23 ms·

The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight

476 points by zlsa 5y ago

bigtones 5y ago
Brilliant well written article. Not without bias, but you can see through the words on the page and into the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man. Branson did put his life on the line to achieve that accolade though, which was a gutsy move.
- ragnot 5y ago
  As much as I hate to admit it, "ego" has driven so much innovation in space that it was probably inevitable that something like this would happen.
  - krapp 5y ago
    The egos of the rich fuel the engine of civilization, and the blood of the poor grease its wheels.
    - HPsquared 5y ago
      I think it's a bigger category: the egos of the powerful. The rich are a subset.
      - krapp 5y ago
        I can't think of anyone powerful enough who isn't also rich. Although "rich" is a vaguely defined term. There still to me seems to be a direct relationship between money and power - billionaires can push the world further than millionaires, than the upper class, etc.
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        Money and power are two sides of the same coin. Money is literally the unit of measure for power over other people - to the first approximation, a dollar in hand means you can make appropriate people do a dollar's worth of arbitrary work for you. The more money you have, the more you have of this kind of power mediated by economy. You can, in particular, use this power to have politicians do work for you (many ways of doing this are perfectly legal). Conversely, political power - the kind mediated by legal systems or explicit threats of violence - is directly convertible to money. (There's also a special variant of the latter - power wielded by organized religions. The power to browbeat others into doing almost any arbitrary work. Of course, that one too is trivially convertible to both money and political power, and vice versa. That's why fully separating business, church and state is fundamentally impossible. They're different facets of the same thing. An Unholy Trinity.)
        zhoujianfu 5y ago
        Rich is how much money you own. Power is how much money you control. They’re not as closely linked as you think. A managing partner of a $1B fund is more powerful than a person worth $10B on paper whose wealth is all tied up in a minority position in a company they are unable to sell the shares of. Or consider the power of Biden vs his personal net worth.
        robertlagrant 5y ago
        That's why being worth something on paper is not the same thing as money.
      - aaaxyz 5y ago
        That's a bit of a tautology isn't it?
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    We used to have smart guys in competition. Edison vs. Tesla. Not we have rich business savy guys with not much of a science background holding the cards. I have met very few wealthy men, young or old, who had great ideas. It's almost like the money dulls their brains? And their vanity projects are usually way out of their wheelhouse. It's the same with Writers. I have read very few wealthy guys shop could write. They certainly have the time to write, but it's dribble. They are only read because they have money.
    - allovertheworld 5y ago
      That's because Edison vs. Tesla was really mostly theoretical with some funds for engineering (and marketing). The space race is really mostly engineering which requires lots of money.
    - slugiscool99 5y ago
      Apparently Edison was much more of a businessman than his legacy suggests - which was intentional on his part. Similar to Bill Gates, they both started as engineers but made their money organizing people. See https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/the-real-nature-of-thomas-edisons-genius https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/the-real-natur...
    - majkinetor 5y ago
      Not really a competition. Comparing Tesla to Edison is like comparing Virgin Galactic to SpaceX.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      Edison wasn't a smart guy. He hired smart guys and didn't give them credit for their inventions, while trying to talk to the dead.
      - kergonath 5y ago
        Sounds exactly like at least a pair of these attention-seeking billionaires who rant about technology and engineering.
- aaroninsf 5y ago
  I would unpack "gutsy" with its overtones of grudging admiration, into a lot harsher terms related to toxic narcissism and what amounts to a pissing contest between competitive men. I suspect there is a natural evolutionary curb on the somewhat sociopathic qualities at work, whereby bravado is kept in some check by self-culling being commonplace.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    If something has positive side-effects, can it be called toxic?
    - JohnFen 5y ago
      Of course. Plenty of toxic things that you want to avoid have positive side-effects. Including chemical toxins.
    - liamwire 5y ago
      I’d like to submit Botox as an example that, yes, it can be.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  The whole exercise was dumb. Flying up and then down on a rocket is a difference in degree, rather than type, from taking a ride on the Vomit Comet. Orbit -- half way to anywhere -- that's the accomplishment.
  - bnralt 5y ago
    I also don't think people realize how close to the earth these people still were. Take a globe, hold your finger as close as you can to it without touching, and that's about as high as Bezos and Branson went. As you said, orbital is what matters, and a suborbital flight around the Karman line doesn't mean much.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Noumenon72 5y ago
      For comparison, how high off the globe would orbit be?
      - bee_rider 5y ago
        Orbit can occur at any distance from Earth if you are the right speed I guess -- although below a handful of fingers you'll get significant drag from the atmosphere. Since the atmosphere doesn't just suddenly cut off at some point, it is a matter of degrees. But for example, the ISS orbits around 400km and needs to be boosted a 'few times a year.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit#Examples (The Karman line is around 100km, so if we want to use 500ish km as the threshold for reasonable orbits, we really are in the ballpark of a hand's worth of fingers). The altitude isn't really the point, so much as the trajectory -- if they miss the ground at least once I say we give them a round of applause.
      - SonicScrub 5y ago
        Bit of a bad comparison of accomplishment. Low Earth Orbit isn't that much higher. But it is much much faster (which is what's hard). Getting into orbit is about going fast enough that the centripetal force from your velocity keeps you aloft. To get into a stable orbit at a precise target altitude requires accurate timings and controls, and lots more energy. The engineering challenge is orders of magnitude more difficult.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Hardly the first time Branson has put his life at risk, with others in tow, for an aeronautical accomplishment.
- jlawson 5y ago
  It seems humans need a sense of competition to make progress towards any goal beyond the day-to-day. If I have to choose between this and nuclear-armed superpowers intimidating each other with super-accurate rockets - I'll take the billionaires. To be honest I think it's awesome. We need people who are able and willing to push for something beyond the everyday, and it doesn't really matter why they're doing it.
  - krisoft 5y ago
    > it doesn't really matter why they're doing it. I disagree with that. Why they are doing what they are doing is very important. Elon is a set of flaws walking on two legs but his plans make sense: Humanity has all their eggs in one basket by being a single planet species. To change that we need to make space travel much, much cheaper than it was. To do that we need reusable and economical spacecrafts. He works alongside this plan. Branson made people build him the adult version of a coin operated mall kiddie ride. You give it money and it shakes you around and later you can tell people that you are now an astronaut. Two people, both have a ton of money and both used some of their wealth to assemble a team to build a spacecraft. The difference between them is the “why” they did this. One if suceeds has changed the history of humankind. If he fails at the grand goal misserably he still made a vastly succesfull space company. The other if he succeeds has a funfair ride with bragging rights. Meh. The why is all that matters, because it affects the how and the what fundamentally.
  - achenet 5y ago
    > It seems humans need a sense of competition to make progress towards any goal beyond the day-to-day. No, you're overgeneralizing. As counter-examples: - fitness goals - financial freedom goals (eg the FIRE communities) - altruistic goals - romantic goals (impress a potential partner) are all proof that humans can be motivated by health/desire for physical well-being, kindness, compassion and personal comfort to progress to goals beyond the day-to-day. Competition motivates some progress, but there are other sources of motivation as well :)
    - jlawson 5y ago
      Fitness goals are generally related to romatic goals. Romantic goals are inherently competitive - if you succeed, you're taking the partner from whoever else would have gotten her had you never existed. Financial freedom isn't competitive really, you're right. Altruism is borderline, given how much of "altruistic" activity is really about social signaling and competitive status games through conspicuous giving. Even if subconsciously. All the above are day-to-day goals though, except perhaps altruism. By not day-to-day I mean something beyond satisfying the desires of your physical body to feel good, fuck, eat well, be safe, be admired, etc. Goals about species, deep time, eternal questions, the fate of the environment or the planet.
- mc32 5y ago
