee shop on main street USA. More customers means more chances of some outlier even happening.

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