10 ms·

What this weeks events show us is that space travel is hard. Really hard. Most systems operate in extreme conditions, sometimes bordering on the improbable. Th

by mixmax 12y ago

What this weeks events show us is that space travel is hard. Really hard. Most systems operate in extreme conditions, sometimes bordering on the improbable. Thousands, sometimes millions of horsepower in an engine smaller than a car, cryogenic liquids at -200 degrees celsius cooling a nozzle that is 3000 degrees celsius 5 millimeters away, heatshields designed to absorb obscene amounts of heat, the list just goes on and on. Most people don't realize how hard this is. The physics, the engineering, the design. Yet we have made great strides, especially over the last few years, and Virgin Galactic is a part of this. There is a new era of cheap spaceflight on the horizon, driven forward by fearless men and women that want to go to space no matter what the cost. This is commendable, and is what drives the human race forward. Without these fearless men we wouldn't have gone to the moon. We wouldn't have explored the depths of the ocean. We wouldn't have flown the skies. Today it appears we lost one of these fearless men, but he now rests in peace assured that others will take his place, that he was not alone in his longing to drive mankind forwards into the unknown, that his dreams live on to inspire others. We have conquered the skies, and we will move on. Eventually we will conquer space and make it accessible to all mankind. A fearless man has given his life to allow us to some day leave the cradle that is mother Earth. His ultimate sacrifice won't be in vain.

