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.
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.
> 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.
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.
(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.)
> computer problem forced Armstrong to take manual control and find a new landing spot at the last minute
The computer kept flying the machine despite the interrupts and reboots due to the radar switch that Buzz had left on. It was really marvelously designed to be able to keep on executing its highest priority tasks.
The reason for the (semi) manual control was that the designated landing spot was a boulder field. The computer kept on operating the throttle.
For what its worth - and not necessarily to draw parallels with the Cygnus CRS Orb-3 mishap - Russia successfully launched an unmanned Soyuz rocket and Progress 57 cargo ship with supplies for the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, hours after the catastrophic explosion destroyed a similar mission in the United States.[1]
The cargo ship was expected to and successfully docked with the ISS later in the day.[2]
[1]
Russia Launches ISS Cargo After US Craft Explodes
Not exactly. The computer worked as designed. If they hadn't left the docking radar on, it would not have had any 1201 or 1202 alarms. A bunch of big rocks is why Armstrong took over.
True. But it is almost pointless to compare these two programs since Apollo was so much more complex.
To put it in perspective, Apollo flew on a rocket with five engines producing 1,500,000 lbf thrust each, on the first stage alone. By contrast, the Virgin motor produces 60,000 lbf thrust for 70 seconds.
The Apollo program had a safety culture configured so that if anyone identified a safety issue, they became responsible for the problem and responsible to sign off that it was corrected.
Speaking of perspective, the Apollo was fully-backed by the government of the most powerful economy in the world at the time - 4% of the federal budget was directed towards it, with 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 third-party employees, with a cost of ~$140B of today's dollars. How the hell is a private company supposed to compete? Not even Apple's famed $100B in cash could pay that bill.
Edit: It's also worth noting that the same entity that ran the Apollo missions currently has no way of putting people into space, and the last system they had also looked like a plane... and had problems with exploding and killing people.
"Almost pointless" due to the vast differences in scale and complexity but still worthwhile, as a contrasting example of a solid safety culture employed by the Apollo engineering and operations teams.
Although the Virgin 60,000 lbf rocket is small by the standards of Apollo, it is still an extremely challenging problem. There are no problem-free or inherently safe options, so safety needs to be engineered in from the bottom up carefully and competently. Otherwise, failures like this will not happen just once.
The engineers involved would do well to study the Apollo program and other successful complex engineering efforts such as nuclear reactors, as well as the counter examples of the two space shuttle that were lost due to management putting schedule ahead of safety.
A propulsion system that was "inherently safe" wouldn't have dangerous failure modes. Although Virgin has tried in the past to paint their hybrid prolusion system as being "inherently safe", it isn't. No 60klb rocket engine is. To make any such system operate safely and reliably is a big engineering challenge. I think you don't understand the meaning of the term "inherently safe" in an engineering context.
Yes, and to bolster your point, they halted the program to re-evaluate safety. I think it's a human fault that we have to learn from our mistakes - unless we make them, people just don't believe the risks are real.
"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."
1. They didn't stay with rubber/nitrous.
2. Like the sort used on Antares?
"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."
But what you know is wrong, they weren't using rubber.
I think a good case can be made that they didn't do enough ground testing, but your post mixing disdain and falsity doesn't advance that case.
Point 1 is a good one, point 2 is not. Yes, liquid engines like the sort used on Antares, Soyuz (most reliable rocket ever built), Falcon, Proton, Atlas, Shuttle, Delta, Ariane, Saturn, and nearly every other orbital launch platform ever. Liquid/liquid engines, by any measure, are orders of magnitude more stable and well proven than hybrid rocket engines.
My point is that they still fail. Both liquid and solid boosters are a lot more mature than hybrids, no doubt. But I'm not so sure that either is fundamentally more reliable. And for hybrids to mature, somebody has to use them.
"Liquid/liquid engines, by any measure, are orders of magnitude more stable."
What do you mean by stable?
A reason to go with hybrids, at least on paper, is that they are mechanically simple but throttlable, hopefully combining the simplicity of a solid booster with the ability to throttle and shutdown of a liquid.
Of course, much of that also applies to blowdown liquid systems, and I personally find a blowdown methane/lox system particularly compelling. I figure Virgin wanted to avoid cryogens, though.
