Hacker News Reader

Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

View on HN

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 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.

> 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

Not to mention there were certainly other problems with Apollo like mission 13, or 11 barely landing before running out of fuel (computer problem forced Armstrong to take manual control and find a new landing spot at the last minute). Ultimately though Apollo was just too big and expensive a program to maintain, for better or worse.

... Also, there was Neil Armstrong's ejection from the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle in 1966:

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.)

> computer problem forced Armstrong to take manual control and find a new landing spot at the last minute

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.

For what its worth - and not necessarily to draw parallels with the Cygnus CRS Orb-3 mishap - Russia successfully launched an unmanned Soyuz rocket and Progress 57 cargo ship with supplies for the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, hours after the catastrophic explosion destroyed a similar mission in the United States.[1]

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-...

Not exactly. The computer worked as designed. If they hadn't left the docking radar on, it would not have had any 1201 or 1202 alarms. A bunch of big rocks is why Armstrong took over.

Yes, and to bolster your point, they halted the program to re-evaluate safety. I think it's a human fault that we have to learn from our mistakes - unless we make them, people just don't believe the risks are real.

True. But it is almost pointless to compare these two programs since Apollo was so much more complex.

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.

Speaking of perspective, the Apollo was fully-backed by the government of the most powerful economy in the world at the time - 4% of the federal budget was directed towards it, with 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 third-party employees, with a cost of ~$140B of today's dollars. How the hell is a private company supposed to compete? Not even Apple's famed $100B in cash could pay that bill.

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.

Another difference, the Apollo astronauts carried slide rules to do calculations during the mission.

They had slide rules in addition to the most sophisticated digital computers of the time. Both, in the spacecraft and on the ground.

"True. But it is almost pointless to compare these two programs since Apollo was so much more complex."

That's funny, because you were the one who compared them first.

"Almost pointless" due to the vast differences in scale and complexity but still worthwhile, as a contrasting example of a solid safety culture employed by the Apollo engineering and operations teams.

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.

If there are no inherently safe options, then that tends to preclude engineering in safety. I really don't think you know what you are talking about.

A propulsion system that was "inherently safe" wouldn't have dangerous failure modes. Although Virgin has tried in the past to paint their hybrid prolusion system as being "inherently safe", it isn't. No 60klb rocket engine is. To make any such system operate safely and reliably is a big engineering challenge. I think you don't understand the meaning of the term "inherently safe" in an engineering context.

Could you define it for me then?

> 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.

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."

They tested the polyamide/nitrous engine back in May, I believe.

A hybrid has a few other failure modes too. One is called hard start:

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.

Based on eye witness accounts saying that the engine appeared to fire once more after a flameout, the hard start scenario may indeed be at play here.

Some say this is an "inevitable" result of pushing boundaries. No. This is the result of a poorly managed program.

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?

That's a really grate way to sell tickets: "We now know just how careless we can be to limit in flight explosions to just one per year!" You can't use the same attitude that's now common in software startups with space vehicles, or any vehicles for that matter. "Ship now and fix problems later" does not work with real world products, and to be honest, should be avoided in software as well.

That's one of the big ways the private sector cuts costs! Where do you imagine the "fat" that the private sector trims (relative to gov't) comes from?

The private sector isn't somehow just better at stuff. It has different motives and different priorities, and makes different compromises.

That's one of the big ways the private sector cuts costs!

Is it? Is there evidence that the private sector is consistently more accident prone that public entities when doing similar activities?

Costs are fixed. It is up to the culture to choose whether to pay in blood or treasure.

Even though it catchy, it's still bullshit. Spending much more money and still failing miserably is a likely outcome of lots of projects.

The less you spending on safety and training, or have lax safety standards, more people will die. End of story.

Cars, planes, etc are all much safer than before while costing less. Safety mechanisms are not somehow immune to efficiency improvements.

Are you a professional quote maker?

It is a nice sounding quote, though it may have factual problems until you get to programs with large numbers of iterations.

Speaking of which, your username was coined by a traditional drummer/singer friend of mine. Do you know her?

It is not a nice quote, it's douchey, reductionist, and mostly nonsense. What on earth does "costs are fixed" mean? I also did not realize there was an inverse relationship between "blood" and "treasure". Are we pirates?

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.

>What on earth does "costs are fixed" mean?

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.

