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.
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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.
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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/
“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.”
autonomous wrote:Sadly this is the fourth death related to the engine technology used by Virgin Galatic.
pstarr wrote:So much for space flight. That and the failure of the driverless Google car should put the kibosh on the singularity.
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
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
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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
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."
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.
pstarr wrote:And I suppose that religion is the 'free-market' and its confessional is the stock market? That would explain the triumphalist BSdissident 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."
I live in the real world. I can see the different between warp drive and kerosone/lox? Can you Six?
pstarr wrote:A google car can not distinguish a crumpled newspaper form a rock.
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.
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.
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.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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