5 ms·

Branson admits Virgin space mission was going the wrong direction

61 points by ollysmit 10y ago

Neliquat 10y ago
A sensible shift, but comes a bit late. The success india, spacex, ula, are having will lead to kepler syndrome before he gets operational if I had to bet on it. Still, I support every dollar spent on space tech. I only hope the tech developed for dead end projects is released if unused.
- binarymax 10y ago
  >Kepler syndrome Do you mean Kessler Syndrome? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
- Waterluvian 10y ago
  I like "Kepler Syndrome". The runaway proliferation of humans on nearby habitable planets.
  - vkou 10y ago
    So, Earth?
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Well, that certainly is the majority of cases we're aware of.
jlebrech 10y ago
yes, diagonal not vertical how it should be.
saalweachter 10y ago
I must say - both physically compelled by the pun and because that it is a pun makes it no less true - that SpaceX has been a rousing success for the "launch and iterate" mantra so often pushed on HN. Having a product, that works, that people can pay you for, as soon as possible makes a huge difference, even if what you push out first is no where near what you want your finished product to be. The contrast to Virgin Galactic is startling.
- Gravityloss 10y ago
  SpaceX looks like a software company that has had success with their product so far but is in the process of a major refactoring to a new technology base. Basically if they want to fly reusable rockets with high reliability and low refurbishment time and cost, they have to redesign and rebuild quite a lot. And they need new philosophies and processes. You can for example look at their current Merlin gas generator technology engines. The chosen cycle results in high temperatures for the turbine, something which works against reliability and reusability. They have the staged combustion Raptor engine coming up, but they are too big to be used as landing engines, so they have to do that in another way. Gas generator as a first engine (and pressure fed upper stage) makes a lot of sense though. On the other hand, Virgin Galactic chose an unconventional and hard to scale technology: hybrid rockets, which has proved even more problematic. As a fairly technical person, you look at these companies and organizations (NASA) and feel how they just simply can't make technically informed decisions higher up. SpaceX has improved a lot historically though. Do you know if there are companies with technical leadership?
  - Retric 10y ago
    Projects are never going to pick the perfect solution out of the gate. But, tested compromises also have value. I would suggest SpaceX freeze a design every 5-7 years that's good enough to scale while cheaper than it's completion and then have a more experimental path. If option A costs 20 million more, but has a 98+% success rate and option B saves 20 million then the market can chose which to focus on. The real 'problem' spaceX is facing is humans simply don't send all that much stuff into space, so they are never get enough data get the experimental path stable.
squeral 10y ago
Too early for space tourism.
- imglorp 10y ago
  There have already been tourist flights to space (eg ISS), plus Virgin already has deposits on suborbital flights. So I would argue the door is open and there's money to be made. Perhaps the winged approach is not optimal for orbital missions, like to the Virgin hotel, but I can't see why they would turn down scores of paying suborbital trips, for which wings probably make a lot more sense. They might as well keep up the SS2 path to finance the higher goals.
- maus42 10y ago
  Musk announced couple of days ago a plan to send tourists on a sightseeing trip around Moon. And not as some hypothetical plan, but in a sense that the said tourists have bought the tickets. Now, with their track record it looks like it's probably going to take 2x more time than the announced schedule says, but on the other hand, 2x is quite much sooner than 'never'.
bmcusick 10y ago
There's no indication that they've figured out that Virgin's real problem is their architecture. They're still trying to use wings to get to space. The Germans and NASA back in the 50s understood that "mass is mass", and wings compete with fuel for weight. They're dead mass you have to accelerate. The lift they provide isn't worth it. The Russians put Sputnik and Gegarin in orbit with a rocket. NASA went to the Moon with a rocket. ICBMs are rockets. SpaceX and Blue Origin are making rockets. Branson's problem is that he founded a company started by Burt Rutan (a brilliant airplane designer), and never hired the right rocket designers, and he doesn't have the technical expertise himself to realize what he's doing wrong. For an example of a rocket company that understands this, but is trying to square the circle anyway, read about Skylon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft) They at least understand the mass trade-offs being made and are trying to develop new technology that helps skirt around them.
- ProAm 10y ago
  > Branson's problem is that he founded a company started by Burt Rutan (a brilliant airplane designer), and never hired the right rocket designers, and he doesn't have the technical expertise himself to realize what he's doing wrong. Rutan won the X-Prize, I don't believe you can call that wrong. This was always space tourism, nothing more.
  - bmcusick 10y ago
    "Rutan won the X-Prize" Yes, he did, but he did with an architecture incapable of doing anything more impressive than win the X-Prize. I'll give you another example from the self-driving X-prize. There were always two teams that were very close to winning. One team hand-coded every decision tree for the particular path the car might encounter, and the other team used machine learning and let the car figure it. Now as it happened in the self-driving challenge, the machine-learning car won, but it was really, really close. For the limited purpose of the challenge, the hand-coded car was nearly good enough. Maybe if they'd hand-coded it just a little better, that car would have won. But hand-coding doesn't scale from a closed challenge track to real-world self-driving cars. Only machine learning can do that. But because of the artificial constraints on the challenge, the non-scaling solution almost won. Well for the Ansari X-Prize, the non-scaling solution DID win. That's the Rutan solution, which used wings, which work for 1 passenger but (as Branson has spent 20 years and a billion dollars proving) doesn't even scale to 10 passenger joy-rides, let alone orbit.
runnr_az 10y ago
down?

