Spaceshiptwo has suffered a mid flight explosion...
- Thread starter Data Holmes
- Start date
So? "civilian" =/= "commercial". Don't conflate one for the other.
Challenger had no effect on manned commercial spaceflight because at the time there was no manned commercial spaceflight.
NASA's decision to self promote by putting civilians on experimental craft was a bad decision that came back to haunt them.
Don't get me started on my disappointment with NASA and how it all went (out the window) but let's also not forget the $$$ in all the equations, and in the pursuit of our lofty goals. Branson does not strike me as a guy who is gonna fuck around with his reputation and his "name" for the sake of hype. It may seem that way in some of his venture, but he is too savvy and -centric for that. Yes, he was under time constraints vs. giving back some $$$, not unlike each shuttle or satellite launch vs. money invested in the run-up and prep to launch (wasted/lost money.) Maybe he rushed the decision to "go" or allowed it to be rushed. Maybe not. Complicated shit from start to finish.
"...not for the timid, indeed"
"...not for the timid, indeed"
Sorry, while your list of recommendations are nice, having a singular vision of what constitutes as a sound platform design does nothing to see if other design possibilities can be put forth. Also, save for this accident, the Scaled Composite project has done more good than harm. So, just because of ONE accident during a SINGLE test, amongst others, that doesn't mean you throw out everything that has been developed. You think Chuck Yeager's flight was the first successful one? No. How about all the tests flights that NASA and the Soviet space program conducted? Were they a complete success? No. People lives were lost, which unfortunate. But they knew the risks, when they piloted the space crafts that the engineers designed. Heck, someone died during one of the test flights conducted by the Wright Brothers.
My point is that, as someone pointed out, there are risks involved in this sort of work. We can only hope that the people conducting the investigation on this accident will determine what had happened, so that such a thing can't happen again. I'm willing to wait and see what comes out of this mishap.
Well, then again, it was apparently a bad decision to promote the shuttle as a perfectly safe like any other aircraft, when it was still experimental.
The shuttle just turned out to be one big expensive disappointment, instead of the breakthrough that was going to make space more assessable.
Yes, it was a bad decision, on a not-well-designed vehicle, and if it didn't happen on the Challenger mission, a similar incident was bound to happen sooner or later.
I suppose that we should be happy that this accident didn't happen much later, and it never got to the point where NASA might've ramped up promotion by having more than one civilian crew member on board, or at least claiming the life of some other unsuspecting soul.
I echo my earlier sentiment that it is fortunate that this happened now during a test flight, and not when SS2 was carrying passengers.
There will be an investigation, and hopefully Virgin Galactic will make their designs safer as a result, and there won't be a dominant sentiment that space flight is too unsafe for everybody.
The shuttle just turned out to be one big expensive disappointment, instead of the breakthrough that was going to make space more assessable.
Yes, it was a bad decision, on a not-well-designed vehicle, and if it didn't happen on the Challenger mission, a similar incident was bound to happen sooner or later.
I suppose that we should be happy that this accident didn't happen much later, and it never got to the point where NASA might've ramped up promotion by having more than one civilian crew member on board, or at least claiming the life of some other unsuspecting soul.
I echo my earlier sentiment that it is fortunate that this happened now during a test flight, and not when SS2 was carrying passengers.
There will be an investigation, and hopefully Virgin Galactic will make their designs safer as a result, and there won't be a dominant sentiment that space flight is too unsafe for everybody.
It's not. People are acting like SS2 was going to represent some kind of breakthrough or innovation in space travel, and it's nothing like that. It was only ever going to be a novelty for rich people. There's nothing wrong with that, but let's not pretend this was ever envelope-pushing space development. It was never intended to be, so this talk of sacrificing lives being necessary for progress is, at best, an empty aphorism. At worst, it lends cover to what may have been actual corporate negligence.
There will be an investigation but Branson has already gone on the record of 100% still in support of this project. Unlike with publically funded spaceflight where endless debate would occur after an accident in the Congress and in the media, Branson and his own personal fortune is 100% still behind this.
Provided he has volunteer pilots who are willling to fly and still paying passengers e.g. Justin Bieber , Brad Pitt and other celebrities, the project will continue full steam ahead.
This is not entirely true. Commercial spaceflight requires government permits, and if Virgin is not abiding by the proper laws and regulations, those permits can be pulled no matter what Branson wants to do.
Well spoken. I hope the permit is not pulled however. If that happens, you know the Rand Simbergs and all the other libertarians will howl to the moon--say NASA/gov't is trying to kill competition...blah blah.
We have enough in-fighting amongst space advocates. Politicos will see that and not support space until all the fan boys get together on one page. To quote Hillhouse, NASA and private space need to be "praising the hell out of each other" if they want funding to not dry up. NASA has been more sinned against than sinning in this regard: http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthr...ming-a-Different-Apollo&p=2252325#post2252325
We do need regulations--especially on the financial system--but we also want folks to have faith in gov't. So this is where I might be the anti-Bloomberg. He regulated the hell out of everything except his buds on Wall Street. I would do the opposite here.