  There are other flaws too. Like pretending to bike to the spaceport on the day of, but it was actually filmed the week before and when called out, they said, oops, you're right, sorry! It's like when Guy Fiery in his hot rod. He pretends he rolls up to the place in his 70s hot rod, but actually it's just rolled out of the truck that lugs it around from location to location and he opens the door, sits, gets filmed getting out, shuts the door and it goes back up the ramp. It's all fakery.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    Also those shows where they view three houses, then buy one, all in the same week : in reality the producers find someone who has just bought a house, then they make the show using that house and two other random houses, and lo and behold they find a house they like!
    - amatecha 5y ago
      Oh dang, for real? That's super weak if true! Also, no wonder they have hundreds of episodes... I'd be curious if you have any links/etc. on the subject to share!
      - dylan604 5y ago
        It still amazes me that anyone still believes that the pictures they see on TV are in any way real. 100% of content on TV is fake. I used to say except the news, but now I'm not even able to trust that. If it's a commercial, definitely fake. If it's a TV show, 100% fake. Games shows shoot 5 episodes in a day, so when they say "last week's winner" it was last hour's.
        bonestamp2 5y ago
        Talk Shows are the worst for this. Many of them have a rehearsal with the guests. It's no surprise that all of the guests have amazingly funny or interesting stories about every topic the host brings up. Once you know this is how they work, it's impossible to unsee it when you're watching them. I'm sorry I ruined talk shows for anyone here who may like them.
- timmytokyo 5y ago
  Violating airspace regulations isn't gutsy. It's irresponsible and selfish. It puts others at risk.
  - rpmisms 5y ago
    Life is risk, sometimes with other people's lives in the balance. Violating their airspace, in this context, was absolutely gutsy, and dangerous, and stupid, but all of them have massive balls and my respect.
    - JohnFen 5y ago
      What about that is deserving of respect? Edit: This was an honest question, and I was hoping for an answer that would help me to understand. It's a shame that this is getting downvoted rather than someone enlightening me.
      - doctor_eval 5y ago
        Anyone can win if they are allowed to break the rules. You get my respect by completing the mission within the rules.
        Sebb767 5y ago
        To be fair, the rules they are really up against are those of physics and they naturally can't break those. FAA rules are rather pale in comparison.
        doctor_eval 5y ago
        The rules I'm referring to are the ones that say "if this light goes red, abort the mission instead of potentially crashing into other people or killing everyone aboard".
        bumby 5y ago
        This is unfortunately common. Even NASA regularly ignores their own standards and procedures due to schedule and budget pressures.
- decebalus1 5y ago
  > the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man. So much energy invested in a dick measuring contest. I hope humanity reaches a point in which the incentive structure would stimulate a more meaningful investment of human labor. Not to say I'm not part of the problem...
- bamboozled 5y ago
  Funny too because no one cares,few months after the event and it’s all water under the bridge. People remember Yuri Gagarin, not these people.
  - baud147258 5y ago
    I'd wager that if Branson had died on the flight, people would remember it
    - bamboozled 5y ago
      Yuri didn't die, everyone remembers it, I don't get your point.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > Branson did put his life on the line to achieve that accolade though, which was a gutsy move. I’m more concerned that he also puts other people’s lives on the line.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > all for the inflated ego of one man. Well, no. All for the best marketing position for the near-space tourism business that Virgin (and, in competition, Blue Origin) is launching and each promoting with the media frenzy around their respective founder-on-board demo launch.
- justinclift 5y ago
  > Brilliant well written article. Personally, I found it the exact opposite. It's like the author was trying to pad something simple into "War and Peace" type volume. Gave up after just a few paragraphs, as it's clear the author had no intention of getting to the point any time soon.
vermontdevil 5y ago
Telling they fired Sturckow when he was pretty outspoken such as this: In another e-mail, in 2019, he urged his fellow test pilots to be more transparent: “Failure to admit mistakes in flight test is a cancer that must be nipped at the bud.” Stucky, whom I wrote about in the magazine in 2018, had been particularly troubled by Mackay and Masucci’s unwillingness to take responsibility for what he perceived to be their mistakes on the July, 2018, flight.
- beerandt 5y ago
  They didn't fire him for the emails, they fired him for publicly bad mouthing the company. There were ~2 years in between.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    If internally bad-mouthing the company doesn’t work, what are you left with?
    - beerandt 5y ago
      It's not that he should or shouldn't have, it's that once you make that decision, certain consequences become likely. I place it more on the author trying to paint a victim narrative, given the guys board resignation (he knew his fate), and the fact that the author directly benefitted from the decision that got him fired.
      - pessimizer 5y ago
        > It's not that he should or shouldn't have > I place it more on the author trying to paint a victim narrative, If he should have, he's a victim; if he shouldn't have, he's not. If you "place it more" on the author trying to paint a victim narrative, you're explicitly saying that it is about whether he should or shouldn't have, and that you think he shouldn't have.
        beerandt 5y ago
bambax 5y ago
In short, we are now using billionaires instead of dogs to test spaceships. I would argue that's progress.
- jedberg 5y ago
  Credit to Musk here for being smart enough not to get in one of his own rockets (yet).
  - mongol 5y ago
    Is that really to his credit though? Should he not be prepared to risk his own life, just like those of his employees?
    - rpmisms 5y ago
      I think it's worth pointing out that Virgin is literally trying to enable space tourism, which is just a side effect for SpaceX. Branson was testing and advertising his product, Elon would be taking valuable time away from his mission.
    - onethought 5y ago
      His employees haven’t got in those rockets either.
    - the-pigeon 5y ago
      SpaceX employees haven't gone to space. Just NASA astronauts on SpaceX rockets. And this privately paid for mission coming up. I don't think it's the CEO's job to be a test pilot. I think that's pretty crazy actually. I know someone who is a test pilot. He's trained a long time to do it. You want someone in the craft that is an expert at both piloting spacecraft and the engineering of the craft. Musk is certainly no pilot and the job of CEO does not require you to have those skills. It could be argued that since these systems are fully automated that you don't need anyone with special skills there. But being a programmer I don't trust software for every situation. So I sure think if you are going to put a person on it, they should be able to intervene if needed. There should be a purpose to their risk.
s5300 5y ago
Wow. Despite his ever growing amount of haters, Musk & Co. do really seem to be placing safety fairly high up on their priority list, if not at the top where Musk says it is. Branson... does not particularly seem to be doing so. I'm unaware if he's ever repeatedly claimed safety is Virgins top priority though. Wonder how things go down in Bezos land.
- ncallaway 5y ago
  I think Blue Origin has appeared from the outside to be pretty safety focused. Blue Origin had 15 successful unmanned test flights of the New Shepard program before launching Jeff and the other astronauts. That's a very extensive test launch regime to conduct of a rocket. Of course Blue Origin is very closed off (especially compared to SpaceX), so it's harder to gauge how much internal weight they put on safety.
- ElFitz 5y ago
  A funny thought. Given - how easy it supposedly would be to find someone to bribe with the inheritance one would get from someone like Bezos and Branson, - how many people work on getting these rockets into space and those men back - how complex and fragile rockets are - how dangerous the whole endeavour is commonly believed to be - that they both came back alive Can we assume that all these murder mystery tv shows and movies have lied to us all along? Unless falling victim to convoluted plots to murder rich relatives for the inheritance only happens to the rich but not the ultra-rich?
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    You would need the inheritee and the engineer to both be willing to commit murder and run the calculus that the money is more valuable than the risk of them going to jail and losing their inheritance forever, which is probably a really bad bet given one of them is a spacex engineer or something and the other is, what, an heir to the bezos fortune? Silly
    - the-pigeon 5y ago
tzs 5y ago
PBS Spacetime episode from a couple years ago about private space travel with a big focus on Branson's approach [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWk9d_YCQOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWk9d_YCQOk
BitwiseFool 5y ago
Let's hope Elon Musk gets cold feet and doesn't fly on that ship. SpaceShipTwo is a pretty atrocious design, safety-wise, compared to what you can accomplish with a capsule and vertical rocket for suborbital spaceflight. https://www.space.com/elon-musk-will-fly-on-virgin-galactic https://www.space.com/elon-musk-will-fly-on-virgin-galactic
- andyxor 5y ago
  I hope Musk values his self-imposed mission enough to not take that risk. If he actually takes that flight it would be the single biggest threat to the future of space exploration.
bryananderson 5y ago