I think Paul McCartney was about 23 years old when the engines powering that Antares launch vehicle were fabricated in Russia in their race against the Americans to the moon. An antique liquid/liquid vs an inadequately qualified hybrid: no winners.
I think they're a little newer than that, but that's a good point. Still, I'm not sure either engine was inadequately qualified.
I'm not sure what constitutes adequate qualification, though. Both engines were ground tested at least some. And in Virgin's case, this flight was one of tests.
Well you could be right, but it is very hard to imagine that being true since the plastic hybrid has only been tested once on the ground. Doing a flight test so soon would be totally insane. In any case, the disaster was undoubtably a result of inadequate ground testing.
Problems like these are almost always the result of management pushing things faster than the engineering progress warrants.
I think it's also possible that a bad fuel grain slipped through whatever QA process they had. You might count that as insufficient ground testing, though.
"Problems like these are almost always the result of management pushing things faster than the engineering progress warrants."
Coincidentally, we were talking about such an instance today at work, the Conestoga 1620. As relayed to me, the "low frequency noise" mentioned in the wikipedia post was a low frequency structural mode that was missed because management didn't want to pay for a high enough fidelity finite element analysis.
Officials decided this spring to modify the space plane’s rocket motor to use a different type of fuel. Instead of burning a rubber-based fuel mix known as HTPB used on SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo’s initial test flights, Virgin Galactic selected a new propellant grain known as polyamide which officials said offered improved performance.
“This was a new fuel formulation that had been proven and tested on the ground many times,” Mickey said in a press conference.
Let us hope for Virgin's sake that "many times" doesn't mean six times for ten seconds each.
I have heard of one long duration test on the plastic fuel reported by the "Virgin watchers" in Mojave, so unless they are doing long duration tests somewhere else it doesn't seem like much. Rocket engine testing is extremely noisy so long duration tests are quite noticeable.
Some say this is an "inevitable" result of pushing boundaries. No. This is the result of a poorly managed program.
Some of the boundaries that are being pushed are how much oversight, how meticulous, etc you have to be. In other words, how well you have to manage the program, how tight a ship you keep.
Keeping a tight ship raises costs, and isn't the big emphasis of all this privatized space travel on reducing costs?
Well I'm going to pay in phone apps and home-made chocolate. I think you will do alright on the treasure, but you might find it hard to shift the blood.
It is not a nice quote, it's douchey, reductionist, and mostly nonsense. What on earth does "costs are fixed" mean? I also did not realize there was an inverse relationship between "blood" and "treasure". Are we pirates?
I don't think you're that simple, I think you're just trying to be derisive.
In case you're not :
Regardless of the effort involved, a value must be paid in order to form a new technology or model.
We, the people who strive to create, choose in what way we would like to
pay this value. We can choose to pay for progress through time, or pay for progress through means of trial and error.
While not mutually exclusive, one methodology tends to detract from the other while serving the same purpose : the pursuit of a novel model.
The methods of payment are not mutually exclusive, the ethos behind the choice to prioritize one over the other typically (but not necessarily) is.
An off-topic example I can think of would be the drive behind early Russian aviation/aerospace versus the drive behind early United States aviation/aerospace.
Different priorities got both parties to a comparable level of technology regardless of the differing means used to get there. Free market competition rushed much of early Russian aviation and made wide use of anecdotal evidences and test piloting and created leading edge machines because of it, whereas government subsidy and large cash flows drove the US to stay on top using theory and finances instead of prioritizing the happiness of pilots and fulfilling 'stick-feel'.
(before anyone mentions it, both parties did the same stuff, they just differed in prioritization)
Both parties created fantastic machines. One paid in blood, the other in time for such achievements.
It is not a nice quote, it's douchey, reductionist, and mostly nonsense. What on earth does "costs are fixed" mean? I also did not realize there was an inverse relationship between "blood" and "treasure". Are we pirates?
I didn't say it's a nice quote. I said it's a nice sounding quote, and I did mean that in the LessWrong sense of "false sagacity." In terms of tone, you sound a bit like a troll to me.
"Blood and treasure," is a phrase used to refer to money and lives/health of personnel.
And no, I was not trolling you. Please read my previous comment as factual, with very subtle nuance in the 1st sentence.
