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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

A reminder to everyone that corners cut included having a control lever, which if pulled during re-entry, would immediately cause destruction of the craft, and for which there were no interlocks. That lever was pulled by the pilot and did indeed almost immediately cause the destruction of the ship.

Also, when Branson was aboard, they had a failure during launch that put them off-course and violated their flight plan (yes, they had a flight plan, and yes, this matters - the route is kept clear of everyone else.) They should have aborted the launch, but the Big Guy was on board, so full speed ahead.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-red-warning-lig...

The billionaire version of "I turn now, good luck everybody else!"

The FAA initially banned VG from further flights and then once the news cycle had moved on - less than a month later - quietly "cleared" VG.

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I actually think those are somewhat forgivable/reasonable things for an experimental craft. My bigger concern is all of the current and ex-employees on Glassdoor talking about how morale is incredibly low and all the experienced folk were driven out and replaced by eager, young recent-grads willing to work 60+ hour weeks in the desert for what they seem to say is below-market pay. The only thing anyone really says about working for Virgin Galactic is that they work a schedule where everyone has every other Friday off. If that's the best thing you can say about your employer, you work in a sweatshop.

So you have all these I assume twenty-somethings working on VMS Eve, the prototype aircraft that takes the Spaceship craft to their launching point 30,000 feet up or whatever it is... Eve is basically two airplanes riveted together by their wings, and it's been why Virgin Galactic is years behind schedule on starting commercial operations. It's still probably going to be a maintenance nightmare, and if it decides to split in-air, they're certainly going bankrupt.

But Virgin Galactic isn't supposed to making an experimental craft, that was SpaceShipOne. They're supposed to be making the production version to carry passengers. You can't really have "ship blows up" levers once the public is on board.

Well they did address the “ship blows up” lever, which… it’s not fair to call it that, as though it were a self-destruct button, it’s a lever for controlling the orientation of the wings, since sometimes the ship is a glider and sometime’s it’s more like a rocket. If that lever is pulled too soon, it’s sort of like deploying extreme flaps on an airplane, it immediately and drastically changes the flight control surfaces and puts sudden force on the plane to go a different direction than it’s currently going.

It’s experimental in the same way commercial airplanes could be considered experimental until accidents went down to “basically zero”. Flying commercial was kind of risky until the ~70s.

Don’t forget Scaled Composites (Virgin Galactic’s partner) blowing up a pressure tank and killing three employees because they didn’t properly investigate nitrous oxide compatibility with composite materials and did a cold flow test on a hot day without any safety precautions.

“I authorize burn now, good luck everybody else!”

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