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Space Ship Two Crash

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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby SeaGypsy » Fri 31 Oct 2014, 19:44:14

The most sensible thing you have said on the topic 6. The sooner folks realise the whole space colonisation dream is actually an impossible nightmare, the better. The worst of this crap is it facilitates fatalist attitudes to the planet we live on, aka Kaiser Jeep.
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby Sixstrings » Fri 31 Oct 2014, 20:13:29

Latest reports: they were trying a different fuel mixture on this flight, previous fuel mixture didn't provide enough thrust and it was a bumpy ride.

The engine sputtered after separation and then the craft broke up, fuel tank may have ruptured. It looks like maybe a problem with the new fuel mixture.

One wonders why they couldn't test that new fuel mix, unmanned.
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby Sixstrings » Fri 31 Oct 2014, 21:36:41

Time Magazine calls for an end to amateur space flight, calls it "hubris," very critical of Branson:

Enough With Amateur Hour Space Flight

But it’s hard too not to be angry, even disgusted, with Branson himself. He is, as today’s tragedy shows, a man driven by too much hubris, too much hucksterism and too little knowledge of the head-crackingly complex business of engineering. For the 21st century billionaire, space travel is what buying a professional sports team was for the rich boys of an earlier era: the biggest, coolest, most impressive toy imaginable.

Amazon.com zillionaire Jeff Bezos has his own spacecraft company—because what can better qualify a man to build machines able to travel to space than selling books, TVs and lawn furniture online? Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has a space operation too because, well, spacecraft have computers and that’s sort of the same thing, right?

Branson, founder of Virgin Airlines, is at least in the business of flying aircraft, but the key part of that compound word is air. Space, as Branson surely knows, has none of that—and that changes the physics considerably.

A Virgin crash always seemed troublingly likely.

...

But never mind, because the crowd seemed happy to be there and to take Branson’s word that they really, truly would get their chance to be astronauts. For the record, the demonstration flight they had come to see never took off due to high desert winds.

...

Elon Musk, founder of the upstart SpaceX is, so far, defying doubters, with a string of both commercial launches and resupply missions to the ISS and no major disasters. But SpaceX is a rare bird—and still a young one—and it has a while to go before it establishes its true space cred.

It’s Branson, however, who has always been the most troubling of the cosmic cowboys—selling not just himself on his fever dreams but his trusting customers.

One of those would-be astronauts I met in the Mojave that day was a teenage girl, whose parents had put aside enough money to buy her the singular experience of a trip to space. They beamed at her courage as we spoke, and seemed thrilled about the ride she was soon to take. Those plans, presumably, are being rethought today.
http://time.com/3551643/virgin-crash-branson-amateur/
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby autonomous » Fri 31 Oct 2014, 23:29:34

Sadly this is the fourth death related to the engine technology used by Virgin Galatic. In 2007 three people were killed and several injured when a nitrous oxide tank exploded during testing. Following this incident a report was prepared in 2008 by the USAF on the explosive hazards of working with large quantities of Nitrous Oxide, for which there have been several unexplained explosions:

Nitrous Oxide Explosive Hazards

“One disturbing observation during the gaseous test program was the rather frequent (about 10 percent of the tests) occurrence of unexplained events in two categories, spontaneous ignitions and spontaneous temperature rises. In the first category, sudden temperature and pressure spikes were sometimes observed while N2O was being vented from the pipe. These anomalies generally occurred at low-pressure conditions where steady-state decomposition cannot be sustained. The other category consisted of unusual increases in pipe wall temperatures (by 20o to 50o F) during filling operations without any sudden pressure rise or other indication of a decomposition reaction. Both of the anomalies remain unexplained.”


http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a489459.pdf
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby Sixstrings » Sat 01 Nov 2014, 00:06:45

autonomous wrote:Sadly this is the fourth death related to the engine technology used by Virgin Galatic.


They're trying to do too much with such a small craft. Trying to get thrust that they can't get with that size.

