SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
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 and on.
Most people don't realize how hard this is. The physics, the engineering, the design.
Yet we have made great strides, especially over the last few years, and Virgin Galactic is a part of this. There is a new era of cheap spaceflight on the horizon, driven forward by fearless men and women that want to go to space no matter what the cost.
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.
Today it appears we lost one of these fearless men, but he now rests in peace assured that others will take his place, that he was not alone in his longing to drive mankind forwards into the unknown, that his dreams live on to inspire others.
We have conquered the skies, and we will move on. Eventually we will conquer space and make it accessible to all mankind. A fearless man has given his life to allow us to some day leave the cradle that is mother Earth.
His ultimate sacrifice won't be in vain.
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 event of the last few of million years. A lot of this effort could go instead into finding a better cohabitation between humans and the other species with whom we supposedly share the planet.
Let's go see the universe, and take life along with us.
No, we're not going to move a billion or two people with them, but that's not what we need to make humanity multi-planet.
Meanwhile, all of the derivative research (effects of zero gravity, life support systems, shielding, re-entry, etc) stagnates. And I guess we should dismantle our satellite systems as well, since they require rockets to achieve orbit.
Maybe we should ban all cars while we're at it, since they pollute our environment. We should shut down the evil factories, too, so no electric cars, either.
Yup, we can just sit in a circle, singing kumbayah while we wait for that miraculous perfect power source that someone else will develop for us. Then, and only THEN, can we continue with "progress".
We can afford to send up a couple of hundred tons of prokaryotic spores every year until the cows come home, with solar sails to get their packages up above solar escape velocity. Over a few decades or centuries that's a lot of unicellular organisms to scatter on the direction of exoplanets; we can hope that in a few million years one or another strikes edible dirt and begins to reproduce.
This is, however, not as mythically resonant as "space: the final frontier" ...
No, thanks. I prefer to believe that this task is what our intelligence is for.
Bacterial colonization is a useful argument for interrogating the "we must colonize spaaaace!" folks' intentions. I mean, why exactly must we colonize space?
"Before the sun leaves the main sequence of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram/the Earth is hit by a comet or irradiated by a GRB" is a meaningless argument. These events happen on a time frame of hundreds to thousands of megayears; while the mean life expectancy of a mammalian species is on the order of one to ten MYa, and for a hominid species like us, it's well under one MYa. These arguments don't hold water. Furthermore, we coevolved with our biosphere and we're really badly adapted to existence without a large subset of it: calling for human space colonization is implicitly a call for terraforming/transporting a viable terrestrial biosphere to other worlds. Which brings us neatly back to bacterial colonization, because that's part of the package deal.
While I can't refute the quasi-religious imperative implicit behind the rhetoric for space colonization, I wish its proponents would recognize that it's essentially a faith-based ideology!
The Antarctic being a barren wasteland makes it an attractive breeding ground for penguins precisely because it's so inhospitable to anything alive, penguins included. As long as penguins suck less at living in a barren wasteland than their predators it's a net benefit for them to be there, despite the hardships of the environment.
If we assume there is a group of humans that feel existentially threatened by other humans so much that odds of surviving in an irradiated subterranean Mars colony beat the odds of being exterminated here on Earth, it would be a perfectly rational choice for them to try and move somewhere out of reach.
There are lots of potential scenarios why such groups might come into existence, and not all of them involve outright genocide. For example, a group could form just as a result of concerned citizens wanting to go to some place very, very remote once kids start playing Pokemon with their newfangled RNA synthesizers.
More recently Oil is currently driving a lot of exploration into the oceans and other remote regions.
PS: Not that I think we should all just stay home, but whitewashing history is stupid.
It might be hard to argue that our industrial pillage of the planet is solely a result of exploration. Anything weaker than that and I think you have the tougher position.
At least with the mass extinction there are prospects for fixing the problem.
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.
Space travel is fundamental to the human species living sustainably in the long term. Correcting greenhouse gasses doesn't help us if the next day we find a planet-killer asteroid is a few weeks away.
CO2 is a direct and immediate threat.