atlantic 12y ago
> This is commendable, and is what drives the human race forward. Without these fearless men we wouldn't have gone to the moon. We wouldn't have explored the depths of the ocean. We wouldn't have flown the skies. That's one way of looking at the matter. Another is that without this untrammelled technological evolution (I hesitate to use the word "progress") we wouldn't be living through the greatest mass extinction event of the last few of million years. A lot of this effort could go instead into finding a better cohabitation between humans and the other species with whom we supposedly share the planet.
- tomrod 12y ago
  Until when? The next large asteroid? The next close-by gamma burst? The sun goes nova? Let's go see the universe, and take life along with us.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - revscat 12y ago
    That's not going to happen with chemical rockets. Until a radically different propulsion system is developed the only planet we have is this one.
    - skndr 12y ago
      The other efficient forms of propulsion actually require you to be in space due to low thrust-to-weight. Chemical rockets get us off the planet first.
    - ceejayoz 12y ago
      There's no reason to believe chemical rockets can't get a small, self-sustaining colony going. Asteroid/comet mining, a Mars base, etc. are likely possible with current or near-current technology. No, we're not going to move a billion or two people with them, but that's not what we need to make humanity multi-planet.
    - kstenerud 12y ago
      And so we just tell everyone in the space agency "Sorry guys, but we can't do any more space stuff besides ground-based telescopes until we come up with a better propulsion system. So we'll keep about 100 of you on board to come up with that and the rest of you are fired." Meanwhile, all of the derivative research (effects of zero gravity, life support systems, shielding, re-entry, etc) stagnates. And I guess we should dismantle our satellite systems as well, since they require rockets to achieve orbit. Maybe we should ban all cars while we're at it, since they pollute our environment. We should shut down the evil factories, too, so no electric cars, either. Yup, we can just sit in a circle, singing kumbayah while we wait for that miraculous perfect power source that someone else will develop for us. Then, and only THEN, can we continue with "progress".
    - cstross 12y ago
      Actually, it could happen with chemical rockets -- if we abandon the idea of sending canned monkeys beyond the atmosphere. We can afford to send up a couple of hundred tons of prokaryotic spores every year until the cows come home, with solar sails to get their packages up above solar escape velocity. Over a few decades or centuries that's a lot of unicellular organisms to scatter on the direction of exoplanets; we can hope that in a few million years one or another strikes edible dirt and begins to reproduce. This is, however, not as mythically resonant as "space: the final frontier" ...
- moskie 12y ago
  Such an incredible false choice you present.
- robertfw 12y ago
  I think you'll find that it hard to argue that the efforts of exploration are linked to our industrial pillage of the planet.
  - Retric 12y ago
    Early exploration was all about pillaging the planet. Much of the Sahara desert for example exists because destroyed the existing ecosystem which altered weather patterns and vastly expanding the desert. Recently we almost did the same to the Midwest in the US. In fact we still might be heading that way after the Ogallala Aquifer is used up. More recently Oil is currently driving a lot of exploration into the oceans and other remote regions. PS: Not that I think we should all just stay home, but whitewashing history is stupid.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    >I think you'll find that it hard to argue that the efforts of exploration are linked to our industrial pillage of the planet. It might be hard to argue that our industrial pillage of the planet is solely a result of exploration. Anything weaker than that and I think you have the tougher position.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Instead of living through the greatest mass extinction event in the last few million years, we'd be living in harmony with nature, dying of now-curable injuries, starving to death when times are lean, seeing our mothers and wives and daughters die in childbirth, and living in profound ignorance of the nature of the universe. At least with the mass extinction there are prospects for fixing the problem.
  - Turing_Machine 12y ago
    There have been at least five mass extinction events that wiped out over 50% of the species on the planet. Possibly as many as twenty. The Permian-Triassic event supposedly took out 90-96%(!) of all living species.
    - JabavuAdams 12y ago
      And yet, here we are. I'm totally okay with causing mass extinction as long as something human-descended comes out the other side.
- nether 12y ago
  Kaczynski was right.
- undersuit 12y ago
  I think there are many other areas humanity could shift their focus away from to better help cohabitation of this planet than spaceflight.
- revscat 12y ago
  You are getting downvoted, but I actually agree with you. Space travel is awesome, but so is living, and right now we are not living in a way that is sustainable over the short term. Space travel is, for me, an anachronistic hold-over from people who grew up with Heinlein, Asimov, etc., but is not something that is realistic given the environmental situation. Realistically, any vehicle that is dependent upon currently available propulsion systems is a waste of time. Our resources would be better spent elsewhere. I know that this opinion is anathema on a tech-heavy site such as this one, but I must nevertheless express my respectful disagreement. It would be far, far more productive for the species to dedicate resources towards CO2 and CH4 reduction in the lower atmosphere.