And they don't have the budget of the government to try something else out, and even the gov would have canceled this by now, after half a billion dollars spent.

I'm feeling mixed about this -- we do need to move forward on space planes.

But you can't leave that up to P.T. Barnum to do it, either (Richard Branson, God bless him, but he's a loose cannon).

I think they need a traditional rocket engine, and they need a bigger spaceplane and bigger mothership plane and then they wouldn't need the exotic fuel mixtures. It's a question of scale and their craft is too small to get the thrust they need.

I'm trying to think, here, hasn't the USAF already figured this all out back in the '50s? Didn't Chuck Yeager get to suborbital? :?: :?:

If no, then how on earth can a startup ever achieve what even the US military couldn't do.

Overall it's a good idea, I think it just needs the military funding it and figuring it out -- use jet fuel to get up to the edge of space and then fire the rocket engines to push you over the edge into suborbital.

I'm also wondering, by the way, I thought VG had achieved suborbital in test flights but I heard that woman on CNN today saying the engine is crap and never would have got anyone to suborbital. I wonder what the truth is, did they ever get above the atmosphere, was the heat shield ever tested? If so, then really that's impressive, what were they using for a heat shield. That alone is one of the biggest challenges, re-entry in a space plane and not incinerating. Was a major challenge for the shuttle, and the columbia was lost when some heat shield tiles got damaged.

It is, as they say, "rocket science" and VG was trying the hardest and most elusive rocket science there is -- space planes.
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby Sixstrings » Sat 01 Nov 2014, 00:18:05

pstarr wrote:So much for space flight. That and the failure of the driverless Google car should put the kibosh on the singularity.


What happened with the driverless cars? Did one hit somebody?

Hey did you all hear about the Slovakian company that's made a flying car and will start selling it by 2017?

First footage of ‘transformer’ flying car prototype lands in Austria
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8cQvRecuik


"Mark my word: A combination of airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come." -- Henry Ford, 1940


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AeroMobil. Beautiful flying car. Beautifully integrated. Transforms in seconds from an automobile to an airplane. Gives you freedom to move.

AeroMobil is a flying car that perfectly makes use of existing infrastructure created for automobiles and planes, and opens doors to real door-to-door travel. As a car it fits into any standard parking space, uses regular gasoline, and can be used in road traffic just like any other car. As a plane it can use any airport in the world, but can also take off and land using any grass strip or paved surface just a few hundred meters long.
http://www.aeromobil.com
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby Tanada » Sat 01 Nov 2014, 08:12:42

Space Ship One made dozens of flights including at least three suborbital flights. Space Ship Two is an enlarged version designed to carry paying passengers. The Space Ship One vehicle had the capability of carrying two or three passengers but used weighted test masses on its flights to simulate passengers. Branson might have been better off putting passenger seats in Space Ship One and selling tickets to make money for the development of Space Ship Two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby dissident » Sat 01 Nov 2014, 08:46:00

autonomous wrote:Sadly this is the fourth death related to the engine technology used by Virgin Galatic. In 2007 three people were killed and several injured when a nitrous oxide tank exploded during testing. Following this incident a report was prepared in 2008 by the USAF on the explosive hazards of working with large quantities of Nitrous Oxide, for which there have been several unexplained explosions:

Nitrous Oxide Explosive Hazards

“One disturbing observation during the gaseous test program was the rather frequent (about 10 percent of the tests) occurrence of unexplained events in two categories, spontaneous ignitions and spontaneous temperature rises. In the first category, sudden temperature and pressure spikes were sometimes observed while N2O was being vented from the pipe. These anomalies generally occurred at low-pressure conditions where steady-state decomposition cannot be sustained. The other category consisted of unusual increases in pipe wall temperatures (by 20o to 50o F) during filling operations without any sudden pressure rise or other indication of a decomposition reaction. Both of the anomalies remain unexplained.”