Unless the lead time is 50-100 years, years might as well be tomorrow, it's going to kill us all either way. Even that might be stretching it.
> Humans as a species will survive CO2
Maybe, personally I believe humans will cause their own extinction. I'm just not sure yet if we're going to take all life with us or not. Dealing with CO2 is a toss up between making the planet uninhabitable or completely inhospitable to life.
In this regard, the comment about CO2 is actually much more pertinent than it seems at first. If we manage to screw up the climate in this century (which seems very likely these days), inundating every coastal cities in the world, "sustainable space colony" will have to wait a bit longer. Much longer. If you're worried that an asteroid might hit us 500 years from now, you might want to rethink your priority.
Advancing chemical rockets now is important, but compared to the scale of space colony, it feels somewhat like producing better vacuum tubes to make sure (say) the US is the first to create strong AI. Any sane 50s US leader would have understood that "trying not to have a nuclear war with Soviet" is a much more important goal anyway: you can't fund AI research if your country is a radioactive wasteland.
We went from not flying anything heavier than air to going to the Moon in 66 years. If we really really wanted to, we could go to Mars in thirty. This is a problem of priorities, not technologies (although the technological problems are real, they are not insurmountable).
That proverbial man who plants trees knowing he will never sit in their shade is proverbial for a reason.. it's an amazing and heartwarming little saying because it's a contrast to how we generally behave, as individuals as well as organizations and masses. We learn from repeated catastrophe.. sometimes, maybe. But this problem is not one we can have a lot of attempts at solving. Right now we are still moving into the wrong direction, and probably even accelerating.. sure, hitting a wall can make people change their direction, but not if it breaks their neck, so to speak.
I'm not enormously optimistic. I'm just saying that compared to interstellar travel, avoiding fossil fuels seems like a fairly small problem.
Parent: See that little blue dot in the night sky? That’s Earth.
Child: What is Earth?
Parent: Earth was the planet of our ancestors, before people came to Mars.
Child: Who lives on Earth now?
Parent: Nobody. It’s a dead planet. The actions of rich, selfish people destroyed it.
Child: How did the rich, selfish people destroy Earth?
Parent: They burned it up as fuel, getting to Mars.
Those same < 10 000 people probably doesn't know nor have the ability to fix all the problems on Earth, but they might be able to get to Mars.
So... what, we just halt development of all vehicles, globally, period? Bye-bye trains, planes, cars, bicycles, and buses?
You can't develop the future of transportation or the future of propulsion systems if you literally shut down global commerce.
Besides, an airplane (for example) is not wedded to the engine. Developments in prop planes carried over directly to jet planes, once the jet engine matured. Any future propulsion system that can replace jet engines will probably not be hard to work into many plane designs of the day.
Better to make incremental progress on poverty, without constraining the innovators to work on problems that don't interest them, or that seem even more intractable than e.g. space travel or AI.
The biggest lever we've got right now is computation, so yeah maybe it would be more efficient to develop AI / IA first and then mass space travel, but we can't be sure.
Also, fundamentally we can accept a few billion deaths. That sounds and is grotesque, but it wouldn't be the end of humanity. I don't see how climate change kills us all in the next 100-500 years.
This is a false dilemma. We have 7+ billion people on the planet. There is most certainly a significant amount of effort going towards the future you mentioned. They are not mutually exclusive (and are, most likely, going to be a product of each other)
I wonder what the carbon footprint of space tourism is, and will be if it becomes cheaper and more popular? I feel guilty flying on a plane.
[0] News report: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/31/spaceshiptwo-...
Absolute zero is -273 °C.
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 mixtures of failures latent within them.
> 5) Complex systems run in degraded mode.
> A corollary to the preceding point is that complex systems run as broken systems. The system continues to function because it contains so many redundancies and because people can make it function, despite the presence of many flaws. After accident reviews nearly always note that the system has a history of prior ‘proto-accidents’ that nearly generated catastrophe.
> 17) People continuously create safety.