Well I'm going to pay in phone apps and home-made chocolate. I think you will do alright on the treasure, but you might find it hard to shift the blood.

Its scary to consider, but you're basically right. This also applies to automobile/truck/aircraft manufacturing. There's always something more one can do increase safety, but it often isn't financially viable. Designing a car in which no one ever died, wouldn't be feasible, or even functional. In the 20th century, cars incrementally increased speed, which isn't so different from space-planes flying higher and higher.

there's no need not in this day and age to have test pilots. If they use computers, they can debug the engine in flight conditions by running maybe ten times as many test flights.

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.

>there's no need not in this day and age to have test pilots.

Good point. What does the FAA say about unmanned rocket powered flight tests?

Not sure, but SpaceX has performed plenty of them.

Not so much over the US, though.

I would beg to differ. SpaceX certainly flown unmanned, rocket powered test flights both from McGregor[1], and Cape Canaveral[2]. Those were in the US last time I checked.

1:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_(rocket)#Flight_tes... 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Launch_history

If a regulation is putting human lives at risks, the regulation has to go.

plenty of companies do them. Ask Elon Musk.

The first statement implies that computer testing is so good now that an aircraft can be tested so thoroughly that the maiden voyage of an aircraft could safely also be its first "for real" mission.

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.)

I think he meant real-life test, but with the pilot working remotely and not sitting on board.

there's a difference between testing the engine, and testing the handling qualities. But not always.

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.

Your forgetting the countless times that a test pilot has saved the aircraft/spacecraft from destruction. If it was unmanned and flown by computer, it would have been a fireball.

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.

The last of the ALT drops did this (with Fred Haise as PIC, IIRC), as did STS-3 back in 1982 at White Sands. I'm not familiar with the STS-4 incident at all. Do you have any links?

According to wikipedia, it was STS-3 that had (autoopilot-induced) oscillations during landing. The description on Wikipedia seems to imply that they were expected (the autopilot was being tested) and that the dangerous condition was due to the autopilot being left partially engaged after the test.

Correct. There was also an pitch stabilization system that malfunctioned due to the misconfigured (partially engaged) autopilot. Point remains that the pilots flying skills in the cockpit saved the orbiter.

And in this case the craft killed the pilot. Shouldn't we be designing pilotless craft?

Pilots can make manual correction remotely. It might not be optimal, but that is better than risking lives on the first flight of a new engine design.

It was STS-3 at White Sands, not STS-4, my mistake.

not in this case. They should have more than one rocket craft for testing. it's ok to fly reciprocating and jet prototypes because Scaled has experience with hundreds if not thousands of those kinds of aircraft, and it's easy to bail out at 200mph. It's much harder to bail out at Mach 3 and 100k ft.

Did you know an F1 car can drive itself around the track? It seems like there's something in human nature, at least among some people that leads them to want to drive the thing themselves.

not today's F1 car. They don't have auto trans, auto steering or auto brakes. Yes they could and audi has been testing an unmanned race car that does round a track, but there is a little chance that an F1 engine will blow up and kill the driver.

"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."

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.

Point 1 is a good one, point 2 is not. Yes, liquid engines like the sort used on Antares, Soyuz (most reliable rocket ever built), Falcon, Proton, Atlas, Shuttle, Delta, Ariane, Saturn, and nearly every other orbital launch platform ever. Liquid/liquid engines, by any measure, are orders of magnitude more stable and well proven than hybrid rocket engines.

My point is that they still fail. Both liquid and solid boosters are a lot more mature than hybrids, no doubt. But I'm not so sure that either is fundamentally more reliable. And for hybrids to mature, somebody has to use them.

"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.

"1. They didn't stay with rubber/nitrous."

This you believe so strongly because a news story stated it?

Wait for the accident report. It will say "rubber".

Aviation Week reported it back in May. So, yes. I'll keep an eye out for the accident report.

http://m.aviationweek.com/space/new-fuel-boost-spaceshiptwo

Well you could be right, but it is very hard to imagine that being true since the plastic hybrid has only been tested once on the ground. Doing a flight test so soon would be totally insane. In any case, the disaster was undoubtably a result of inadequate ground testing.

Problems like these are almost always the result of management pushing things faster than the engineering progress warrants.

I think it's also possible that a bad fuel grain slipped through whatever QA process they had. You might count that as insufficient ground testing, though.