http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a489459.pdf


Quoted for truth. The above should be drilled into the little heads of all the triumphalist, chest thumping drones like Six$. N2O is thought to break down in the upper stratosphere due to photolysis and should be stable in the lower atmosphere. Yet here we see what looks like a catalytic breakdown near metal pipe surfaces possibly in the presence of other unidentified gases. There is simply no substitute for real world testing and observation. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby FrY10cK » Sat 01 Nov 2014, 16:08:14

dissident wrote:N2O is thought to break down in the upper stratosphere due to photolysis and should be stable in the lower atmosphere. Yet here we see what looks like a catalytic breakdown near metal pipe surfaces possibly in the presence of other unidentified gases. There is simply no substitute for real world testing and observation. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Interesting. Maybe Burt Rutan and http://www.scaled.com/ in spite of being brilliant innovators for decades, are out of their depth here.
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby dissident » Sat 01 Nov 2014, 18:13:07

FrY10cK wrote:
dissident wrote:N2O is thought to break down in the upper stratosphere due to photolysis and should be stable in the lower atmosphere. Yet here we see what looks like a catalytic breakdown near metal pipe surfaces possibly in the presence of other unidentified gases. There is simply no substitute for real world testing and observation. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Interesting. Maybe Burt Rutan and http://www.scaled.com/ in spite of being brilliant innovators for decades, are out of their depth here.


Such tests indicate that there is a risk that needs to be removed. I am not sure, maybe it has already been removed in the most recent variants of the craft. Perhaps they chose some other materials to avoid this issue and have not discussed it much because it is proprietary technology.

But internet experts expect new designs to be ready to go. The fact that there are unexpected effects and interactions in all complex systems does not enter their minds.
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby dissident » Sat 01 Nov 2014, 18:14:35

pstarr wrote:
dissident wrote:The above should be drilled into the little heads of all the triumphalist, chest thumping drones like Six$ . . . "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
And I suppose that religion is the 'free-market' and its confessional is the stock market? That would explain the triumphalist BS

I live in the real world. I can see the different between warp drive and kerosone/lox? Can you Six?


People like Six$ cannot be bothered with complexity. They just want the gratification of vicarious achievement. To me this indicates some sort of inadequacy syndrome.
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby Sixstrings » Sat 01 Nov 2014, 21:23:01

pstarr wrote:A google car can not distinguish a crumpled newspaper form a rock.


I wondered about that. Yet they've got a lot of these driving in California.

Really, though.. when's the last time you saw a crumpled newspaper on the road? I can't recall the last. All I can recall are obstructions. A frickin' engine fell of the back of a pickup truck the other day and I had to stop and swerve, that was scary.

Some guy got road rage at me the other day too, frickin' races back up on me honking and flipping the bird, cutting me off. Bizarre.

At least a Google car won't do that. It'll save 30,000 American lives a year, from auto accidents.
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby Sixstrings » Sat 01 Nov 2014, 21:44:11

Tanada wrote:Space Ship One made dozens of flights including at least three suborbital flights. Space Ship Two is an enlarged version designed to carry paying passengers. The Space Ship One vehicle had the capability of carrying two or three passengers but used weighted test masses on its flights to simulate passengers. Branson might have been better off putting passenger seats in Space Ship One and selling tickets to make money for the development of Space Ship Two.


Hm, okay, so maybe it's the spaceship two that couldn't get to suborbit. Which is why they were trying a different fuel mix, for more thrust, and that caused the failure.

I'm sure they wanted the Spaceship 2 for the larger passenger capacity, but from you're saying it looks like it's the spaceship 1 that worked?

I'm just trying to reconcile what that woman on CNN was saying, that their engine could never have gotten anyone to suborbital.

Anyhow the bottom line on it is that it really is rocket science and the usual domain of DARPA and defense, and Branson wants space planes and that's the most elusive and difficult kind of "rocket science" there is.

It's outrageous they were talking about passengers as early as a few months from now, but OTOH it seems like they were *this close* with the thing so that's sad to see it all fail now.