> Failure free operations are the result of activities of people who work to keep the system within the boundaries of tolerable performance. These activities are, for the most part, part of normal operations and superficially straightforward. But because system operations are never trouble free, human practitioner adaptations to changing conditions actually create safety from moment to moment.
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.
If you're a small company you generally get to deal with each and every case, and do risk assessment up front on an individual basis. When you're big you're doing enough jobs to standardise those assessments (getting the economies of scale going), processes, and any resulting contracts. The problems get going when the supporting bureaucracy has lost track with reality and becomes a self perpetuating beast, but at least in the early stages it should be beneficial.
That's really the key point actually. Things become self perpetuating without anyone even questioning if they are still even necessary.
That said most people don't read contracts (at least most consumers) so in a sense and in certain situations it pays to stuff as many things in there as possible.
What's interesting is how many risky situations you enter into with potential liability where you don't sign a contract.
For example nobody signs a contract to eat a meal at a restaurant. You don't sign away your right to sue if the food is bad or if the meal isn't delivered on time. The car company that sells you a car doesn't require you to sign a contract with them the dealer of course has a sales contract which is different. Car company is big enough to not really have to go that route. They know they don't need a contract to protect against the little things and with a big thing it doesn't matter.
Otoh an electrician just quoted a job to me for under $800. And he sends me this long involved contract (that no doubt he copied from another electrician) which really isn't necessary for this type of job.
I remember when a developer I hired to do work started many years ago. It was a $60k job. Long and involved contract. Ended up signing it (needed the work had no choice). Well we are still doing business 12 years later. But it evolved into a handshake. Nothing in the contract says he has to take my call at 11:00pm on a Saturday night but last weekend he did just that. He and his team finished the repair by Monday morning. I told him to take his wife and family to dinner and we'd pay the bill. Not required but I was really appreciative of the effort. He thanked me and told me it was his job to make sure things were working but he appreciated very much.
1. contains a lot of energy
2. releases a considerable stream of energy at a controlled, steady rate
3. does that in a small system, while flying through the air.
It's a lot easier if you drop one requirement:
1 + 2 = coal-based power plant
1 + 3 = bomb
2 (sort of) + 3 = conventional airplane
All of the above have been done reliably. It's only when you put together all three conditions that you get a rocket, and that's when things get really, really difficult.
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.
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/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle
(And I see another test pilot, Joe Algranti, also had a very close call flying a second-generation LLTV -- ejecting 0.6 seconds before it crashed!)
NASA came very close to losing more astronauts during mission prep for Apollo, in addition to the Apollo 1 crew. (Even if we leave aside the four astronauts killed in T-38 crashes in the 1960s.)
The computer kept flying the machine despite the interrupts and reboots due to the radar switch that Buzz had left on. It was really marvelously designed to be able to keep on executing its highest priority tasks.
The reason for the (semi) manual control was that the designated landing spot was a boulder field. The computer kept on operating the throttle.
Source: Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal.
The cargo ship was expected to and successfully docked with the ISS later in the day.[2]
[1] Russia Launches ISS Cargo After US Craft Explodes
http://www.voanews.com/content/russia-launches-iss-cargo-mis...
Russian supply ship poised for launch Wednesday
http://spaceflightnow.com/2014/10/28/russian-supply-ship-poi...
[2] Russian Progress M-25M docks with the ISS
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/10/russian-progress-iss-...
To put it in perspective, Apollo flew on a rocket with five engines producing 1,500,000 lbf thrust each, on the first stage alone. By contrast, the Virgin motor produces 60,000 lbf thrust for 70 seconds.
The Apollo program had a safety culture configured so that if anyone identified a safety issue, they became responsible for the problem and responsible to sign off that it was corrected.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_Apollo_p...
Edit: It's also worth noting that the same entity that ran the Apollo missions currently has no way of putting people into space, and the last system they had also looked like a plane... and had problems with exploding and killing people.
That's funny, because you were the one who compared them first.
Although the Virgin 60,000 lbf rocket is small by the standards of Apollo, it is still an extremely challenging problem. There are no problem-free or inherently safe options, so safety needs to be engineered in from the bottom up carefully and competently. Otherwise, failures like this will not happen just once.