I recommend Schmidle’s recent book “Test Gods” if you are interested in Virgin Galactic and test piloting. Schmidle is not an engineer and I would have enjoyed a deeper dive into Virgin Galactic’s design choices, but it is a great book about (among other things) the tensions that emerge when a complex technical project is overseen from a distance by utterly nontechnical, PR-oriented upper management. The company’s communications and business strategies make a lot more sense knowing that the people calling the shots do not comprehend in the slightest how their product works. For many reasons (some alluded to in this article, many more in the book), SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. Engineering leadership has done what they can to make the vehicle safer (at the cost of performance), but the intractable issue is that any one mistake by a pilot is likely to be fatal (and already has been, in the 2014 accident). Voices like Stucky and Ericson who wanted to acknowledge the inherent danger of the vehicle (which doesn’t mean grounding it) have been ignored and ultimately removed. The company’s business requires the vehicle to be understood to be safe by the public. The chickens will come home to roost.
- IggleSniggle 5y ago
  > SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. This comment reminded me of another story from a previous aerospace era (blimp cruise liners aka airships), the summary of which is: > A British Lord wanted to build the best airship in the world – and so he had two rival design teams battle it out to win the juicy government contract. Competition is supposed to bring the best out of people, but run in the wrong way it can cause people (and the things they make) to fall apart in the most horrifying ways. https://timharford.com/2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-4-the-deadly-airship-race/ https://timharford.com/2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-4-the-dea...
  - monocasa 5y ago
    Hmm, that certainly colors a rumor I've heard about Apple. That they'll have two or three teams compete on a new product... but they won't tell the teams that they have competition until final demo day.
anotheryou 5y ago
I didn't get why the orange or red light is scary. Because it could mean landing in the desert when you are a glider?
- mabbo 5y ago
  You don't 'land in the desert'. It has to come down on a runway. Any risk to that means very high likelihood of injuries or death. Was that the case here? Maybe, maybe not. But the flight plan was built with safety in mind, and the pilots should have aborted.
  - anotheryou 5y ago
    Makes sense :) I forgot the space shuttle was also dubbed a flying/gliding brick
- asdfadsfgfdda 5y ago
  It's a glider, but a glider capable of mach 3 flight. So, approach speeds will be much faster than a typical glider. Probably higher speed than an airliner. That would be dangerous to land off field. Also, it could mean the vehicle is exposed to aerodynamic conditions it is not designed for, operating outside of the flight envelope.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  For reference, here's a video of a Boing 727 landing in the desert: https://youtu.be/kJZ1eHU_JZg?t=51 https://youtu.be/kJZ1eHU_JZg?t=51 It doesn't go terribly well.
  - overspeed 5y ago
    I don't believe the intention of that test was to try and safely put a plane down in a desert. It was a remote controlled crash test. The wiki page[1] says the descent rate was 1500 feet per minute. A typical touchdown rate according to the linked MIT article about this crash[2] puts airliner landings at 10-20 feet per minute. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Boeing_727_crash_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Boeing_727_crash_experime... [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130129040232/http://alum.mit.edu/pages/sliceofmit/2012/10/10/scientists-crash-a-plane-in-the-name-of-safety/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130129040232/http://alum.mit.e...
1024core 5y ago
> Eight days after Branson’s flight, an H.R. manager booked time on his calendar, and then fired Stucky over Zoom. Such a shame. You can bet that this will come back to bite Virgin, and should a serious accident happen and they get sued, Stucky could be a prime witness. Don't burn bridges.
mabbo 5y ago
This highlights why having automated pilots in spaceships is so critical. Software can be tested more thoroughly than humans, and cannot override safety protocols. If the rules say to abort, the software aborts. Humans get to say "I think we'll be fine", and put lives on the line.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > If the rules say to abort, the software aborts. Humans get to say "I think we'll be fine", and put lives on the line. But logic errors and bugs in "thoroughly-tested" (subjective, determined by humans/corporations) software-controlled systems kills too. Interesting thought experiment: How many humans will die in 2031, across all industries, because of bad software? https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-race-condition-therac-25 https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-race-condition-therac-2...
- ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
  In contrast, humans can also say: "It's saying to abort because the sensor reading is incorrect, we'll be fine." It's tricky... in the airplane world, I think it is understood that the current state of the art is an extremely well trained and competent pilot coupled with a nice advanced cockpit is the gold standard. Where each of their responsibilities lie, and how well they work together, is where the rubber meets the road. The record is beyond question that increased automation has drastically reduced airplane fatalities, while there are also being many, many fatal accidents which are quite clearly a case of automation gone awry. Effectively putting both of them together is quite a fascinating problem, and one I think we are still in the infancy of fully understanding, particularly in brand new domains that are emerging like self-driving cars, etc.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Automation is critical, but also the ability to override software that fails is critical, too. Armstrong overrode the failed LEM computer to land safely. Of the 3 737MAX software stab trim runaway incidents, only one crew followed the stab trim override instructions and saved their plane. Pilots are never perfect, and neither is the software. Need both watching each other.
Mitzz 5y ago
While I'm super excited about the future of space tourism, I dread a "Hindenburg" catastrophe that stops the whole idea for a generation.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- WalterBright 5y ago
  If the Hindenburg disaster had not been filmed, it likely would not have stopped Zeppelin travel.
tdeck 5y ago
> “I don’t know how we didn’t lose the vehicle and kill three people,” Todd Ericson, a retired Air Force Colonel and Virgin Galactic’s then vice-president of safety and test, told me in a 2020 interview. I'm pretty impressed by this guy. Not only did he quit his VP job when he saw these safety problems, but he went around giving interviews about them. It strikes me that very few people would have done the same.
- aerosmile 5y ago
  > Not only did he quit his VP job when he saw these safety problems Agree, great guy, putting his ethics ahead of his career > but he went around giving interviews about them Hmmm, gets a bit murky here. If he wanted to save lives, there's a very clear path to alerting the FAA. But he didn't do that. This sounds a bit more like he was trying to save his career. Which brings in question why he quit in the first place, and how voluntary that was to begin with.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    > If he wanted to save lives, there's a very clear path to alerting the FAA. Is there? I doubt you can just call up the FAA and be like, "hey, my former employer is going to get people killed." The FAA will naturally call the employer and the employer will naturally defend themselves, calling the ex-employee a kook. You probably need to generate awareness of the issues in public and show the FAA you're not the only engineer who thinks those practices are unsafe. Then, and only then when you have some accredited clout behind your accusation, can you start holding the FAA's feet to the fire for inaction. And after that, maybe they will investigate.
    - aerosmile 5y ago
      https://hotline.faa.gov/ https://hotline.faa.gov/ It's a thing, trust me, and works a lot better than you assumed above. You absolutely don't need an article in the NY Times to initiate an FAA audit.
      - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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selimnairb 5y ago
dont care
jonplackett 5y ago
> And now they were accelerating to Mach 3, with a red light glowing in the cockpit. Fortunately for Branson and the three other crew members in the back, the pilots got the ship into space and landed safely It seems like we’re missing the crucial step of how it all turned out OK. 2 paragraphs earlier they’re saying how red lights ought to ‘scare the shit out of you’ and ‘it’s too late once it turns red’.
- gwern 5y ago
  Yes, the red light is supposed to mean that they failed to boost enough to be able to glide back to their target runway. But... they did anyway? Apparently? Something is missing from this account.
  - theelous3 5y ago
    Typically warning lights appear when the thing they warn about is impending, not that you've past the point. Otherwise they would be useless, except for existential mockery.
    - iab 5y ago
      "Should have aborted lol"
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I always wanted a street navigator that would say: "you should have turned left back there" followed by a random insult in various languages. Much like every human navigator I've ever had who has been as unhelpful as possible.
      - kevinventullo 5y ago
        Or maybe just a heavy sigh before “Rerouting…”.
      - tragomaskhalos 5y ago