"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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conestoga_%28rocket%29

Virgin has to get Brandon to space this year or their funding is subject to considerable clawback.

Do they still get to keep the funding if he returns?

You don't know what the problem was.

Officials decided this spring to modify the space plane’s rocket motor to use a different type of fuel. Instead of burning a rubber-based fuel mix known as HTPB used on SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo’s initial test flights, Virgin Galactic selected a new propellant grain known as polyamide which officials said offered improved performance.

“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...

Let us hope for Virgin's sake that "many times" doesn't mean six times for ten seconds each.

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.

"2. Like the sort used on Antares?"

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 think they're a little newer than that, but that's a good point. Still, I'm not sure either engine was inadequately qualified.

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.

> I think they're a little newer than that, but that's a good point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33 says the AJ-26 engines are from the 1960s and 1970s.

well, I don't think it can have been the rubber because it says in the article:

"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"

> 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.

Let's hope they won't ask you to run the inevitable investigation then.

You are certainly very good at finding evidence to validate your prejudice.

>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.

Can I ask how? What is in there that tells you that?

Sure: intuition, not anything in that paragraph besides the simple fact that the vehicle destroyed itself during rocket powered flight.

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.

The hybrid rocket they are using is simpler and cheaper than a liquid/liquid design would be.

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.

Even under the best circumstances, space travel is risky business. It may well be that this program didn't do all it should have done to mitigate those risks, but both facts can be true it's not mutually exclusive.

You seem to have some sort of inside knowledge none of the rest of us have? Seriously, to say that this is a poorly managed program is something you can't provide any concrete evidence of - there has been a tragedy, but you cannot say that it was poorly managed because you don't know.

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.

Software development fuckups can be just as fatal as manned space flight. Software is actually the cause of many space flight accidents. To think of software as some isolated system that does not affect peoples' lives is absurd. It's critical in many areas and can fail with fatalities.

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

This is two fatal accidents, so far. There was widespread speculation in the space community over Scaled Composite's seemingly blasé attitude to Nitrous Oxide, after their cold-flow test fatalities.

> 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 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.

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.

This makes me think of all those crazy warning labels that warn you not to do some incredibly stupid thing (ie "don't use the hair dryer while sleeping"). You know every dumb warning has some sort of story behind it. :)

My dad used to tell me, "Try and live your life so that you never end up inspiring a warning label." .

Is it cheaper to pay by adding extra complexity into legal contracts, extra labels, and extra training across organization vs just paying up for fixing the consequences of an outlier accident?

The point is beyond an unintuitively small size outliers become practical inevitabilities. This isn't black swan stuff either, but just simple percentages.

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.

"Inevitable" does not mean "must prevent no matter what cost to prevent is".

"when the supporting bureaucracy has lost track with reality"

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.

Well, a rocket is a thing that:

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 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 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.

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.

The other efficient forms of propulsion actually require you to be in space due to low thrust-to-weight. Chemical rockets get us off the planet first.

There's no reason to believe chemical rockets can't get a small, self-sustaining colony going. Asteroid/comet mining, a Mars base, etc. are likely possible with current or near-current technology.

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.

And so we just tell everyone in the space agency "Sorry guys, but we can't do any more space stuff besides ground-based telescopes until we come up with a better propulsion system. So we'll keep about 100 of you on board to come up with that and the rest of you are fired."

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".

Actually, it could happen with chemical rockets -- if we abandon the idea of sending canned monkeys beyond the atmosphere.

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" ...

Ethically speaking, sending non-sentient foreign organisms to an unknown planet that might already be inhabited falls somewhere between spamming and attempted genocide.

No, thanks. I prefer to believe that this task is what our intelligence is for.

For all we know we're only returning the favor.

I completely agree with you on the spamming point. But disagree on the intelligence side ...

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!

Apart from the usual Manifest Destiny IN SPACE! crap, recently I've been a bit shocked to realize that there might actually be a point in trying to go to remote and harsh places.

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.

Humanity is not going to keep itself together long enough to be threatened by the sun's nova.

Such an incredible false choice you present.

I think you'll find that it hard to argue that the efforts of exploration are linked to our industrial pillage of the planet.

Early exploration was all about pillaging the planet. Much of the Sahara desert for example exists because destroyed the existing ecosystem which altered weather patterns and vastly expanding the desert. Recently we almost did the same to the Midwest in the US. In fact we still might be heading that way after the Ogallala Aquifer is used up.