The engineers involved would do well to study the Apollo program and other successful complex engineering efforts such as nuclear reactors, as well as the counter examples of the two space shuttle that were lost due to management putting schedule ahead of safety.
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 SpaceShipTwo's fuel mixture from a rubber-based compound to a plastic-based mix — in hopes that the new formulation would boost the hybrid rocket engine's performance."
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.
Some of the boundaries that are being pushed are how much oversight, how meticulous, etc you have to be. In other words, how well you have to manage the program, how tight a ship you keep.
Keeping a tight ship raises costs, and isn't the big emphasis of all this privatized space travel on reducing costs?
The private sector isn't somehow just better at stuff. It has different motives and different priorities, and makes different compromises.
Is it? Is there evidence that the private sector is consistently more accident prone that public entities when doing similar activities?
Speaking of which, your username was coined by a traditional drummer/singer friend of mine. Do you know her?
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 take credit for it she's 100% welcome.
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.
I don't think you're that simple, I think you're just trying to be derisive.
In case you're not :
Regardless of the effort involved, a value must be paid in order to form a new technology or model.
We, the people who strive to create, choose in what way we would like to pay this value. We can choose to pay for progress through time, or pay for progress through means of trial and error.
While not mutually exclusive, one methodology tends to detract from the other while serving the same purpose : the pursuit of a novel model.
The methods of payment are not mutually exclusive, the ethos behind the choice to prioritize one over the other typically (but not necessarily) is.
An off-topic example I can think of would be the drive behind early Russian aviation/aerospace versus the drive behind early United States aviation/aerospace.
Different priorities got both parties to a comparable level of technology regardless of the differing means used to get there. Free market competition rushed much of early Russian aviation and made wide use of anecdotal evidences and test piloting and created leading edge machines because of it, whereas government subsidy and large cash flows drove the US to stay on top using theory and finances instead of prioritizing the happiness of pilots and fulfilling 'stick-feel'.
(before anyone mentions it, both parties did the same stuff, they just differed in prioritization)
Both parties created fantastic machines. One paid in blood, the other in time for such achievements.
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.
Good point. What does the FAA say about unmanned rocket powered flight tests?
1:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_(rocket)#Flight_tes... 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Launch_history
It is true that computer models have definitely reduced the risks for test pilots by helping to define a much greater percentage of the performance envelope of a given system without the need for test flights. When a pilot steps into an untested craft for the first time, the "unknown" area of the envelope is better quantified; in different words, we have a better idea of how much of the performance envelope is unclear.
Yet that unknown area still exists and has to be discovered by actual human test pilots because as good as computerized testing is there still isn't 100% coverage.
(I'm a pilot and have dealt with experimental aircraft. Not on the level of this project, of course, where the envelopes of technology are being pushed, but on the level of small private aircraft where the technology is in many cases half a century old, well understood, debugged, and still has to be tested. By a human.)
For testing the engine which in this case is throttleable and has time constants greater than hundreds of milliseconds the time lag from not having a pilot onboard is acceptable.
For flying qualities again the plane is large enough to be slow enough that remote pilot timelag is not significant.
There is no part of the envelope of this vehicle where you need a pilot onboard. Most of the development here can be done without pilot onboard. Space has been done from unmanned vehicles since the beginning and what they are doing is only barely rocket science.
Putting a pair of pilots in a vehicle with a non-flight-tested rocket engine is just irresponsible.
I like Rutan's company. But what they are doing on this program smacks of amateurism. They got engineers killed on the ground and now pilots killed and injured in flight. Both of which were completely preventable by some basic range and flight safety measures.
It looks like they are cutting corners by doing too much too soon because of management pressures to cut delays. And people are paying the ultimate price for their hubris.
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.
1. They didn't stay with rubber/nitrous.
2. Like the sort used on Antares?
"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."
But what you know is wrong, they weren't using rubber.
I think a good case can be made that they didn't do enough ground testing, but your post mixing disdain and falsity doesn't advance that case.