        Satnavs are actually too polite - explicitly telling the driver that they went wrong (sans insults of course!) is useful information that could avoid a lot of confusion. I imagine the reason that this is not done is the same reason as lots of sound engineering is compromised - marketing dweebs.
worker767424 5y ago
> The ship uses rocket power to get into space, but glides back to Earth and lands on a runway, like the space shuttle would do. Does that mean it can't do a go around?
- zlsa 5y ago
  Correct, they have one chance to land. (But the runway is REALLY long.)
- rozab 5y ago
  I understand it has pretty good glide characteristics, MUCH better than the space shuttle, allowing for abort at basically any stage of the flight. Also they actually get given parachutes, unlike pre-Challenger STS missions. The space shuttle was really grim.
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ashtonkem 5y ago
> “ A private program can’t afford to lose anybody,” Branson said. Worth noting that Virgin Galactic is currently the only private space program to have killed anyone so far. This quote is from before the fatal 2014 crash, but the FAA makes it pretty clear that a virgin galactic had a cavalier attitude towards crew safety[0] back then too. Combined with this article, that paints a picture of Virgin Galactic as a genuinely unsafe company that is going to kill a lot of people if it’s not stopped. Manual processes, no safeties, high pilot work loads, and rockets do not mix well. 0 - This was caused by a design that explicitly assumed that highly trained test pilots were incapable of making mistakes. The design required manual activation, had no failsafes, and the pilots were not told that activation at too low a speed would cause the vehicle to break apart. A breathtakingly bad design for a spacecraft.
- darkcha0s 5y ago
  >activation at too low a speed would cause the vehicle to break apart. A breathtakingly bad design for a spacecraft. I do hope you know that outside its designed flight envelope, almost any space craft / rocket / airplane breaks apart pretty fast.
  - vultour 5y ago
    It is very difficult, and often impossible with all systems operational, to get a modern airliner outside of its flight envelope. I'd imagine a tiny glider with a rocket bolted on is a different story.
    - mianos 5y ago
      This is not true. In most cases you will get warnings but if you are hands-on you can fly into an unrecoverable situation, specially if you are not very high.
      - vultour 5y ago
        The systems prevent you from flying outside of the flight envelope, not from smashing the plane into the ground. Of course you can crash if you want, but the plane will still be within the flight envelope.
m3at 5y ago
Interesting article regarding Virgin Galactic safety practices. I'm not sure about this comparison though? > Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin [...] profits depend on making frequent and safe human spaceflight a reality. For SpaceX, their profits are largely driven by unmanned launches. Maybe the point was just to mention a better known company to the general public?
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  Its talking about the future.
thefounder 5y ago
To me this looks like some PR from Bezos as its Origin flights are not crewed. "Every Virgin Galactic test flight is crewed, which makes each one a matter of life and death."
anonymousiam 5y ago
Good article, but I did not like the way it referred to Scaled Composites as a company "contracting" for Virgin. IIRC Burt Rutan (founder of Scaled Composites) began the whole program (Spaceship One. etc.), but became associated with Branson later, and that eventually led to an acquisition. I suppose that like many others, the acquisition deal required the re-writing of history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites
- rrss 5y ago
  Scaled Composites was contracting for Virgin Galactic though. Rutan and Scaled did SpaceShipOne for the X Prize, then Branson contracted them to do SpaceShipTwo for Virgin. Also, i don’t follow what you are saying about the acquisition - Scaled was acquired by Northrop Grumman back in 2007, not Virgin Galactic / Branson.
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  Interestingly Scaled Composites was not mentioned even once during the livestream.
lanevorockz 5y ago
Too much narrative and too little facts. I don’t care how much the journalist hates space travel, just get to the point. All that rumble means, he personally believes that “a more risky” correction for a red light was taken because the pilot was afraid of Branson being angry. A bit of a silly argument when you are talking about life and death situation.
- caconym_ 5y ago
  > A bit of a silly argument when you are talking about life and death situation. "Get-there-itis", a.k.a. plan continuation bias, is a real thing that's gotten a lot of aviators and their passengers killed.
  - andi999 5y ago
    It totally is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk_air_disaster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk_air_disaster Seems they didn't wanted to be late and there were quite a few important passengers.
codezero 5y ago
I didn't realize this was a sub 100k flight... wow. What a sad regression. I went to Vandeberg in 2004 to watch the X-prize launch which actually hit 100k. It was anticlimactic as an event... No confident confirmation of the accomplishment at the time, which is pretty great in retrospect, comparing to Branson's bravado at... not even hitting space, but marketing it as hitting space. Get tossed.
junon 5y ago
What a refreshing bit of real journalism. Of course it's not unbiased but it feels as though it's reported accurately. Out of curiosity, is the New Yorker an outlier here in this regard? I almost forgot what it was like to read a real article like this.
tasogare 5y ago
I know quite a bunch of software engineers which are fine with what are basically beta version of vaccines. Go figure.
- tsukikage 5y ago
  I mean, it beats eating horse dewormer.
  - drno123 5y ago
    You are aware that Ivermectin is FDA approved for human use?
    - tsukikage 5y ago
      FDA approves particular formulations of drugs for particular uses, generally in the context of being prescribed by a medical professional who understands when the treatment is appropriate and what the correct dosage should be. To the best of my knowledge it has not approved people randomly going down to the pet shop and chomping down on the horse dewormer just because they've chosen to eschew interventions that actually help but also don't want to get scarred lungs and/or die. But you don't have to take my word for it. Here's what the FDA has to say on the subject: https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-should-not-use-ivermectin-treat-or-prevent-covid-19 https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul...
    - drno123 5y ago
      For all the downvoters: https://ivmmeta.com https://ivmmeta.com + from India: https://www.thedesertreview.com/news/national/ivermectin-obliterates-97-percent-of-delhi-cases/article_6a3be6b2-c31f-11eb-836d-2722d2325a08.html https://www.thedesertreview.com/news/national/ivermectin-obl...
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - 5y ago
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
Richard Branson does seem to be a little accident prone: https://thebookofman.com/body/adventure/sir-richard-branson/ https://thebookofman.com/body/adventure/sir-richard-branson/ “On my first time skydiving, there was one cord that opened the parachute, and one that got rid of it. I pulled the wrong cord by mistake. I was falling through the air before an instructor managed to yank my spare ripcord.”
- teekert 5y ago
  Why would there be a cord to get rid of an unopened parachute?
  - iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
    I don't know how it was in 1986, but today you have 3 "chords". One in the back is the primary chute and hopefully the only one you need. On the front you have two. One cuts the primary, whether or not you've opened it, and the other deploys the secondary.
  - scanny 5y ago
    Should the main chute be tangled and you want to deploy a reserve probably
  - erostrate 5y ago
    The cord is designed to get rid of an incorrectly opened main parachute. Not an unopened one. This is to allow safe deployment of the reserve parachute. On modern parachutes it won't actually get rid of an unopened main parachute. A main parachute that refuses to open at all is actually scarier than a poorly opened one, because it could get open anytime. Including after you have opened the reserve one. Then you have two parachutes open, and they can get into surprising unstable aerodynamic configurations (a downplane). And you can't easily get rid of an unopened main parachute. Source: I learned skydiving this summer
aazaa 5y ago
> ... On the morning of the flight, Branson, an outspoken environmentalist, appeared on the “livestream” arriving at the spaceport on a bicycle. But this turned out to be false: Branson did not pedal to work that day; the bike ride was filmed a week earlier and then made to look like it happened that morning. When Reuters called out the company, an anonymous official said, “We regret the error and any confusion it may have caused.” But this was no "error": > Branson also told spectators about the bike ride during a post-flight celebration at the spaceport, Reuters said. "It's so awesome to arrive on a bicycle, across this beautiful New Mexico countryside," Branson was quoted as telling the crowd from a stage. https://www.space.com/virgin-galactic-richard-branson-bike-ride-video-update-unity-22 https://www.space.com/virgin-galactic-richard-branson-bike-r... Even without the red light, this incident speaks volumes about what's going in inside this "company." As long as Branson is at the helm, VG's prospects as a going concern seem dim. You can't merch your way into space with the usual marketing game plan. Mother Nature always calls bullshit.
belter 5y ago
And they got grounded... https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58421796 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58421796
fbomb 5y ago
https://mantiseye.com/img/caps/102/scr05.jpg https://mantiseye.com/img/caps/102/scr05.jpg

