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The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

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Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#91

Post by labster »

pinewurst wrote: post #78
bryananderson wrote: post #36

I recommend Schmidle’s recent book “Test Gods” if you are interested in Virgin Galactic and test piloting. Schmidle is not an engineer and I would have enjoyed a deeper dive into Virgin Galactic’s design choices, but it is a great book about (among other things) the tensions that emerge when a complex technical project is overseen from a distance by utterly nontechnical, PR-oriented upper management. The company’s co…

SpaceShipTwo (and SpaceShipOne) are fascinating to me because they're so _not_ general purpose vehicles, yet are sold and in most cases perceived as such. SS1 was conceived by one of the most creative designers in aviation as a point solution for the X-Prize contest - the minimal design/implementation to precisely solve that problem in the most cost effective way possible (as detailed in "Test Gods"). This cobbled to…

SS2 is going to be a real horrorshow idea, one way or another.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#92

Post by zhoujianfu »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #49
krapp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of anyone powerful enough who isn't also rich. Although "rich" is a vaguely defined term. There still to me seems to be a direct relationship between money and power - billionaires can push the world further than millionaires, than the upper class, etc.

Money and power are two sides of the same coin. Money is literally the unit of measure for power over other people - to the first approximation, a dollar in hand means you can make appropriate people do a dollar's worth of arbitrary work for you. The more money you have, the more you have of this kind of power mediated by economy. You can, in particular, use this power to have politicians do work for you (many ways o…

Rich is how much money you own.

Power is how much money you control.

They’re not as closely linked as you think.

A managing partner of a $1B fund is more powerful than a person worth $10B on paper whose wealth is all tied up in a minority position in a company they are unable to sell the shares of.

Or consider the power of Biden vs his personal net worth.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#93

Post by Aeolun »

bigtones wrote: post #2

Brilliant well written article. Not without bias, but you can see through the words on the page and into the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man. Branson did put his life on the line to achieve that accolade though, which was a gutsy move.

> Branson did put his life on the line to achieve that accolade though, which was a gutsy move.

I’m more concerned that he also puts other people’s lives on the line.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#94

Post by hellbannedguy »

ragnot wrote: post #4
bigtones wrote: post #2

Brilliant well written article. Not without bias, but you can see through the words on the page and into the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man. Branson did put his life on the line to achieve that accolade though, which was a gutsy move.

As much as I hate to admit it, "ego" has driven so much innovation in space that it was probably inevitable that something like this would happen.

We used to have smart guys in competition. Edison vs. Tesla.

Not we have rich business savy guys with not much of a science background holding the cards.

I have met very few wealthy men, young or old, who had great ideas. It's almost like the money dulls their brains? And their vanity projects are usually way out of their wheelhouse.

It's the same with Writers. I have read very few wealthy guys shop could write. They certainly have the time to write, but it's dribble. They are only read because they have money.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#95

Post by Aeolun »

beerandt wrote: post #46
vermontdevil wrote: post #3

Telling they fired Sturckow when he was pretty outspoken such as this: In another e-mail, in 2019, he urged his fellow test pilots to be more transparent: “Failure to admit mistakes in flight test is a cancer that must be nipped at the bud.” Stucky, whom I wrote about in the magazine in 2018, had been particularly troubled by Mackay and Masucci’s unwillingness to take responsibility for what he perceived to be their…

They didn't fire him for the emails, they fired him for publicly bad mouthing the company. There were ~2 years in between.

If internally bad-mouthing the company doesn’t work, what are you left with?

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#96

Post by jessaustin »

secondaryacct wrote: post #86
the-pigeon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And reality isn't a heist movie. Most heirs are not going to attempt to murder for the money. They normally are already enjoying that wealth. And if the money maker stays alive it just grows even more. Now even if they have a motive. How are they going to connect to the right engineer? They likely don't have the skills to even identify an employee that could deliberately sabotage the system. And you likely couldn't d…

China, the universal boogieman. Interestingly I dont hear yet you say that we hate your freedoms, the red alarm of near invasion :D

We just got our asses kicked by Syria and, more recently, the Taliban. Even our idiot generals aren't eager for more of that. They'll be able to justify several trillion dollars more in "defense" spending before needing to incite another war. Expect the next freedom-haters to be a somewhat smaller nation, like Grenada.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#97

Post by allovertheworld »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #94
ragnot wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I hate to admit it, "ego" has driven so much innovation in space that it was probably inevitable that something like this would happen.

We used to have smart guys in competition. Edison vs. Tesla. Not we have rich business savy guys with not much of a science background holding the cards. I have met very few wealthy men, young or old, who had great ideas. It's almost like the money dulls their brains? And their vanity projects are usually way out of their wheelhouse. It's the same with Writers. I have read very few wealthy guys shop could write. They…

That's because Edison vs. Tesla was really mostly theoretical with some funds for engineering (and marketing). The space race is really mostly engineering which requires lots of money.

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#98

Post by throwawayForMe2 »

amatecha wrote: post #27
dboreham wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also those shows where they view three houses, then buy one, all in the same week : in reality the producers find someone who has just bought a house, then they make the show using that house and two other random houses, and lo and behold they find a house they like!

Oh dang, for real? That's super weak if true! Also, no wonder they have hundreds of episodes... I'd be curious if you have any links/etc. on the subject to share!

Here is an article from a paper local to me.

https://shelterislandreporter.timesreview.com/2016/12/14/she...

“… The segment was shot in July and it documents Ms. Larsen traversing the Island with her friend and realtor Roxanne Briggs as they tour three Shelter Island homes on the market in the $650,000 to $850,000 range.

Spoiler alert: Ms. Larsen actually bought her Longview home back in 2015, a full year before the show was taped, so the outcome was a foregone conclusion by the time the “Island Life” crew came to town…”

Re: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

#99

Post by crooked-v »

mc32 wrote: post #11
bigtones wrote: post #2

Brilliant well written article. Not without bias, but you can see through the words on the page and into the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man. Branson did put his life on the line to achieve that accolade though, which was a gutsy move.

There are other flaws too. Like pretending to bike to the spaceport on the day of, but it was actually filmed the week before and when called out, they said, oops, you're right, sorry! It's like when Guy Fiery in his hot rod. He pretends he rolls up to the place in his 70s hot rod, but actually it's just rolled out of the truck that lugs it around from location to location and he opens the door, sits, gets filmed get…

The Guy Fieri comparison seems like a weird one, since the actual subject of the show (that is, the restaurants) isn't faked. The hot rod and whatever goofy stuff comes with Fieri's persona is just a framing device around the actual establishments.
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