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.

>I think you'll find that it hard to argue that the efforts of exploration are linked to our industrial pillage of the planet.

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.

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.

And yet, here we are. I'm totally okay with causing mass extinction as long as something human-descended comes out the other side.

Kaczynski was right.

I think there are many other areas humanity could shift their focus away from to better help cohabitation of this planet than spaceflight.

You are getting downvoted, but I actually agree with you. Space travel is awesome, but so is living, and right now we are not living in a way that is sustainable over the short term. Space travel is, for me, an anachronistic hold-over from people who grew up with Heinlein, Asimov, etc., but is not something that is realistic given the environmental situation. Realistically, any vehicle that is dependent upon currently available propulsion systems is a waste of time.

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 awesome, but so is living, and right now we are not living in a way that is sustainable over the short term.

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.

While true, it is also not as direct of a threat. CO2 is affecting us now, whereas asteroids, etc., are (thankfully) only possibilities. Serious ones, to be certain, but not immediately threatening.

CO2 is a direct and immediate threat.

Humans as a species will survive CO2, though, whereas asteroids conceivably can go from "not immediately threatening" to "Earth will be destroyed in a few years" without warning.

"... few days"

I went with years there to be safe as I'm uncertain about what the detection levels are like for planet-killer sized asteroids. I know we discover house-sized ones passing between us and the Moon after they whiz by.

No detection. Who's looking? Many are found by amateurs, as you say, after they whiz by.

> not immediately threatening" to "Earth will be destroyed in a few years" without warning.

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.

What study has indicated CO2 might make the planet completely inhospitable to life?

CO2 is a very real threat and we should be doing more about it. That said, the threat is neither direct nor immediate.

I don't think you fully appreciate just how difficult space travel is, especially the kind of space travel where you found a colony that will sustain itself after the Earth is hit by an asteroid. The required scale of technology/economy comfortably puts it in "at least several centuries from now, if we're incredibly lucky and/or devoted".

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.

> The required scale of technology/economy comfortably puts it in "at least several centuries from now, if we're incredibly lucky and/or devoted".

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).

Thanks. I expected the downvotes. But it breaks my heart that we have such a beautiful planet and we treat it like a trash heap, all the while dreaming of Mars and whatnot. Let's put our own house in order before we go off travelling.

There's no reason for everybody to stay home and do housekeeping, then there's a big beautiful universe out there. Dare to dream big!

If we can't even save our own home world, there is every reason to believe that we will do damage elsewhere. That being the case, best to stay home until we grow up a bit.

The rest of our solar system is rocks. Hard to do much damage there. Anything we do has to be for the better (oxygen, water, life).

Are you sure? I get the impression we're not very good at recognizing other life forms, or alternative forms of intelligence.

So we kill them. It wouldn't be the first time, and it won't be the last. This is life. Hopefully we'll learn something, except to be paralyzed by fear of doing damage.

I rather suspect fossil fuel usage, deforestation, etc. won't be an issue on Mars.

That's great; but Mars, and even the solar system, is not "the universe".

I suspect we're likely to solve greenhouse gas emissions long before we're able to get humans out of the solar system.

I suspect that in turn depends on whether we're able to create 'digital' humans or not.(I'm not weighing in on whether or not we'll be able to, just pointing out that if we can, 'manned' interstellar travel becomes much, much easier.)

The one easy option, voluntary restraint, isn't even on the table, not that I noticed. So what makes you think that's so likely, what about our current priorities and behaviours makes you so optimistic? Where is the economic incentive to solve the problem? Sure, it means more long-term life and profit, but having even 1% less quarterly profit so that in 1000 years some other company can exist at all is not exactly how we do things around here. Instead companies invested in fossil fuels are happily funding "global warming skeptics".

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.

> So what makes you think that's so likely, what about our current priorities and behaviours makes you so optimistic?

I'm not enormously optimistic. I'm just saying that compared to interstellar travel, avoiding fossil fuels seems like a fairly small problem.

Earth doesn't need saving, it's perfectly fine. Regardless, in a world with practical interstellar travel local damage is irrelevant - the universe is infinite. Milky Way alone contains at least 100 billion planets.

