5 ms·

All of those you said are very true. It's also worth mentioning that that very 'safe' engine has already killed three people, and injured three others during a

• smackfu 12y ago
  Yeah, "rocket" + "safe enough to carry tourists regularly" just seems like a difficult combination.
  • untog 12y ago
    Many years ago, trying to combine "flying in the air" with "safe enough to carry tourists regularly" would be seen in a similar light.
    • Animats 12y ago
      It took 54 years to go from the Wright Brothers first flight to the Boeing 707. It took 53 years to go from Yuri Gagarin's first flight (one orbit) to this suborbital flight test.
      • DanBC 12y ago
        It only took 8 / 9 years between Gagarin's flight and landing men on the Moon. That's remarkable. It's depressing to think how much closer we'd be to humans on Mars if we had focussed all the Afghan and Iraq war money on space research.
        • jacquesm 12y ago
          Or simply to reduce the national debt.
        • a3n 12y ago
          It only took 8 / 9 years between Gagarin's flight and landing test pilots on the Moon. Which is still remarkable. Since this sub-thread has invoked tourists and the implied safety and convenience of a commercial operation that carries passengers and other payload. Tourists are payload, test pilots are ... test pilots.
    • smackfu 12y ago
      Fair point, but the failure modes of flying seem to be more addressable than those of rockets. Like if the airplane engine is essential, add enough that you can tolerate a failure. If control surfaces are essential, add redundant systems. Whereas the failure mode of rockets tends to be exploding, and that's pretty hard to mitigate.
      • zepolud 12y ago
        The failure modes of rocket engines could be explosions but nobody says you can't have multiple redundant engines on a single rocket. In fact, in 2012 Falcon 9 demonstrated exactly that: one of their 9 Merlin engines blew up but the rest redistributed the load and the rocket successfully delivered the payload to the ISS[1]. [1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/10/08/spacex-falcon-9-lost-an-engine-on-the-way-up-dragon-on-its-way-to-iss/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/10/08/sp...
        • robryk 12y ago
          According to the article you are quoting the engine didn't explode; it's just failed. I'd be very impressed if a rocket survived an explosion of one of its engines (they are much closer together than jet engines on a passenger plane and even i such planes an explosion of one engines can damage others due to shrapnel).
• JanSolo 12y ago
  You are right. Hybrid engines are not looking like the safe & reliable middle-ground between solid & liquid engines that they were made out to be.
  • JshWright 12y ago
    "The best of both worlds" has an often overlooked twin sibling.. "The worst of both worlds"
    • smacktoward 12y ago
      Or as it's sometimes formulated, "the sports car-slash-dump truck problem." In other words, you can build a great sports car, or a great dump truck. But there's no way to build a great sports car that is also a great dump truck.
      • csours 12y ago
        Maybe not, but you can always pivot[1]! http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/transportation/advanced-cars/ian-wright-is-turning-garbage-trucks-and-fedex-vans-into-high-performance-evs http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/transportation...
    • erobbins 12y ago
      all the performance of solids with all the complexities of liquids!
    • sib 12y ago
      "The only thing in the middle of the road is yellow lines and dead armadillos."
• HarryHirsch 12y ago
  How do you even manage to kill not one but three people with shrapnel during a pressure test? Proper safety procedure demands that anything potentially shrapnel-producing is contained within an enclosure and that engineers are outside the area while testing takes place. The whole incident indicates a lax safety culture.
  • InclinedPlane 12y ago
    Precisely. An absence of proper safety procedures is how.