476 points by zlsa 5y ago

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

ragnot 5y ago
As much as I hate to admit it, "ego" has driven so much innovation in space that it was probably inevitable that something like this would happen.
- krapp 5y ago
  The egos of the rich fuel the engine of civilization, and the blood of the poor grease its wheels.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    I think it's a bigger category: the egos of the powerful. The rich are a subset.
    - krapp 5y ago
      I can't think of anyone powerful enough who isn't also rich. Although "rich" is a vaguely defined term. There still to me seems to be a direct relationship between money and power - billionaires can push the world further than millionaires, than the upper class, etc.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        Money and power are two sides of the same coin. Money is literally the unit of measure for power over other people - to the first approximation, a dollar in hand means you can make appropriate people do a dollar's worth of arbitrary work for you. The more money you have, the more you have of this kind of power mediated by economy. You can, in particular, use this power to have politicians do work for you (many ways of doing this are perfectly legal). Conversely, political power - the kind mediated by legal systems or explicit threats of violence - is directly convertible to money. (There's also a special variant of the latter - power wielded by organized religions. The power to browbeat others into doing almost any arbitrary work. Of course, that one too is trivially convertible to both money and political power, and vice versa. That's why fully separating business, church and state is fundamentally impossible. They're different facets of the same thing. An Unholy Trinity.)
        zhoujianfu 5y ago
        Rich is how much money you own. Power is how much money you control. They’re not as closely linked as you think. A managing partner of a $1B fund is more powerful than a person worth $10B on paper whose wealth is all tied up in a minority position in a company they are unable to sell the shares of. Or consider the power of Biden vs his personal net worth.
        robertlagrant 5y ago
        That's why being worth something on paper is not the same thing as money.
    - aaaxyz 5y ago
      That's a bit of a tautology isn't it?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  We used to have smart guys in competition. Edison vs. Tesla. Not we have rich business savy guys with not much of a science background holding the cards. I have met very few wealthy men, young or old, who had great ideas. It's almost like the money dulls their brains? And their vanity projects are usually way out of their wheelhouse. It's the same with Writers. I have read very few wealthy guys shop could write. They certainly have the time to write, but it's dribble. They are only read because they have money.
  - allovertheworld 5y ago
    That's because Edison vs. Tesla was really mostly theoretical with some funds for engineering (and marketing). The space race is really mostly engineering which requires lots of money.
  - slugiscool99 5y ago
    Apparently Edison was much more of a businessman than his legacy suggests - which was intentional on his part. Similar to Bill Gates, they both started as engineers but made their money organizing people. See https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/the-real-nature-of-thomas-edisons-genius https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/the-real-natur...
  - majkinetor 5y ago
    Not really a competition. Comparing Tesla to Edison is like comparing Virgin Galactic to SpaceX.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Edison wasn't a smart guy. He hired smart guys and didn't give them credit for their inventions, while trying to talk to the dead.
    - kergonath 5y ago
      Sounds exactly like at least a pair of these attention-seeking billionaires who rant about technology and engineering.
aaroninsf 5y ago
I would unpack "gutsy" with its overtones of grudging admiration, into a lot harsher terms related to toxic narcissism and what amounts to a pissing contest between competitive men. I suspect there is a natural evolutionary curb on the somewhat sociopathic qualities at work, whereby bravado is kept in some check by self-culling being commonplace.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  If something has positive side-effects, can it be called toxic?
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    Of course. Plenty of toxic things that you want to avoid have positive side-effects. Including chemical toxins.
  - liamwire 5y ago
    I’d like to submit Botox as an example that, yes, it can be.
bee_rider 5y ago
The whole exercise was dumb. Flying up and then down on a rocket is a difference in degree, rather than type, from taking a ride on the Vomit Comet. Orbit -- half way to anywhere -- that's the accomplishment.
- bnralt 5y ago
  I also don't think people realize how close to the earth these people still were. Take a globe, hold your finger as close as you can to it without touching, and that's about as high as Bezos and Branson went. As you said, orbital is what matters, and a suborbital flight around the Karman line doesn't mean much.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Noumenon72 5y ago
    For comparison, how high off the globe would orbit be?
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      Orbit can occur at any distance from Earth if you are the right speed I guess -- although below a handful of fingers you'll get significant drag from the atmosphere. Since the atmosphere doesn't just suddenly cut off at some point, it is a matter of degrees. But for example, the ISS orbits around 400km and needs to be boosted a 'few times a year.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit#Examples (The Karman line is around 100km, so if we want to use 500ish km as the threshold for reasonable orbits, we really are in the ballpark of a hand's worth of fingers). The altitude isn't really the point, so much as the trajectory -- if they miss the ground at least once I say we give them a round of applause.
    - SonicScrub 5y ago
      Bit of a bad comparison of accomplishment. Low Earth Orbit isn't that much higher. But it is much much faster (which is what's hard). Getting into orbit is about going fast enough that the centripetal force from your velocity keeps you aloft. To get into a stable orbit at a precise target altitude requires accurate timings and controls, and lots more energy. The engineering challenge is orders of magnitude more difficult.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Hardly the first time Branson has put his life at risk, with others in tow, for an aeronautical accomplishment.
jlawson 5y ago
It seems humans need a sense of competition to make progress towards any goal beyond the day-to-day. If I have to choose between this and nuclear-armed superpowers intimidating each other with super-accurate rockets - I'll take the billionaires. To be honest I think it's awesome. We need people who are able and willing to push for something beyond the everyday, and it doesn't really matter why they're doing it.
- krisoft 5y ago
  > it doesn't really matter why they're doing it. I disagree with that. Why they are doing what they are doing is very important. Elon is a set of flaws walking on two legs but his plans make sense: Humanity has all their eggs in one basket by being a single planet species. To change that we need to make space travel much, much cheaper than it was. To do that we need reusable and economical spacecrafts. He works alongside this plan. Branson made people build him the adult version of a coin operated mall kiddie ride. You give it money and it shakes you around and later you can tell people that you are now an astronaut. Two people, both have a ton of money and both used some of their wealth to assemble a team to build a spacecraft. The difference between them is the “why” they did this. One if suceeds has changed the history of humankind. If he fails at the grand goal misserably he still made a vastly succesfull space company. The other if he succeeds has a funfair ride with bragging rights. Meh. The why is all that matters, because it affects the how and the what fundamentally.
- achenet 5y ago
  > It seems humans need a sense of competition to make progress towards any goal beyond the day-to-day. No, you're overgeneralizing. As counter-examples: - fitness goals - financial freedom goals (eg the FIRE communities) - altruistic goals - romantic goals (impress a potential partner) are all proof that humans can be motivated by health/desire for physical well-being, kindness, compassion and personal comfort to progress to goals beyond the day-to-day. Competition motivates some progress, but there are other sources of motivation as well :)
  - jlawson 5y ago
    Fitness goals are generally related to romatic goals. Romantic goals are inherently competitive - if you succeed, you're taking the partner from whoever else would have gotten her had you never existed. Financial freedom isn't competitive really, you're right. Altruism is borderline, given how much of "altruistic" activity is really about social signaling and competitive status games through conspicuous giving. Even if subconsciously. All the above are day-to-day goals though, except perhaps altruism. By not day-to-day I mean something beyond satisfying the desires of your physical body to feel good, fuck, eat well, be safe, be admired, etc. Goals about species, deep time, eternal questions, the fate of the environment or the planet.
mc32 5y ago
There are other flaws too. Like pretending to bike to the spaceport on the day of, but it was actually filmed the week before and when called out, they said, oops, you're right, sorry! It's like when Guy Fiery in his hot rod. He pretends he rolls up to the place in his 70s hot rod, but actually it's just rolled out of the truck that lugs it around from location to location and he opens the door, sits, gets filmed getting out, shuts the door and it goes back up the ramp. It's all fakery.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Also those shows where they view three houses, then buy one, all in the same week : in reality the producers find someone who has just bought a house, then they make the show using that house and two other random houses, and lo and behold they find a house they like!
  - amatecha 5y ago
    Oh dang, for real? That's super weak if true! Also, no wonder they have hundreds of episodes... I'd be curious if you have any links/etc. on the subject to share!
    - dylan604 5y ago
      It still amazes me that anyone still believes that the pictures they see on TV are in any way real. 100% of content on TV is fake. I used to say except the news, but now I'm not even able to trust that. If it's a commercial, definitely fake. If it's a TV show, 100% fake. Games shows shoot 5 episodes in a day, so when they say "last week's winner" it was last hour's.
      - bonestamp2 5y ago
        Talk Shows are the worst for this. Many of them have a rehearsal with the guests. It's no surprise that all of the guests have amazingly funny or interesting stories about every topic the host brings up. Once you know this is how they work, it's impossible to unsee it when you're watching them. I'm sorry I ruined talk shows for anyone here who may like them.
timmytokyo 5y ago
Violating airspace regulations isn't gutsy. It's irresponsible and selfish. It puts others at risk.
- rpmisms 5y ago
  Life is risk, sometimes with other people's lives in the balance. Violating their airspace, in this context, was absolutely gutsy, and dangerous, and stupid, but all of them have massive balls and my respect.
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    What about that is deserving of respect? Edit: This was an honest question, and I was hoping for an answer that would help me to understand. It's a shame that this is getting downvoted rather than someone enlightening me.
    - doctor_eval 5y ago
      Anyone can win if they are allowed to break the rules. You get my respect by completing the mission within the rules.
      - Sebb767 5y ago
        To be fair, the rules they are really up against are those of physics and they naturally can't break those. FAA rules are rather pale in comparison.
        doctor_eval 5y ago
        The rules I'm referring to are the ones that say "if this light goes red, abort the mission instead of potentially crashing into other people or killing everyone aboard".
      - bumby 5y ago
        This is unfortunately common. Even NASA regularly ignores their own standards and procedures due to schedule and budget pressures.
decebalus1 5y ago
> the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man. So much energy invested in a dick measuring contest. I hope humanity reaches a point in which the incentive structure would stimulate a more meaningful investment of human labor. Not to say I'm not part of the problem...
bamboozled 5y ago
Funny too because no one cares,few months after the event and it’s all water under the bridge. People remember Yuri Gagarin, not these people.
- baud147258 5y ago
  I'd wager that if Branson had died on the flight, people would remember it
  - bamboozled 5y ago
    Yuri didn't die, everyone remembers it, I don't get your point.
Aeolun 5y ago
> Branson did put his life on the line to achieve that accolade though, which was a gutsy move. I’m more concerned that he also puts other people’s lives on the line.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> all for the inflated ego of one man. Well, no. All for the best marketing position for the near-space tourism business that Virgin (and, in competition, Blue Origin) is launching and each promoting with the media frenzy around their respective founder-on-board demo launch.
justinclift 5y ago
> Brilliant well written article. Personally, I found it the exact opposite. It's like the author was trying to pad something simple into "War and Peace" type volume. Gave up after just a few paragraphs, as it's clear the author had no intention of getting to the point any time soon.