I still like Elon Musk the best -- we've seen these dreamers come and go ever since the 70s -- it often winds up the same way in the end -- but Musk is so different, he's a dreamer that *made it work*.

And by the way, these companies are not "one man" -- VG had a lot of employees and supposedly great engineers etc. And spacex isn't all "Elon Musk," but his leadership and control freak quality control over every last detail seems to make a difference. He's the same way with Tesla design, he goes over literally every last detail. He's like a Steve Jobs except he's a physicist and engineer.
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby Withnail » Sun 02 Nov 2014, 05:44:09

Sixstrings wrote:
Some guy got road rage at me the other day too, frickin' races back up on me honking and flipping the bird, cutting me off. Bizarre.



You were driving too slow, old timer.

ChilPhil1986 wrote:
On that topic of colonization, anyone outside of Earth's magnetosphere longer than a couple months dies of cancer from high-energy radiation from the Sun, and last I checked, Mars does not have one. The physics behind how the Earth even generates this phenomena isn't understood all that well either, and unless we want everything we bring to Mars encased in lead, I would suggest we figure out how the Earth does what it does so that we can emulate it on a smaller scale to suit our needs.



Yes absolutely, the surface of Mars is barely less hostile than deep space. The idea of settling there is just ridiculous.

It's just a sterile, irradiated rock.

Even now I'm finding the Mars probe missions progressively less interesting. There's really nothing there.
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby Tanada » Sun 02 Nov 2014, 15:04:00

Mars discussion being off topic for this thread was moved to
elon-musk-wants-to-build-a-city-on-mars-t70209-60.html#p1216397
Enjoy both topics, but this thread has nothing to do with mars colonies, it is about a suborbital space plane prototype that crashed in the desert killing one of its pilots and putting another in the hospital.
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby Sixstrings » Mon 03 Nov 2014, 06:14:59

It looks like maybe the crash was casued the feathering tail section deploying in error:

Image

SpaceShipTwo's unique tail section, which can "feather" at an angle to help the Virgin Galactic spacecraft make a safe descent, unfurled as it was ascending during the flight that ended in a fatal breakup Friday and without being ordered to do so, federal investigators said Sunday night.

The "feathering" mechanism isn't supposed to be unlocked until the spacecraft reaches 1.4 times the speed of sound, Christopher Hart, the NTSB's acting chairman, said at a news conference. But on the flight that crashed Friday, co-pilot Michael Alsbury moved the mechanism's lock-unlock lever into the unlocked position earlier, at just slightly above Mach 1, Hart said.

The feathering procedure is supposed to require two separate steps to engage: First, the pilots must unlock the feather mechanism; then they must move a separate feather handle into position. SpaceShipTwo's feather mechanism began moving almost immediately — even though neither pilot took that second step, Hart said. That would have increased the plane's atmospheric drag at just the wrong moment.

"Two seconds later, we saw disintegration," Hart said. Almost immediately, telemetry and video data "terminated," he said.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/virgin-voyage/spaceshiptwo-feather-tail-system-deployed-prematurely-ntsb-n239721


If I understand it right, that tail is supposed to hinged up -- but only on command -- when the craft descends.
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Re: Space Ship Two Crash

Unread postby Tanada » Mon 03 Nov 2014, 07:01:56

In a normal flight the tail section 'feathers' meaning it fold upward 90 degrees to act as a giant air brake for the craft to control descent speed. Apparently the copilot hit the unlock switch by mistake earlier in the flight, after that all it takes is turbulence to move the tail out of line. That happened when the craft was at Mach 1.4, causing the tail to rip apart. It is only designed to withstand feathering at Mach 1.0 and below. Early rumors blamed the engine that was running somewhat rough due to testing a new fuel mixture. If the feathering was unlocked and the engine 'burped' that could have caused the turbulence that deployed the air brake action and tore the ship apart.
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