"Liquid/liquid engines, by any measure, are orders of magnitude more stable."
What do you mean by stable?
A reason to go with hybrids, at least on paper, is that they are mechanically simple but throttlable, hopefully combining the simplicity of a solid booster with the ability to throttle and shutdown of a liquid.
Of course, much of that also applies to blowdown liquid systems, and I personally find a blowdown methane/lox system particularly compelling. I figure Virgin wanted to avoid cryogens, though.
This you believe so strongly because a news story stated it?
Wait for the accident report. It will say "rubber".
Problems like these are almost always the result of management pushing things faster than the engineering progress warrants.
"Problems like these are almost always the result of management pushing things faster than the engineering progress warrants."
Coincidentally, we were talking about such an instance today at work, the Conestoga 1620. As relayed to me, the "low frequency noise" mentioned in the wikipedia post was a low frequency structural mode that was missed because management didn't want to pay for a high enough fidelity finite element analysis.
“This was a new fuel formulation that had been proven and tested on the ground many times,” Mickey said in a press conference.
http://spaceflightnow.com/2014/10/31/virgin-galactics-spaces...
I have heard of one long duration test on the plastic fuel reported by the "Virgin watchers" in Mojave, so unless they are doing long duration tests somewhere else it doesn't seem like much. Rocket engine testing is extremely noisy so long duration tests are quite noticeable.
I think Paul McCartney was about 23 years old when the engines powering that Antares launch vehicle were fabricated in Russia in their race against the Americans to the moon. An antique liquid/liquid vs an inadequately qualified hybrid: no winners.
I'm not sure what constitutes adequate qualification, though. Both engines were ground tested at least some. And in Virgin's case, this flight was one of tests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33 says the AJ-26 engines are from the 1960s and 1970s.
"During the nine months since the previous rocket-powered test in January, Virgin Galactic switched SpaceShipTwo's fuel mixture from a rubber-based compound to a plastic-based mix"
Let's hope they won't ask you to run the inevitable investigation then.
Can I ask how? What is in there that tells you that?
You've got a hybrid motor, it's flown a number of times. You have a program that has been going for years but still hasn't got the motor design finalized due to unknown (to us) problems. Failure modes that could destroy the vehicle include things like pressurized oxidizer tank failure, burn-through of the nozzle, burn-through of the main combustion pressure vessel, blocking of the nozzle by unburned solid fuel chunks causing over-pressure failure, and the like. The last one seems most likely, since it's likelihood is modified by modifications to the fuel (which is what they are probably changing, as opposed to the nitrous system or structure or nozzle).
Obviously no one knows for sure yet.
I'd love to see civilian spaceflight become a reality, so this is an unfortunate setback. I hope Virgin will be able to take the time to get it right. I hope they will look back at this accident the same way the Apollo program viewed the Apollo 1 fire, as a much needed chance to fix a lot of potential issues that needed fixing that were thought to have contributed in a fundamental way to the lack of subsequent in-flight failures.
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.
In fact, you don't even know that rubber in the hybrid engine blocked the nozzle. You can't know that - you aren't part of the investigating team. And they don't even know yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs
- radiation therapy machine kills 5 - clock drift in Patriot system caused 28 killed - Chinook helicopter killed 29 due to bug in engine control - Toyota's electronic throttle control system caused dozens of fatalities
We mostly still haven't! I think ocean exploration is pretty exciting too.
You are all prey to the "religion of progress".
Your dogma is that space travel is not only possible, but a given, something the universe has put somewhere for us to find and make ours.
Except that, basic hard laws such as the speed of light, the laws of thermodynamics, etc. say NO. And it's only your religious thinking that allows you to handwave all that with a "we always find a way".
For all we know, in this universe it may be impossible to bypass or even bend those laws. Yet, you're betting the future of the species on old Star Trek fantasies.
As you said, the conditions and difficulty for modern space travel are in the extreme and pushing all of our sciences to their limits. And for what? just to get to... the moon. I don't want to scare you, but if that seems far to you, see how much bigger the distance to anything else in the solar system is, nevermind anything outside it.