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    > Space travel is awesome, but so is living, and right now we are not living in a way that is sustainable over the short term. Space travel is fundamental to the human species living sustainably in the long term. Correcting greenhouse gasses doesn't help us if the next day we find a planet-killer asteroid is a few weeks away.
    - yongjik 12y ago
      I don't think you fully appreciate just how difficult space travel is, especially the kind of space travel where you found a colony that will sustain itself after the Earth is hit by an asteroid. The required scale of technology/economy comfortably puts it in "at least several centuries from now, if we're incredibly lucky and/or devoted". In this regard, the comment about CO2 is actually much more pertinent than it seems at first. If we manage to screw up the climate in this century (which seems very likely these days), inundating every coastal cities in the world, "sustainable space colony" will have to wait a bit longer. Much longer. If you're worried that an asteroid might hit us 500 years from now, you might want to rethink your priority. Advancing chemical rockets now is important, but compared to the scale of space colony, it feels somewhat like producing better vacuum tubes to make sure (say) the US is the first to create strong AI. Any sane 50s US leader would have understood that "trying not to have a nuclear war with Soviet" is a much more important goal anyway: you can't fund AI research if your country is a radioactive wasteland.
- vcjohnson 12y ago
  >A lot of this effort could go instead into finding a better cohabitation between humans and the other species with whom we supposedly share the planet. This is a false dilemma. We have 7+ billion people on the planet. There is most certainly a significant amount of effort going towards the future you mentioned. They are not mutually exclusive (and are, most likely, going to be a product of each other)
- pessimizer 12y ago
  You're forgetting how cool it would be for rich people to burn a couple hundred thousand to fly in space for two and a half hours. It's clearly the highest expression of the human spirit, and you're a hopeless hater cynic. I wonder what the carbon footprint of space tourism is, and will be if it becomes cheaper and more popular? I feel guilty flying on a plane.
  - brent_noorda 12y ago
    I worked out some quick math estimating 25,000 gallons just for the fuel for each tourist's 2-hour flight. Space tourism seems like the douchebaggiest idea ever created. I hope the in-flight space cocktails are worth it. http://brent-noorda.blogspot.com/2014/05/richard-branson-elon-musk-cognitive-dissonance.html http://brent-noorda.blogspot.com/2014/05/richard-branson-elo...
    - porsupah 12y ago
      Perhaps Skylon is more to your liking?
  - JabavuAdams 12y ago
    Live a little! It's okay to be human-supremacist. Sheesh. Have neo-cortex, will dominate.
- JabavuAdams 12y ago
  Boring.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tomrod 12y ago
There was a comment earlier asking for a source that someone didn't make it.[0] [0] News report: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/31/spaceshiptwo-richard-branson-virgin-crash-mojave http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/31/spaceshiptwo-...
nether 12y ago
> cryogenic liquids at -300 degrees celsius Absolute zero is -273 °C.
- mixmax 12y ago
  Thanks for the catch, it's updated now - stupid mistake...
- jaredmcdonald 12y ago
  now that is pushing boundaries
jcrites 12y ago
> Most systems operate in extreme conditions, sometimes bordering on the improbable. Indeed. Your statement reminds me of an insightful engineering article, "How Complex Systems Fail": http://www.ctlab.org/documents/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fail.pdf http://www.ctlab.org/documents/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fai... . A few relevant observations from the article that resonate with me: > 1) Complex systems are intrinsically hazardous systems. > 4) Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them. > 5) Complex systems run in degraded mode. > A corollary to the preceding point is that complex systems run as broken systems. The system continues to function because it contains so many redundancies and because people can make it function, despite the presence of many flaws. After accident reviews nearly always note that the system has a history of prior ‘proto-accidents’ that nearly generated catastrophe. > 17) People continuously create safety. > Failure free operations are the result of activities of people who work to keep the system within the boundaries of tolerable performance. These activities are, for the most part, part of normal operations and superficially straightforward. But because system operations are never trouble free, human practitioner adaptations to changing conditions actually create safety from moment to moment.
- larrys 12y ago
  The other thing to keep in mind with new complex systems is that they will inevitably go thorough a phase where things are discovered over time. At the start "n" is small 1 flight, 5 flights etc. It's pretty much a given that there will be failures it's just a matter of when and how critical a failure. The failures would be loaded toward happening early on and then fixed so that one particular failure shouldn't happen again. Something else might of course. As an aside this is similar to why large companies have really long involved legal contracts. They are large enoug,h and have run into enough problems, (or employ attorneys who have) that they've seen it all and done it all and know what they need to do to protect themselves because of the statistical chance that in their large operation a particular problem will appear. In other words more likely that with a footprint as large as McDonalds there will be a customer that get's scalded by coffee and files a lawsuit than the local coffee shop on main street USA. More customers means more chances of some outlier even happening.