What is damage? Life is change. Life modifies the environment. The Earth does seem to be the most interesting body in this region of space, but I don't view it as some sacred jewel that should be protected against all change.

You talk as if we can only do one thing, or as if there's any chance that we will all agree to pull in one direction or agree about what the most critical threats are.

SHORT STORY: A conversation between parent and child, on Mars, sometime in the future:

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.

That's why you build a Mars-dreaming company AND an electric vehicle company :)

"we" ? There's no we. There's just various groups of people. If one such group of < 10 000 people (spacex) can go off and build transportation to go to Mars, let them - no one should deny them to do that.

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.

any vehicle that is dependent upon currently available propulsion systems is a waste of time.

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.

To be fair space flight has some significant advantages from an environmental perspective. Earth observation satellites are essential for understanding how the atmosphere works and how the planet is changing. Also, the unique constraints of space have lead to the development of sustainable technology such as solar panels, fuel cells, and better water purification.

Who cares? Let's feed the poor first and worry about bigger stuff later. Reminds me of a story about a letter written by Sister Mary Jucunda from Zambia to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. (http://www.meaus.com/whyExplore.html)

Well feeding the world is a more challenging problem than space flight ever will be. It is not like you can just sign a massive check and deploy some engineers and suddenly poor people in Africa will have enough to eat. But the comparatively trivial challenge of space flight can provide real benefits. Weather satellites can let farmers and governments plan ahead. A single remote sensing satellite can map desertification (which destroy farm land), and track floods (which destroy crops).

There are so many structural / societal problems in the way of feeding the poor that it's not a very interesting problem. You would have to re-engineer our society and power-structures.

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.

Fundamentally, we don't know where our resources would be best spent. We need to try all the things.

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.

>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.

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)

You're forgetting how cool it would be for rich people to burn a couple hundred thousand to fly in space for two and a half hours. It's clearly the highest expression of the human spirit, and you're a hopeless hater cynic.

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.

I worked out some quick math estimating 25,000 gallons just for the fuel for each tourist's 2-hour flight. Space tourism seems like the douchebaggiest idea ever created. I hope the in-flight space cocktails are worth it. http://brent-noorda.blogspot.com/2014/05/richard-branson-elo...

Perhaps Skylon is more to your liking?

Live a little! It's okay to be human-supremacist. Sheesh. Have neo-cortex, will dominate.

Boring.

> cryogenic liquids at -300 degrees celsius

Absolute zero is -273 °C.

Thanks for the catch, it's updated now - stupid mistake...

now that is pushing boundaries

We must never forget that progress, social or technical, is built on people dedicating or sacrificing their lives.

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.

It also shows that the crew capsule doesn't survive rapid dissassembly of the engine. Which is another thing to work on. Sad to see this so quickly on the heels of the Orbital failure.

> We wouldn't have explored the depths of the ocean.

We mostly still haven't! I think ocean exploration is pretty exciting too.

This is a tragedy and something to learn from. Being able to test this thoroughly without the presence of any human almost seems like a no-brainer to me.

I find this dogma of "Eventually we will conquer space and make it accessible to all mankind" dangerous in the extreme to the actual, all-too-present predicaments we have here on real Earth such as climate change, environment devastation, fossil fuels/minerals/water depletion and the accelerating destruction of the web of life that makes possible your even being able to breathe.

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.

While we are off topic, this post is a fine example of "concern trolling".

Someone has to point out that you have fallen into dogmatic thinking when it comes to our "space future". There is nothing promised, nothing that can be taken for granted, nothing shown to be possible (beyond the current limits of our physics which are: getting to the moon at enormous fuel expense, and 1-way ticket to die in Mars)

> basic hard laws such as the speed of light, the laws of thermodynamics, etc. say NO

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.

a) Travel within the solar system? where do you want to go live, Mercury, Venus? Mars is almost as worthless too, its gravity is 1/3 Earth's. Can't live there for long.

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.

a) Mars.Your notion that humans cannot survive for long in 1/3 gravity is interesting. While it has not been proven that we can live long and healthy lives in 1/3 G, many very intelligent and informed people believe we can. Do you have a particular reason to believe we cannot?

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.

I'm finding this whole thread interesting, but your comment is the inspirational one I'd hoped to find. Thanks.

There was a comment earlier asking for a source that someone didn't make it.[0]

[0] News report: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/31/spaceshiptwo-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com