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.
b) We just need to make it cheaper? how, exactly, are you going to get up there except by burning obscene quantities of solid (fossil) fuel, as we do now?
That's where the thermodynamics things comes in play: you have to pay the energy cost, there's no elegant "oh, we're just going to fold space" or some such bs. And fossil fuels are finite by definition, need I remind you.
It's not "we just need to make it cheaper". It's coming up with new breakthroughs in physics that no one can assure even exist.
b) You have to pay the energy cost but that is not the hard part. Fossil fuels are finite, but we don't need to use fossil fuels and even if we did setting up a civilization on mars would take a tiny portion of earth's fossil fuels. We are not going to run out of hydrogen as long as we have the energy to split water and plenty of energy hits the earth in the form of sunlight every day, not to mention fission or fusion.
So no, the laws of thermodynamics are not the problem. We "just" need to make it cheaper.
Wikipedia lists: 19 Test Pilots 18 Astronauts in spaceflight 11 Astronauts in training
The death tolls for social progress are vastly greater.
These people choose to dedicate and risk their lives drive us forward.
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 two. No turbopumps or gimbals or much mechanical stuff to go wrong. It only goes suborbital, so it does not need a heatshield because there's no re-entry. The landing system uses wings & wheels similar to any commercial jet. This stuff is mature and tested.
In fact, the only novel thing about SS2 is it's wing-feathering system. It's lets the craft to descend vertically still under the pilots control. I wonder if (and this is complete speculation) there was a problem restoring the wings to their 'atmospheric' flight position which prevented them from landing normally.
The consequences for commercial manned spaceflight will be quite severe, I think. I imagine that many Virgin Galactic customers will cancel their pre-orders. The flight test program is dead in it's tracks at this point; even those who don't cancel will be unlikely to fly for many more years while investigations and improvements are concluded. Other manned providers such as SpaceX and XCor will likely be extra cautious before allowing people to fly in their vehicles.
The image of manned commercial spaceflight will take a hit. If the 'Safest' of the commercial vehicles can crash before it even enters service, I worry that many potential customers will be put off. It never hurts to remember that Spaceflight is a dangerous business.
It's a sad day to top off a bad week in spaceflight. :(
What's interesting is that the SS2 engine fuel was swapped out very recently for a new thermoplastic polyamide solid fuel for better performace. Maybe this new fuel was not tested as well as it should have been?
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...)
edit: I'm wrong. They simply switched to a new type of fuel for their hybrid engine.
I dug up this article:
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/10/08/work-continues-hybrid...
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.
Don't forget that this is not the first fatality associated with this engine. In 2007, 3 people were killed in an explosion during a static test at Mohave Air & Space port.
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.
http://www.knightsarrow.com/rockets/scaled-composites-accide...
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a489459.pdf
(In that Air Force research lab report there's mention of supercritical N20 causing a spontaneous explosion with coffee grounds.)
Strong oxidizers are almost universally hard to handle. About the nicest ones around are Lox, Nox and hydrogen peroxide.
see for details: http://www.knightsarrow.com/rockets/scaled-composites-accide...
or the "Test program accident" at the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RocketMotorTwo
It took 53 years to go from Yuri Gagarin's first flight (one orbit) to this suborbital flight test.
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.
[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/10/08/sp...
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.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/transportation...
The whole incident indicates a lax safety culture.
It may or may not be true, but it's the same thing it was last week.
XCOR's culture of safety is pretty good, though it's the school of thought quite close to Virgin Galactic . At least rocket engines in XCOR are designed with the highest standards of safety.
I think it won't be that dire. People who sign up to fly into space on a new design would probably be aware of the risks involved.
Many people still climb Everest, dive into caves, and jump from clifs with wingsuits. I think there won't be a shortage and the future is bright and exciting.
SpaceShipTwo is meant to get to zero velocity at ~105km up. Soyuz gets to 17,450 mph at 200km up (and then catches up to the station at 400km up). Only the speed sideways is important, and there is more than one order of magnitude difference.