zallarak 12y ago
This is a tragedy and something to learn from. Being able to test this thoroughly without the presence of any human almost seems like a no-brainer to me.
marze 12y ago
Some say this is an "inevitable" result of pushing boundaries. No. This is the result of a poorly managed program. What they are doing is much easier than the Apollo program, which was well managed and had no in-flight failures that resulted in loss of life, while accomplishing an infinitely harder task. This is a tragedy, obviously. But the program is about six years behind schedule, been going for 10 years. The most stupid thing they've done is stay with an experimental rubber/nitrous hybrid engine this whole time, instead of switching to liquid/liquid engine, a well proven technology. I know first hand that groups with such engine expertise have approached Virgin and been turned down. Seeing only the first paragraph, I already know that some rubber in the hybrid engine detached blocking the nozzle and causing the whole engine to explode. The pilots should have refused to fly until Virgin had 10 consecutive motor qualification tests at full duration, not ride on a ship with a half-baked motor that has seen constant modifications during the last year. In the software development world, a "death march" in a program behind schedule does not result in loss of actual life, not so in manned spaceflight.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > Apollo program, which was well managed and had no in-flight failures that resulted in loss of life The flaws in Apollo One were so severe the three crew died on the launchpad. Describing that tragedy as "no in-flight deaths" is accurate but misses some important information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
  - tdicola 12y ago
    Not to mention there were certainly other problems with Apollo like mission 13, or 11 barely landing before running out of fuel (computer problem forced Armstrong to take manual control and find a new landing spot at the last minute). Ultimately though Apollo was just too big and expensive a program to maintain, for better or worse.
    - cstross 12y ago
      ... Also, there was Neil Armstrong's ejection from the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle in 1966: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle (And I see another test pilot, Joe Algranti, also had a very close call flying a second-generation LLTV -- ejecting 0.6 seconds before it crashed!) NASA came very close to losing more astronauts during mission prep for Apollo, in addition to the Apollo 1 crew. (Even if we leave aside the four astronauts killed in T-38 crashes in the 1960s.)
ChuckMcM 12y ago
It also shows that the crew capsule doesn't survive rapid dissassembly of the engine. Which is another thing to work on. Sad to see this so quickly on the heels of the Orbital failure.
jMyles 12y ago
> We wouldn't have explored the depths of the ocean. We mostly still haven't! I think ocean exploration is pretty exciting too.
Metapony 12y ago
I'm finding this whole thread interesting, but your comment is the inspirational one I'd hoped to find. Thanks.
ghostunit 12y ago
I find this dogma of "Eventually we will conquer space and make it accessible to all mankind" dangerous in the extreme to the actual, all-too-present predicaments we have here on real Earth such as climate change, environment devastation, fossil fuels/minerals/water depletion and the accelerating destruction of the web of life that makes possible your even being able to breathe. You are all prey to the "religion of progress". Your dogma is that space travel is not only possible, but a given, something the universe has put somewhere for us to find and make ours. Except that, basic hard laws such as the speed of light, the laws of thermodynamics, etc. say NO. And it's only your religious thinking that allows you to handwave all that with a "we always find a way". For all we know, in this universe it may be impossible to bypass or even bend those laws. Yet, you're betting the future of the species on old Star Trek fantasies. As you said, the conditions and difficulty for modern space travel are in the extreme and pushing all of our sciences to their limits. And for what? just to get to... the moon. I don't want to scare you, but if that seems far to you, see how much bigger the distance to anything else in the solar system is, nevermind anything outside it.
- colordrops 12y ago
  While we are off topic, this post is a fine example of "concern trolling".
  - ghostunit 12y ago
    Someone has to point out that you have fallen into dogmatic thinking when it comes to our "space future". There is nothing promised, nothing that can be taken for granted, nothing shown to be possible (beyond the current limits of our physics which are: getting to the moon at enormous fuel expense, and 1-way ticket to die in Mars)
- seanflyon 12y ago
  > basic hard laws such as the speed of light, the laws of thermodynamics, etc. say NO This is not true. For travel within the solar system the speed of light is no more than a nuisance delaying communication. The laws of thermodynamics don't stop space travel. No one is saying "we always find a way" to do the impossible. We are saying "we always find a way" to do that thing that we already know how to do and have demonstrated lots of times, only this time we need to make it cheaper.
abandonliberty 12y ago
We must never forget that progress, social or technical, is built on people dedicating or sacrificing their lives. Wikipedia lists: 19 Test Pilots 18 Astronauts in spaceflight 11 Astronauts in training The death tolls for social progress are vastly greater. These people choose to dedicate and risk their lives drive us forward.