vermontdevil 5y ago

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

beerandt 5y ago
They didn't fire him for the emails, they fired him for publicly bad mouthing the company. There were ~2 years in between.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  If internally bad-mouthing the company doesn’t work, what are you left with?
  - beerandt 5y ago
    It's not that he should or shouldn't have, it's that once you make that decision, certain consequences become likely. I place it more on the author trying to paint a victim narrative, given the guys board resignation (he knew his fate), and the fact that the author directly benefitted from the decision that got him fired.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      > It's not that he should or shouldn't have > I place it more on the author trying to paint a victim narrative, If he should have, he's a victim; if he shouldn't have, he's not. If you "place it more" on the author trying to paint a victim narrative, you're explicitly saying that it is about whether he should or shouldn't have, and that you think he shouldn't have.
      - beerandt 5y ago

bambax 5y ago

In short, we are now using billionaires instead of dogs to test spaceships. I would argue that's progress.

jedberg 5y ago
Credit to Musk here for being smart enough not to get in one of his own rockets (yet).
- mongol 5y ago
  Is that really to his credit though? Should he not be prepared to risk his own life, just like those of his employees?
  - rpmisms 5y ago
    I think it's worth pointing out that Virgin is literally trying to enable space tourism, which is just a side effect for SpaceX. Branson was testing and advertising his product, Elon would be taking valuable time away from his mission.
  - onethought 5y ago
    His employees haven’t got in those rockets either.
  - the-pigeon 5y ago
    SpaceX employees haven't gone to space. Just NASA astronauts on SpaceX rockets. And this privately paid for mission coming up. I don't think it's the CEO's job to be a test pilot. I think that's pretty crazy actually. I know someone who is a test pilot. He's trained a long time to do it. You want someone in the craft that is an expert at both piloting spacecraft and the engineering of the craft. Musk is certainly no pilot and the job of CEO does not require you to have those skills. It could be argued that since these systems are fully automated that you don't need anyone with special skills there. But being a programmer I don't trust software for every situation. So I sure think if you are going to put a person on it, they should be able to intervene if needed. There should be a purpose to their risk.

s5300 5y ago

Wow. Despite his ever growing amount of haters, Musk & Co. do really seem to be placing safety fairly high up on their priority list, if not at the top where Musk says it is. Branson... does not particularly seem to be doing so. I'm unaware if he's ever repeatedly claimed safety is Virgins top priority though. Wonder how things go down in Bezos land.

ncallaway 5y ago
I think Blue Origin has appeared from the outside to be pretty safety focused. Blue Origin had 15 successful unmanned test flights of the New Shepard program before launching Jeff and the other astronauts. That's a very extensive test launch regime to conduct of a rocket. Of course Blue Origin is very closed off (especially compared to SpaceX), so it's harder to gauge how much internal weight they put on safety.
ElFitz 5y ago
A funny thought. Given - how easy it supposedly would be to find someone to bribe with the inheritance one would get from someone like Bezos and Branson, - how many people work on getting these rockets into space and those men back - how complex and fragile rockets are - how dangerous the whole endeavour is commonly believed to be - that they both came back alive Can we assume that all these murder mystery tv shows and movies have lied to us all along? Unless falling victim to convoluted plots to murder rich relatives for the inheritance only happens to the rich but not the ultra-rich?
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  You would need the inheritee and the engineer to both be willing to commit murder and run the calculus that the money is more valuable than the risk of them going to jail and losing their inheritance forever, which is probably a really bad bet given one of them is a spacex engineer or something and the other is, what, an heir to the bezos fortune? Silly
  - the-pigeon 5y ago

tzs 5y ago

PBS Spacetime episode from a couple years ago about private space travel with a big focus on Branson's approach [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWk9d_YCQOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWk9d_YCQOk

BitwiseFool 5y ago

Let's hope Elon Musk gets cold feet and doesn't fly on that ship. SpaceShipTwo is a pretty atrocious design, safety-wise, compared to what you can accomplish with a capsule and vertical rocket for suborbital spaceflight. https://www.space.com/elon-musk-will-fly-on-virgin-galactic https://www.space.com/elon-musk-will-fly-on-virgin-galactic

andyxor 5y ago
I hope Musk values his self-imposed mission enough to not take that risk. If he actually takes that flight it would be the single biggest threat to the future of space exploration.

bryananderson 5y ago

I recommend Schmidle’s recent book “Test Gods” if you are interested in Virgin Galactic and test piloting. Schmidle is not an engineer and I would have enjoyed a deeper dive into Virgin Galactic’s design choices, but it is a great book about (among other things) the tensions that emerge when a complex technical project is overseen from a distance by utterly nontechnical, PR-oriented upper management. The company’s communications and business strategies make a lot more sense knowing that the people calling the shots do not comprehend in the slightest how their product works. For many reasons (some alluded to in this article, many more in the book), SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. Engineering leadership has done what they can to make the vehicle safer (at the cost of performance), but the intractable issue is that any one mistake by a pilot is likely to be fatal (and already has been, in the 2014 accident). Voices like Stucky and Ericson who wanted to acknowledge the inherent danger of the vehicle (which doesn’t mean grounding it) have been ignored and ultimately removed. The company’s business requires the vehicle to be understood to be safe by the public. The chickens will come home to roost.