Gene Kranz is the gentleman sitting in the flight director's chair in the Apollo 13 movie, wearing the white vest. He helped create the Mission Control organization at NASA.
"Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work.
Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dammit, stop!’ I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.
From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘Tough’ and ‘Competent.’ Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect.
When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write ‘Tough and Competent’ on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control."
Video re-enactment by Gene Kranz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zjAteaK9lM
For that alone, all involved are heroes.
In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now than if we move slowly trying to reduce the risk in order to keep humans safe.
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.
The ability of the United States to send people to space ended because of the last shuttle accident. So, yes, people dying did affect our national resolve. I think if you do the math, flying in the space shuttle was more dangerous. There were only 135 flights? We lost $3.5 billion of hardware and 14 lives in 2 accidents.
Its a priority for these Americans to send people into space. I don't think I've overlooked anything. The importance of this adventure (to the people involved) has so far been worth the risk, partly because they regard it as far more important that motorcycle racing.
We are moving into Space at a snail's pace because we keep insisting on spending lots of money to try and send humans there "safely", and that's not really working out so well for us.
Neither will Virgin Galactic.
"You don't need to go to Congress and request an additional $1.7 billion for another ship."
Neither does Richard Branson.
Btw, you don't think they need to revisit safety to assure their customers that it's not a one way trip? Do they even have a second plane? There's not a chance that there will be a commercial flight carrying paying customers within the next 2 years. Branson was saying this year just a month ago.
Not from what I'm seeing. No one is planning to cancel their reservation. I wouldn't, if I had one.
By the way, the spacecraft cost $500 million.
http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/31/technology/virgin-galactic-s...
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.
Right now the risk makes it too expensive, so the profit isn't there. Much of the work Virgin Galactic and the others are doing will lower the cost eventually. When it gets low enough, there will be people lining up around the block to become asteroid miners, etc.
Lack of willing people will never be a problem.
Not to say that there aren't large drawbacks (huge amounts of R&D, for example). Robot space travelers are also relatively uninspiring.
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.
For that matter, look at the problem of operating an autonomous vehicle right here on Earth. Everyone from DARPA to MIT to Carnegie-Mellon to Google has been working on that one for the last sixty years or so. It's now gotten to where it kinda works. Sorta. In some conditions.
Remote control doesn't work well when there's a large speed-of-light lag between the earthbound operator and the vehicle. Mars is 6 minutes away, round trip, minimum and that's about the best case. For the outer planets, forget it. The Jupiter system is at least an hour round-trip (not that we'd be landing people on Jupiter itself, but there's a lot of interesting stuff in the system).
Your vehicle is toast long before you figure out that there's a problem.
That's why I keep emphasising developing the machines and sending them.
I find it absolutely reckless and inexcusable to require live humans riding on a prototype rocket when you have all the processing power needed to automate/remote manage the vehicle literally in your pocket.
EDIT: To those downvoting, you should really check that all 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.
I think people should make that decision themselves.
Please have a look here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program#Incidents....
One step at a time.
If the Soviets deemed it too risky for human pilots and managed to automate it 25 years ago maybe that should put it into perspective just how risky and reckless what Virgin are doing is.
"During the nine months since the previous rocket-powered test in January, Virgin Galactic switched SpaceShipTwo's fuel mixture from a rubber-based compound to a plastic-based mix"
[1]: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JBrl96U...
Where is the line?
But I get what you mean. It's a tough thing to figure out, and hindsight is always going to be "well we shouldn't have done that".
For each of the technologies involved with the X-37, et al., that technology required testing with a human-in-the-loop to act as the judge for if the control output made sense. It simply isn't feasible to begin testing your robot pilot without first testing it with a pilot there in the first place.
I think at the moment, and into the foreseeable future, a human at the pilot seat for an experimental craft, where all sorts of unexpected scenarios could pop up, would be much better suited than an automated "test" pilot, given that sometimes you don't even necessarily have the correct parameters of your plane/rocket to program a successful autopilot.
Keep in mind that people at Virgin Galactic will have finite resources. Even if you can automate something that can access very unexpected situations and make a correct decision on what to do, the cost of doing that vs a test pilot is going to be much higher.