by mixmax 12y ago

atlantic 12y ago

> This is commendable, and is what drives the human race forward. Without these fearless men we wouldn't have gone to the moon. We wouldn't have explored the depths of the ocean. We wouldn't have flown the skies. That's one way of looking at the matter. Another is that without this untrammelled technological evolution (I hesitate to use the word "progress") we wouldn't be living through the greatest mass extinction event of the last few of million years. A lot of this effort could go instead into finding a better cohabitation between humans and the other species with whom we supposedly share the planet.

tomrod 12y ago
Until when? The next large asteroid? The next close-by gamma burst? The sun goes nova? Let's go see the universe, and take life along with us.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- revscat 12y ago
  That's not going to happen with chemical rockets. Until a radically different propulsion system is developed the only planet we have is this one.
  - skndr 12y ago
    The other efficient forms of propulsion actually require you to be in space due to low thrust-to-weight. Chemical rockets get us off the planet first.
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    There's no reason to believe chemical rockets can't get a small, self-sustaining colony going. Asteroid/comet mining, a Mars base, etc. are likely possible with current or near-current technology. No, we're not going to move a billion or two people with them, but that's not what we need to make humanity multi-planet.
  - kstenerud 12y ago
    And so we just tell everyone in the space agency "Sorry guys, but we can't do any more space stuff besides ground-based telescopes until we come up with a better propulsion system. So we'll keep about 100 of you on board to come up with that and the rest of you are fired." Meanwhile, all of the derivative research (effects of zero gravity, life support systems, shielding, re-entry, etc) stagnates. And I guess we should dismantle our satellite systems as well, since they require rockets to achieve orbit. Maybe we should ban all cars while we're at it, since they pollute our environment. We should shut down the evil factories, too, so no electric cars, either. Yup, we can just sit in a circle, singing kumbayah while we wait for that miraculous perfect power source that someone else will develop for us. Then, and only THEN, can we continue with "progress".
  - cstross 12y ago
    Actually, it could happen with chemical rockets -- if we abandon the idea of sending canned monkeys beyond the atmosphere. We can afford to send up a couple of hundred tons of prokaryotic spores every year until the cows come home, with solar sails to get their packages up above solar escape velocity. Over a few decades or centuries that's a lot of unicellular organisms to scatter on the direction of exoplanets; we can hope that in a few million years one or another strikes edible dirt and begins to reproduce. This is, however, not as mythically resonant as "space: the final frontier" ...
moskie 12y ago
Such an incredible false choice you present.
robertfw 12y ago
I think you'll find that it hard to argue that the efforts of exploration are linked to our industrial pillage of the planet.
- Retric 12y ago
  Early exploration was all about pillaging the planet. Much of the Sahara desert for example exists because destroyed the existing ecosystem which altered weather patterns and vastly expanding the desert. Recently we almost did the same to the Midwest in the US. In fact we still might be heading that way after the Ogallala Aquifer is used up. More recently Oil is currently driving a lot of exploration into the oceans and other remote regions. PS: Not that I think we should all just stay home, but whitewashing history is stupid.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  >I think you'll find that it hard to argue that the efforts of exploration are linked to our industrial pillage of the planet. It might be hard to argue that our industrial pillage of the planet is solely a result of exploration. Anything weaker than that and I think you have the tougher position.
mikeash 12y ago
Instead of living through the greatest mass extinction event in the last few million years, we'd be living in harmony with nature, dying of now-curable injuries, starving to death when times are lean, seeing our mothers and wives and daughters die in childbirth, and living in profound ignorance of the nature of the universe. At least with the mass extinction there are prospects for fixing the problem.
- Turing_Machine 12y ago
  There have been at least five mass extinction events that wiped out over 50% of the species on the planet. Possibly as many as twenty. The Permian-Triassic event supposedly took out 90-96%(!) of all living species.
  - JabavuAdams 12y ago
    And yet, here we are. I'm totally okay with causing mass extinction as long as something human-descended comes out the other side.
nether 12y ago
Kaczynski was right.
undersuit 12y ago
I think there are many other areas humanity could shift their focus away from to better help cohabitation of this planet than spaceflight.
revscat 12y ago
You are getting downvoted, but I actually agree with you. Space travel is awesome, but so is living, and right now we are not living in a way that is sustainable over the short term. Space travel is, for me, an anachronistic hold-over from people who grew up with Heinlein, Asimov, etc., but is not something that is realistic given the environmental situation. Realistically, any vehicle that is dependent upon currently available propulsion systems is a waste of time. Our resources would be better spent elsewhere. I know that this opinion is anathema on a tech-heavy site such as this one, but I must nevertheless express my respectful disagreement. It would be far, far more productive for the species to dedicate resources towards CO2 and CH4 reduction in the lower atmosphere.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  > Space travel is awesome, but so is living, and right now we are not living in a way that is sustainable over the short term. Space travel is fundamental to the human species living sustainably in the long term. Correcting greenhouse gasses doesn't help us if the next day we find a planet-killer asteroid is a few weeks away.
  - yongjik 12y ago
    I don't think you fully appreciate just how difficult space travel is, especially the kind of space travel where you found a colony that will sustain itself after the Earth is hit by an asteroid. The required scale of technology/economy comfortably puts it in "at least several centuries from now, if we're incredibly lucky and/or devoted". In this regard, the comment about CO2 is actually much more pertinent than it seems at first. If we manage to screw up the climate in this century (which seems very likely these days), inundating every coastal cities in the world, "sustainable space colony" will have to wait a bit longer. Much longer. If you're worried that an asteroid might hit us 500 years from now, you might want to rethink your priority. Advancing chemical rockets now is important, but compared to the scale of space colony, it feels somewhat like producing better vacuum tubes to make sure (say) the US is the first to create strong AI. Any sane 50s US leader would have understood that "trying not to have a nuclear war with Soviet" is a much more important goal anyway: you can't fund AI research if your country is a radioactive wasteland.
vcjohnson 12y ago
>A lot of this effort could go instead into finding a better cohabitation between humans and the other species with whom we supposedly share the planet. This is a false dilemma. We have 7+ billion people on the planet. There is most certainly a significant amount of effort going towards the future you mentioned. They are not mutually exclusive (and are, most likely, going to be a product of each other)
pessimizer 12y ago
You're forgetting how cool it would be for rich people to burn a couple hundred thousand to fly in space for two and a half hours. It's clearly the highest expression of the human spirit, and you're a hopeless hater cynic. I wonder what the carbon footprint of space tourism is, and will be if it becomes cheaper and more popular? I feel guilty flying on a plane.
- brent_noorda 12y ago
  I worked out some quick math estimating 25,000 gallons just for the fuel for each tourist's 2-hour flight. Space tourism seems like the douchebaggiest idea ever created. I hope the in-flight space cocktails are worth it. http://brent-noorda.blogspot.com/2014/05/richard-branson-elon-musk-cognitive-dissonance.html http://brent-noorda.blogspot.com/2014/05/richard-branson-elo...
  - porsupah 12y ago
    Perhaps Skylon is more to your liking?
- JabavuAdams 12y ago
  Live a little! It's okay to be human-supremacist. Sheesh. Have neo-cortex, will dominate.
JabavuAdams 12y ago
Boring.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