IggleSniggle 5y ago
> SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. This comment reminded me of another story from a previous aerospace era (blimp cruise liners aka airships), the summary of which is: > A British Lord wanted to build the best airship in the world – and so he had two rival design teams battle it out to win the juicy government contract. Competition is supposed to bring the best out of people, but run in the wrong way it can cause people (and the things they make) to fall apart in the most horrifying ways. https://timharford.com/2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-4-the-deadly-airship-race/ https://timharford.com/2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-4-the-dea...
- monocasa 5y ago
  Hmm, that certainly colors a rumor I've heard about Apple. That they'll have two or three teams compete on a new product... but they won't tell the teams that they have competition until final demo day.

anotheryou 5y ago

I didn't get why the orange or red light is scary. Because it could mean landing in the desert when you are a glider?

mabbo 5y ago
You don't 'land in the desert'. It has to come down on a runway. Any risk to that means very high likelihood of injuries or death. Was that the case here? Maybe, maybe not. But the flight plan was built with safety in mind, and the pilots should have aborted.
- anotheryou 5y ago
  Makes sense :) I forgot the space shuttle was also dubbed a flying/gliding brick
asdfadsfgfdda 5y ago
It's a glider, but a glider capable of mach 3 flight. So, approach speeds will be much faster than a typical glider. Probably higher speed than an airliner. That would be dangerous to land off field. Also, it could mean the vehicle is exposed to aerodynamic conditions it is not designed for, operating outside of the flight envelope.
wongarsu 5y ago
For reference, here's a video of a Boing 727 landing in the desert: https://youtu.be/kJZ1eHU_JZg?t=51 https://youtu.be/kJZ1eHU_JZg?t=51 It doesn't go terribly well.
- overspeed 5y ago
  I don't believe the intention of that test was to try and safely put a plane down in a desert. It was a remote controlled crash test. The wiki page[1] says the descent rate was 1500 feet per minute. A typical touchdown rate according to the linked MIT article about this crash[2] puts airliner landings at 10-20 feet per minute. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Boeing_727_crash_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Boeing_727_crash_experime... [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130129040232/http://alum.mit.edu/pages/sliceofmit/2012/10/10/scientists-crash-a-plane-in-the-name-of-safety/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130129040232/http://alum.mit.e...

1024core 5y ago

> Eight days after Branson’s flight, an H.R. manager booked time on his calendar, and then fired Stucky over Zoom. Such a shame. You can bet that this will come back to bite Virgin, and should a serious accident happen and they get sued, Stucky could be a prime witness. Don't burn bridges.

mabbo 5y ago

This highlights why having automated pilots in spaceships is so critical. Software can be tested more thoroughly than humans, and cannot override safety protocols. If the rules say to abort, the software aborts. Humans get to say "I think we'll be fine", and put lives on the line.

CharlesW 5y ago
> If the rules say to abort, the software aborts. Humans get to say "I think we'll be fine", and put lives on the line. But logic errors and bugs in "thoroughly-tested" (subjective, determined by humans/corporations) software-controlled systems kills too. Interesting thought experiment: How many humans will die in 2031, across all industries, because of bad software? https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-race-condition-therac-25 https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-race-condition-therac-2...
ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
In contrast, humans can also say: "It's saying to abort because the sensor reading is incorrect, we'll be fine." It's tricky... in the airplane world, I think it is understood that the current state of the art is an extremely well trained and competent pilot coupled with a nice advanced cockpit is the gold standard. Where each of their responsibilities lie, and how well they work together, is where the rubber meets the road. The record is beyond question that increased automation has drastically reduced airplane fatalities, while there are also being many, many fatal accidents which are quite clearly a case of automation gone awry. Effectively putting both of them together is quite a fascinating problem, and one I think we are still in the infancy of fully understanding, particularly in brand new domains that are emerging like self-driving cars, etc.
WalterBright 5y ago
Automation is critical, but also the ability to override software that fails is critical, too. Armstrong overrode the failed LEM computer to land safely. Of the 3 737MAX software stab trim runaway incidents, only one crew followed the stab trim override instructions and saved their plane. Pilots are never perfect, and neither is the software. Need both watching each other.

Mitzz 5y ago

While I'm super excited about the future of space tourism, I dread a "Hindenburg" catastrophe that stops the whole idea for a generation.

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WalterBright 5y ago
If the Hindenburg disaster had not been filmed, it likely would not have stopped Zeppelin travel.

tdeck 5y ago

> “I don’t know how we didn’t lose the vehicle and kill three people,” Todd Ericson, a retired Air Force Colonel and Virgin Galactic’s then vice-president of safety and test, told me in a 2020 interview. I'm pretty impressed by this guy. Not only did he quit his VP job when he saw these safety problems, but he went around giving interviews about them. It strikes me that very few people would have done the same.

aerosmile 5y ago
> Not only did he quit his VP job when he saw these safety problems Agree, great guy, putting his ethics ahead of his career > but he went around giving interviews about them Hmmm, gets a bit murky here. If he wanted to save lives, there's a very clear path to alerting the FAA. But he didn't do that. This sounds a bit more like he was trying to save his career. Which brings in question why he quit in the first place, and how voluntary that was to begin with.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  > If he wanted to save lives, there's a very clear path to alerting the FAA. Is there? I doubt you can just call up the FAA and be like, "hey, my former employer is going to get people killed." The FAA will naturally call the employer and the employer will naturally defend themselves, calling the ex-employee a kook. You probably need to generate awareness of the issues in public and show the FAA you're not the only engineer who thinks those practices are unsafe. Then, and only then when you have some accredited clout behind your accusation, can you start holding the FAA's feet to the fire for inaction. And after that, maybe they will investigate.
  - aerosmile 5y ago
    https://hotline.faa.gov/ https://hotline.faa.gov/ It's a thing, trust me, and works a lot better than you assumed above. You absolutely don't need an article in the NY Times to initiate an FAA audit.
    - 5y ago

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selimnairb 5y ago

dont care

jonplackett 5y ago

> And now they were accelerating to Mach 3, with a red light glowing in the cockpit. Fortunately for Branson and the three other crew members in the back, the pilots got the ship into space and landed safely It seems like we’re missing the crucial step of how it all turned out OK. 2 paragraphs earlier they’re saying how red lights ought to ‘scare the shit out of you’ and ‘it’s too late once it turns red’.

gwern 5y ago
Yes, the red light is supposed to mean that they failed to boost enough to be able to glide back to their target runway. But... they did anyway? Apparently? Something is missing from this account.
- theelous3 5y ago
  Typically warning lights appear when the thing they warn about is impending, not that you've past the point. Otherwise they would be useless, except for existential mockery.
  - iab 5y ago
    "Should have aborted lol"
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I always wanted a street navigator that would say: "you should have turned left back there" followed by a random insult in various languages. Much like every human navigator I've ever had who has been as unhelpful as possible.
    - kevinventullo 5y ago
      Or maybe just a heavy sigh before “Rerouting…”.
    - tragomaskhalos 5y ago
      Satnavs are actually too polite - explicitly telling the driver that they went wrong (sans insults of course!) is useful information that could avoid a lot of confusion. I imagine the reason that this is not done is the same reason as lots of sound engineering is compromised - marketing dweebs.

worker767424 5y ago

> The ship uses rocket power to get into space, but glides back to Earth and lands on a runway, like the space shuttle would do. Does that mean it can't do a go around?

zlsa 5y ago
Correct, they have one chance to land. (But the runway is REALLY long.)
rozab 5y ago
I understand it has pretty good glide characteristics, MUCH better than the space shuttle, allowing for abort at basically any stage of the flight. Also they actually get given parachutes, unlike pre-Challenger STS missions. The space shuttle was really grim.