As far as I'm aware, aircraft autopilot systems do not perform well when unexpected mechanical failures occur and usually defer to humans by sounding alarms and such.
As for rockets, especially test ones, usually the automated system that makes a call when mechanical failures occur involves self destruct to prevent collateral damages.
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35117.270
What a terrible week. :(
- Virgin Galactic has ordered a total of 5 SpaceShipTwos from the aptly named "The Spaceship Company".
- There are 2 built, the VSS (Virgin Space Ship) Enterprise and VSS Voyager.
- Only the VSS Enterprise has been flown, so I assume that is the ship which crashed today.
This is a sad day, indeed.
While this is a major set-back and bummer, at the same time it is far better that something like this happen during a test than during a commercial flight. Whatever the design, manufacturing, or process issues are, they will now be sussed out reducing the chance of a failure later on.
I sincerely hope this is not such a huge set-back that it totally derails Virgin/Scaled's approach as I love the fact that we have competing commercial concepts working at the same time.
> Virgin Galactic's partner Scaled Composites conducted a powered test flight of #SpaceShipTwo earlier today.
> During the test, the vehicle suffered a serious anomaly resulting in the loss of SpaceShipTwo. WK2 landed safely.
> Our first concern is the status of the pilots, which is unknown at this time.
> We will work closely with relevant authorities to determine the cause of this accident and provide updates ASAP.
This is awful. I hope that problems like this don't result in more regulations and barriers to private spaceflight. It's about as dangerous of a job as they come and we have to expect companies will lose men. Every astronaut is a hero for humanity and progress.
I'd like to recommend everyone select as their next book for pleasure reading Andy Weir's "The Martian".
Here's my GoodReads review:
It's not high-brow literature by any stretch. But it's not about the writing per se, it's about the story. I challenge anyone to read it without caring what happens to the protagonist. I recognize that he (and perhaps by extension the author?) may be borderline juvenile on a few occasions... but for me it hardly detracted from the reading experience. On the contrary, I was sufficiently immersed in being on Mars in the shoes of this bold and lonely astronaut that the book per se disappeared nearly the entire time I read it. Pausing to re-read a noteworthy turn of phrase or analyzing it as literature might well have detracted from the author's intent. The story is the thing. For me, the writing got out of the way. And I'm glad it did. This is an extremely well-researched, gripping, exciting page-turner. If you are remotely interested in space travel, imho it's a must-read.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-03-18/news/860120045...
Space vehicles and space exploration is a very dangerous and high risk endeavor. This week we are unfortunately reminded of this fact. Thoughts go out to the families of the brave pilots and those with the Virgin Galactic program.
Say what you want about "cheap spaceflight", there is something dysfunctional going on here. This latest disaster makes me wonder if the US even has a current capability of space flight. Pinching a few pennies isn't worth it.
[1] http://spaceflightnow.com/2014/10/27/china-launches-third-sp...
[2] http://spaceflightnow.com/2014/10/29/russians-launch-progres...
Virgin Galactic was set up so eventually the average person can experience the wonder of space flight. The company didn't have Elon Musk type aspirations, but it is a big part of the process that will eventually allow us to colonize the stars.
These type of events show that even though we have the smartest scientific wizards in the world working on these things, there is still so much we have to learn, almost a half century after we landed people on the moon.
Virgin Galactic, especially those you lost today, you have my deepest respect for Daring Greatly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz8wlcUPz90
The documentary includes a very touching interview with a test pilot.
In lots of ways unmanned is actually simpler than maned, as the US army knows.
Using pilots for testing new things looks to me as extremely outdated, from the old macho days.
In the old macho days you had to sacrifice people for learning things as simple as how to control the aircraft over the speed of sound.
But today it is totally unnecessary.
Eventually you'll have one.
( Chrome doesn't think evited is a word. )
> 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.
The mother plane part, or the spacecraft part?
Jet fighters do the same thing: convert control to the flight systems within an envelope.
Both incidents seem to involve ignition, so that seems to be an issue.