tomrod 12y ago

There was a comment earlier asking for a source that someone didn't make it.[0] [0] News report: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/31/spaceshiptwo-richard-branson-virgin-crash-mojave http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/31/spaceshiptwo-...

nether 12y ago

> cryogenic liquids at -300 degrees celsius Absolute zero is -273 °C.

mixmax 12y ago
Thanks for the catch, it's updated now - stupid mistake...
jaredmcdonald 12y ago
now that is pushing boundaries

jcrites 12y ago

> Most systems operate in extreme conditions, sometimes bordering on the improbable. Indeed. Your statement reminds me of an insightful engineering article, "How Complex Systems Fail": http://www.ctlab.org/documents/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fail.pdf http://www.ctlab.org/documents/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fai... . A few relevant observations from the article that resonate with me: > 1) Complex systems are intrinsically hazardous systems. > 4) Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them. > 5) Complex systems run in degraded mode. > A corollary to the preceding point is that complex systems run as broken systems. The system continues to function because it contains so many redundancies and because people can make it function, despite the presence of many flaws. After accident reviews nearly always note that the system has a history of prior ‘proto-accidents’ that nearly generated catastrophe. > 17) People continuously create safety. > Failure free operations are the result of activities of people who work to keep the system within the boundaries of tolerable performance. These activities are, for the most part, part of normal operations and superficially straightforward. But because system operations are never trouble free, human practitioner adaptations to changing conditions actually create safety from moment to moment.

larrys 12y ago
The other thing to keep in mind with new complex systems is that they will inevitably go thorough a phase where things are discovered over time. At the start "n" is small 1 flight, 5 flights etc. It's pretty much a given that there will be failures it's just a matter of when and how critical a failure. The failures would be loaded toward happening early on and then fixed so that one particular failure shouldn't happen again. Something else might of course. As an aside this is similar to why large companies have really long involved legal contracts. They are large enoug,h and have run into enough problems, (or employ attorneys who have) that they've seen it all and done it all and know what they need to do to protect themselves because of the statistical chance that in their large operation a particular problem will appear. In other words more likely that with a footprint as large as McDonalds there will be a customer that get's scalded by coffee and files a lawsuit than the local coffee shop on main street USA. More customers means more chances of some outlier even happening.