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ashtonkem 5y ago

> “ A private program can’t afford to lose anybody,” Branson said. Worth noting that Virgin Galactic is currently the only private space program to have killed anyone so far. This quote is from before the fatal 2014 crash, but the FAA makes it pretty clear that a virgin galactic had a cavalier attitude towards crew safety[0] back then too. Combined with this article, that paints a picture of Virgin Galactic as a genuinely unsafe company that is going to kill a lot of people if it’s not stopped. Manual processes, no safeties, high pilot work loads, and rockets do not mix well. 0 - This was caused by a design that explicitly assumed that highly trained test pilots were incapable of making mistakes. The design required manual activation, had no failsafes, and the pilots were not told that activation at too low a speed would cause the vehicle to break apart. A breathtakingly bad design for a spacecraft.

darkcha0s 5y ago
>activation at too low a speed would cause the vehicle to break apart. A breathtakingly bad design for a spacecraft. I do hope you know that outside its designed flight envelope, almost any space craft / rocket / airplane breaks apart pretty fast.
- vultour 5y ago
  It is very difficult, and often impossible with all systems operational, to get a modern airliner outside of its flight envelope. I'd imagine a tiny glider with a rocket bolted on is a different story.
  - mianos 5y ago
    This is not true. In most cases you will get warnings but if you are hands-on you can fly into an unrecoverable situation, specially if you are not very high.
    - vultour 5y ago
      The systems prevent you from flying outside of the flight envelope, not from smashing the plane into the ground. Of course you can crash if you want, but the plane will still be within the flight envelope.

m3at 5y ago

Interesting article regarding Virgin Galactic safety practices. I'm not sure about this comparison though? > Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin [...] profits depend on making frequent and safe human spaceflight a reality. For SpaceX, their profits are largely driven by unmanned launches. Maybe the point was just to mention a better known company to the general public?

aero-glide2 5y ago
Its talking about the future.

thefounder 5y ago

To me this looks like some PR from Bezos as its Origin flights are not crewed. "Every Virgin Galactic test flight is crewed, which makes each one a matter of life and death."

anonymousiam 5y ago

Good article, but I did not like the way it referred to Scaled Composites as a company "contracting" for Virgin. IIRC Burt Rutan (founder of Scaled Composites) began the whole program (Spaceship One. etc.), but became associated with Branson later, and that eventually led to an acquisition. I suppose that like many others, the acquisition deal required the re-writing of history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites

rrss 5y ago
Scaled Composites was contracting for Virgin Galactic though. Rutan and Scaled did SpaceShipOne for the X Prize, then Branson contracted them to do SpaceShipTwo for Virgin. Also, i don’t follow what you are saying about the acquisition - Scaled was acquired by Northrop Grumman back in 2007, not Virgin Galactic / Branson.
aero-glide2 5y ago
Interestingly Scaled Composites was not mentioned even once during the livestream.

lanevorockz 5y ago

Too much narrative and too little facts. I don’t care how much the journalist hates space travel, just get to the point. All that rumble means, he personally believes that “a more risky” correction for a red light was taken because the pilot was afraid of Branson being angry. A bit of a silly argument when you are talking about life and death situation.

caconym_ 5y ago
> A bit of a silly argument when you are talking about life and death situation. "Get-there-itis", a.k.a. plan continuation bias, is a real thing that's gotten a lot of aviators and their passengers killed.
- andi999 5y ago
  It totally is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk_air_disaster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk_air_disaster Seems they didn't wanted to be late and there were quite a few important passengers.

codezero 5y ago

I didn't realize this was a sub 100k flight... wow. What a sad regression. I went to Vandeberg in 2004 to watch the X-prize launch which actually hit 100k. It was anticlimactic as an event... No confident confirmation of the accomplishment at the time, which is pretty great in retrospect, comparing to Branson's bravado at... not even hitting space, but marketing it as hitting space. Get tossed.

junon 5y ago

What a refreshing bit of real journalism. Of course it's not unbiased but it feels as though it's reported accurately. Out of curiosity, is the New Yorker an outlier here in this regard? I almost forgot what it was like to read a real article like this.

tasogare 5y ago

I know quite a bunch of software engineers which are fine with what are basically beta version of vaccines. Go figure.

tsukikage 5y ago
I mean, it beats eating horse dewormer.
- drno123 5y ago
  You are aware that Ivermectin is FDA approved for human use?
  - tsukikage 5y ago
    FDA approves particular formulations of drugs for particular uses, generally in the context of being prescribed by a medical professional who understands when the treatment is appropriate and what the correct dosage should be. To the best of my knowledge it has not approved people randomly going down to the pet shop and chomping down on the horse dewormer just because they've chosen to eschew interventions that actually help but also don't want to get scarred lungs and/or die. But you don't have to take my word for it. Here's what the FDA has to say on the subject: https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-should-not-use-ivermectin-treat-or-prevent-covid-19 https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul...
  - drno123 5y ago
    For all the downvoters: https://ivmmeta.com https://ivmmeta.com + from India: https://www.thedesertreview.com/news/national/ivermectin-obliterates-97-percent-of-delhi-cases/article_6a3be6b2-c31f-11eb-836d-2722d2325a08.html https://www.thedesertreview.com/news/national/ivermectin-obl...
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- 5y ago

helsinkiandrew 5y ago

Richard Branson does seem to be a little accident prone: https://thebookofman.com/body/adventure/sir-richard-branson/ https://thebookofman.com/body/adventure/sir-richard-branson/ “On my first time skydiving, there was one cord that opened the parachute, and one that got rid of it. I pulled the wrong cord by mistake. I was falling through the air before an instructor managed to yank my spare ripcord.”

teekert 5y ago
Why would there be a cord to get rid of an unopened parachute?
- iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
  I don't know how it was in 1986, but today you have 3 "chords". One in the back is the primary chute and hopefully the only one you need. On the front you have two. One cuts the primary, whether or not you've opened it, and the other deploys the secondary.
- scanny 5y ago
  Should the main chute be tangled and you want to deploy a reserve probably
- erostrate 5y ago
  The cord is designed to get rid of an incorrectly opened main parachute. Not an unopened one. This is to allow safe deployment of the reserve parachute. On modern parachutes it won't actually get rid of an unopened main parachute. A main parachute that refuses to open at all is actually scarier than a poorly opened one, because it could get open anytime. Including after you have opened the reserve one. Then you have two parachutes open, and they can get into surprising unstable aerodynamic configurations (a downplane). And you can't easily get rid of an unopened main parachute. Source: I learned skydiving this summer

aazaa 5y ago

> ... On the morning of the flight, Branson, an outspoken environmentalist, appeared on the “livestream” arriving at the spaceport on a bicycle. But this turned out to be false: Branson did not pedal to work that day; the bike ride was filmed a week earlier and then made to look like it happened that morning. When Reuters called out the company, an anonymous official said, “We regret the error and any confusion it may have caused.” But this was no "error": > Branson also told spectators about the bike ride during a post-flight celebration at the spaceport, Reuters said. "It's so awesome to arrive on a bicycle, across this beautiful New Mexico countryside," Branson was quoted as telling the crowd from a stage. https://www.space.com/virgin-galactic-richard-branson-bike-ride-video-update-unity-22 https://www.space.com/virgin-galactic-richard-branson-bike-r... Even without the red light, this incident speaks volumes about what's going in inside this "company." As long as Branson is at the helm, VG's prospects as a going concern seem dim. You can't merch your way into space with the usual marketing game plan. Mother Nature always calls bullshit.

belter 5y ago

And they got grounded... https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58421796 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58421796

fbomb 5y ago

https://mantiseye.com/img/caps/102/scr05.jpg https://mantiseye.com/img/caps/102/scr05.jpg