I do get that we are in the barnstorming days, so to think that I'm timid on spaceflight is not correct.
To wit:
Then too--remember that there were to be different Tiers here. If it indeed is true that the novel fethering concept is what failed, and that you want to grow and have more passengers--then nixing SS2 is a must. We left Gemini for Apollo after all.
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=26973
Stratolaunch needs to be the new White Knight, with a very rugged all metal X-34 type design and an all liquid engine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Sciences_X-34
So a scaled down dream chaser goes to orbit--and a large X-34 vehicle can take a fair number of passengers high for zero g (suborbital vomit comet) ride...or far and fast, like a rocket assist Short/Mayo. Getting FASTRAC back on track will help VG and also assist the DARPA spaceplane project. Stratolaunch gets another passenger. To me, Dream Chaser, XCOR, VG, DARPA and Stratolaunch all working together is what it is going to take to have any chance of dethroning Musk with his simple expendables (maybe re-usable one day) and capsules. If you want winged spaceflight, then you all hang together--or all hang separately.
I'm not much on mergers--but here it would seem a must.
The Euros are looking to their own system:
http://www.space-airbusds.com/en/news2/space-travel-for-all.html
There was an interesting blurb from this website in the comments section: http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=26959
But let me share that with you here:
"...development continues in a methodical, professional way on the Airbus Defence and Space "SpacePlane". The program survived the corporate re-branding from Astrium to "Airbus Defence and Space" (gag) which was a good sign. The SpacePlane program's stepwise engineering approach together with an appeal to the science and small satellite launch markets, resembles Xcor's business model in contrast to the circus stunt VG disaster."
Seeing that the man behind Parabolic Arc was giving rise to similar concerns even before this tragedy goes back to my earlier statement.
There are good failures--and there are bad failures.
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That's true. However the project won't go through the same level of public scrutiny that if a similar crash occurred with a NASA space craft. I'm hoping/confident that cooler heads will prevail and they will retain the permits provided that the problem with the flight is identified.
I know it's not a perfect analogy but shit, a Boeing 777 simply disppeared yet they didn't ground the entire fleet and while the 777 isn't an experiemntal aicraft, the Boeing Dreamliner while relatively new had a series of fires with its battery unit and was only grounded for a short period of time while they solved the problem.
I guess Robert, I'm somewhat lamenting over our risk averse culture. Its worth remembering that Apollo 1 had a fire in the cabin killing all of the astronauts in 1967 but just 1 year later we were back in the saddle with the program launching spacecraft.
If you're going to lament risk-averse culture, maybe you could find a topic other than commercial space exploration to do it in, as it seems totally out of place here.
Hate to keep going off topic--but, as an aside, regulation does work:
http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthr...Tortoises-Make-a-Comeback-on-Galapagos-Island
Looks like they are going with pilot error--except that here, we know a handle was moved, unlike with Gus Grissom.
http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthr...Tortoises-Make-a-Comeback-on-Galapagos-Island
Looks like they are going with pilot error--except that here, we know a handle was moved, unlike with Gus Grissom.
Glad I'm not the only one who is concerned that this might happen. That might not only discourage cheaper, private space travel, but also the who private commercial suborbital industry.
I was hoping that the ticket price might drop over time, the space planes would get bigger, and if you scale up the size and fuel reserves, and add a standard jet engine to get and keep you in the air, you might have what I like to call a skipper.
That is, an aircraft that uses vacuum's property of no friction, so you get to keep your speed once your out of earth's gravity, coast to the other side of the planet at super or even hyper sonic speeds, and for the most part, the fuel you burn is leaving the atmosphere, and for landing.
Still very pricy, but I'd like to think that if enough industry is built up, it could be done. And what a ride it would be, to go from the U.S. to Europe in only a few hours!
I think I have an idea of what you're saying, either that, or I have my own idea of what a tier system is.
My idea is that you have your small-medium joyrides, and that funds the commercial space industry, along with cargo deliveries.
I suppose that you also have your small winged 2-3 crew delivery shuttles, which have the merit of being smaller and cheaper than just another shuttle replacement.
As cost allows it, you have medium sized joyrides, making so seat costs drop, allowing more passengers.
Then, once the capital has been built up, we have a sub-orbital hypersonic business skipper, which will allow short time travel to different parts of the world. Of course, I suppose that the seat costs would need to be cheap enough to even consider it being worth it-and I'm pretty sure someone will say that suborbital transports would be too expensive.
I'm pretty sure that DARPA has researched and funded the possibility, and I'd like to think that maybe it would be less expensive to develop if the commercial industry and DARPA were to jointly develop it, so that the military has a hypersonic plane for what purpose I don't really care
, as long as we also finally get a commercial super-hypersonic transport, the first one in years.Maybe this could even eventually lead up to a spaceplane that actually delivers what the shuttle promised and failed to do, using the technology developed since the shuttle was introduced like 30 years ago, though then again, I'll probably get yet another reality check telling me that this isn't financially or technologically feasible. But hey, I like to dream.