zallarak 12y ago

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

marze 12y ago

Some say this is an "inevitable" result of pushing boundaries. No. This is the result of a poorly managed program. What they are doing is much easier than the Apollo program, which was well managed and had no in-flight failures that resulted in loss of life, while accomplishing an infinitely harder task. This is a tragedy, obviously. But the program is about six years behind schedule, been going for 10 years. The most stupid thing they've done is stay with an experimental rubber/nitrous hybrid engine this whole time, instead of switching to liquid/liquid engine, a well proven technology. I know first hand that groups with such engine expertise have approached Virgin and been turned down. Seeing only the first paragraph, I already know that some rubber in the hybrid engine detached blocking the nozzle and causing the whole engine to explode. The pilots should have refused to fly until Virgin had 10 consecutive motor qualification tests at full duration, not ride on a ship with a half-baked motor that has seen constant modifications during the last year. In the software development world, a "death march" in a program behind schedule does not result in loss of actual life, not so in manned spaceflight.

DanBC 12y ago
> Apollo program, which was well managed and had no in-flight failures that resulted in loss of life The flaws in Apollo One were so severe the three crew died on the launchpad. Describing that tragedy as "no in-flight deaths" is accurate but misses some important information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
- tdicola 12y ago
  Not to mention there were certainly other problems with Apollo like mission 13, or 11 barely landing before running out of fuel (computer problem forced Armstrong to take manual control and find a new landing spot at the last minute). Ultimately though Apollo was just too big and expensive a program to maintain, for better or worse.
  - cstross 12y ago
    ... Also, there was Neil Armstrong's ejection from the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle in 1966: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle (And I see another test pilot, Joe Algranti, also had a very close call flying a second-generation LLTV -- ejecting 0.6 seconds before it crashed!) NASA came very close to losing more astronauts during mission prep for Apollo, in addition to the Apollo 1 crew. (Even if we leave aside the four astronauts killed in T-38 crashes in the 1960s.)

ChuckMcM 12y ago

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

jMyles 12y ago

> We wouldn't have explored the depths of the ocean. We mostly still haven't! I think ocean exploration is pretty exciting too.

Metapony 12y ago

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

ghostunit 12y ago

I find this dogma of "Eventually we will conquer space and make it accessible to all mankind" dangerous in the extreme to the actual, all-too-present predicaments we have here on real Earth such as climate change, environment devastation, fossil fuels/minerals/water depletion and the accelerating destruction of the web of life that makes possible your even being able to breathe. You are all prey to the "religion of progress". Your dogma is that space travel is not only possible, but a given, something the universe has put somewhere for us to find and make ours. Except that, basic hard laws such as the speed of light, the laws of thermodynamics, etc. say NO. And it's only your religious thinking that allows you to handwave all that with a "we always find a way". For all we know, in this universe it may be impossible to bypass or even bend those laws. Yet, you're betting the future of the species on old Star Trek fantasies. As you said, the conditions and difficulty for modern space travel are in the extreme and pushing all of our sciences to their limits. And for what? just to get to... the moon. I don't want to scare you, but if that seems far to you, see how much bigger the distance to anything else in the solar system is, nevermind anything outside it.

colordrops 12y ago
While we are off topic, this post is a fine example of "concern trolling".
- ghostunit 12y ago
  Someone has to point out that you have fallen into dogmatic thinking when it comes to our "space future". There is nothing promised, nothing that can be taken for granted, nothing shown to be possible (beyond the current limits of our physics which are: getting to the moon at enormous fuel expense, and 1-way ticket to die in Mars)
seanflyon 12y ago
> basic hard laws such as the speed of light, the laws of thermodynamics, etc. say NO This is not true. For travel within the solar system the speed of light is no more than a nuisance delaying communication. The laws of thermodynamics don't stop space travel. No one is saying "we always find a way" to do the impossible. We are saying "we always find a way" to do that thing that we already know how to do and have demonstrated lots of times, only this time we need to make it cheaper.

abandonliberty 12y ago

We must never forget that progress, social or technical, is built on people dedicating or sacrificing their lives. Wikipedia lists: 19 Test Pilots 18 Astronauts in spaceflight 11 Astronauts in training The death tolls for social progress are vastly greater. These people choose to dedicate and risk their lives drive us forward.