61 points by ollysmit 10y ago

A sensible shift, but comes a bit late. The success india, spacex, ula, are having will lead to kepler syndrome before he gets operational if I had to bet on it. Still, I support every dollar spent on space tech. I only hope the tech developed for dead end projects is released if unused.

binarymax 10y ago
>Kepler syndrome Do you mean Kessler Syndrome? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Waterluvian 10y ago
I like "Kepler Syndrome". The runaway proliferation of humans on nearby habitable planets.
- vkou 10y ago
  So, Earth?
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Well, that certainly is the majority of cases we're aware of.

jlebrech 10y ago

yes, diagonal not vertical how it should be.

saalweachter 10y ago

I must say - both physically compelled by the pun and because that it is a pun makes it no less true - that SpaceX has been a rousing success for the "launch and iterate" mantra so often pushed on HN. Having a product, that works, that people can pay you for, as soon as possible makes a huge difference, even if what you push out first is no where near what you want your finished product to be. The contrast to Virgin Galactic is startling.

Gravityloss 10y ago
SpaceX looks like a software company that has had success with their product so far but is in the process of a major refactoring to a new technology base. Basically if they want to fly reusable rockets with high reliability and low refurbishment time and cost, they have to redesign and rebuild quite a lot. And they need new philosophies and processes. You can for example look at their current Merlin gas generator technology engines. The chosen cycle results in high temperatures for the turbine, something which works against reliability and reusability. They have the staged combustion Raptor engine coming up, but they are too big to be used as landing engines, so they have to do that in another way. Gas generator as a first engine (and pressure fed upper stage) makes a lot of sense though. On the other hand, Virgin Galactic chose an unconventional and hard to scale technology: hybrid rockets, which has proved even more problematic. As a fairly technical person, you look at these companies and organizations (NASA) and feel how they just simply can't make technically informed decisions higher up. SpaceX has improved a lot historically though. Do you know if there are companies with technical leadership?
- Retric 10y ago
  Projects are never going to pick the perfect solution out of the gate. But, tested compromises also have value. I would suggest SpaceX freeze a design every 5-7 years that's good enough to scale while cheaper than it's completion and then have a more experimental path. If option A costs 20 million more, but has a 98+% success rate and option B saves 20 million then the market can chose which to focus on. The real 'problem' spaceX is facing is humans simply don't send all that much stuff into space, so they are never get enough data get the experimental path stable.

squeral 10y ago

Too early for space tourism.

imglorp 10y ago
There have already been tourist flights to space (eg ISS), plus Virgin already has deposits on suborbital flights. So I would argue the door is open and there's money to be made. Perhaps the winged approach is not optimal for orbital missions, like to the Virgin hotel, but I can't see why they would turn down scores of paying suborbital trips, for which wings probably make a lot more sense. They might as well keep up the SS2 path to finance the higher goals.
maus42 10y ago
Musk announced couple of days ago a plan to send tourists on a sightseeing trip around Moon. And not as some hypothetical plan, but in a sense that the said tourists have bought the tickets. Now, with their track record it looks like it's probably going to take 2x more time than the announced schedule says, but on the other hand, 2x is quite much sooner than 'never'.

bmcusick 10y ago

There's no indication that they've figured out that Virgin's real problem is their architecture. They're still trying to use wings to get to space. The Germans and NASA back in the 50s understood that "mass is mass", and wings compete with fuel for weight. They're dead mass you have to accelerate. The lift they provide isn't worth it. The Russians put Sputnik and Gegarin in orbit with a rocket. NASA went to the Moon with a rocket. ICBMs are rockets. SpaceX and Blue Origin are making rockets. Branson's problem is that he founded a company started by Burt Rutan (a brilliant airplane designer), and never hired the right rocket designers, and he doesn't have the technical expertise himself to realize what he's doing wrong. For an example of a rocket company that understands this, but is trying to square the circle anyway, read about Skylon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft) They at least understand the mass trade-offs being made and are trying to develop new technology that helps skirt around them.

ProAm 10y ago
> Branson's problem is that he founded a company started by Burt Rutan (a brilliant airplane designer), and never hired the right rocket designers, and he doesn't have the technical expertise himself to realize what he's doing wrong. Rutan won the X-Prize, I don't believe you can call that wrong. This was always space tourism, nothing more.
- bmcusick 10y ago
  "Rutan won the X-Prize" Yes, he did, but he did with an architecture incapable of doing anything more impressive than win the X-Prize. I'll give you another example from the self-driving X-prize. There were always two teams that were very close to winning. One team hand-coded every decision tree for the particular path the car might encounter, and the other team used machine learning and let the car figure it. Now as it happened in the self-driving challenge, the machine-learning car won, but it was really, really close. For the limited purpose of the challenge, the hand-coded car was nearly good enough. Maybe if they'd hand-coded it just a little better, that car would have won. But hand-coding doesn't scale from a closed challenge track to real-world self-driving cars. Only machine learning can do that. But because of the artificial constraints on the challenge, the non-scaling solution almost won. Well for the Ansari X-Prize, the non-scaling solution DID win. That's the Rutan solution, which used wings, which work for 1 passenger but (as Branson has spent 20 years and a billion dollars proving) doesn't even scale to 10 passenger joy-rides, let alone orbit.

runnr_az 10y ago

down?