Its scary to consider, but you're basically right. This also applies to automobile/truck/aircraft manufacturing. There's always something more one can do increase safety, but it often isn't financially viable. Designing a car in which no one ever died, wouldn't be feasible, or even functional. In the 20th century, cars incrementally increased speed, which isn't so different from space-planes flying higher and higher.
That's a really grate way to sell tickets: "We now know just how careless we can be to limit in flight explosions to just one per year!" You can't use the same attitude that's now common in software startups with space vehicles, or any vehicles for that matter. "Ship now and fix problems later" does not work with real world products, and to be honest, should be avoided in software as well.
> 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.
Does this same concern apply to plastic-based fuel? It does seem like a terrible idea to have people in the rocket the first time you try a new fuel mixture.
"During the nine months since the previous rocket-powered test in January, Virgin Galactic switched SpaceShipTwo's fuel mixture from a rubber-based compound to a plastic-based mix — in hopes that the new formulation would boost the hybrid rocket engine's performance."
> 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.
Let's hope they won't ask you to run the inevitable investigation then.
>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.
Can I ask how? What is in there that tells you that?
Sure: intuition, not anything in that paragraph besides the simple fact that the vehicle destroyed itself during rocket powered flight.
You've got a hybrid motor, it's flown a number of times. You have a program that has been going for years but still hasn't got the motor design finalized due to unknown (to us) problems. Failure modes that could destroy the vehicle include things like pressurized oxidizer tank failure, burn-through of the nozzle, burn-through of the main combustion pressure vessel, blocking of the nozzle by unburned solid fuel chunks causing over-pressure failure, and the like. The last one seems most likely, since it's likelihood is modified by modifications to the fuel (which is what they are probably changing, as opposed to the nitrous system or structure or nozzle).
Obviously no one knows for sure yet.
I'd love to see civilian spaceflight become a reality, so this is an unfortunate setback. I hope Virgin will be able to take the time to get it right. I hope they will look back at this accident the same way the Apollo program viewed the Apollo 1 fire, as a much needed chance to fix a lot of potential issues that needed fixing that were thought to have contributed in a fundamental way to the lack of subsequent in-flight failures.
The hybrid rocket they are using is simpler and cheaper than a liquid/liquid design would be.
I agree that, for all we know, it was the catastrophic failure of a rocket engine that was not tested enough that killed a pilot and that they should have tested the engine for much longer than they appear to have.
I imagine they switched to this design because it's supposed to be a better one.
well, I don't think it can have been the rubber because it says in the article:
"During the nine months since the previous rocket-powered test in January, Virgin Galactic switched SpaceShipTwo's fuel mixture from a rubber-based compound to a plastic-based mix"
Software development fuckups can be just as fatal as manned space flight. Software is actually the cause of many space flight accidents. To think of software as some isolated system that does not affect peoples' lives is absurd. It's critical in many areas and can fail with fatalities.
- radiation therapy machine kills 5
- clock drift in Patriot system caused 28 killed
- Chinook helicopter killed 29 due to bug in engine control
- Toyota's electronic throttle control system caused dozens of fatalities
there's no need not in this day and age to have test pilots. If they use computers, they can debug the engine in flight conditions by running maybe ten times as many test flights.
Delays of months between flights are dangerous. Until you have a 1000-10,000 flights to build up operational data and envelope, this is a death trap causing unnecessary deaths.
The first statement implies that computer testing is so good now that an aircraft can be tested so thoroughly that the maiden voyage of an aircraft could safely also be its first "for real" mission.
It is true that computer models have definitely reduced the risks for test pilots by helping to define a much greater percentage of the performance envelope of a given system without the need for test flights. When a pilot steps into an untested craft for the first time, the "unknown" area of the envelope is better quantified; in different words, we have a better idea of how much of the performance envelope is unclear.
Yet that unknown area still exists and has to be discovered by actual human test pilots because as good as computerized testing is there still isn't 100% coverage.
(I'm a pilot and have dealt with experimental aircraft. Not on the level of this project, of course, where the envelopes of technology are being pushed, but on the level of small private aircraft where the technology is in many cases half a century old, well understood, debugged, and still has to be tested. By a human.)
there's a difference between testing the engine, and testing the handling qualities. But not always.
For testing the engine which in this case is throttleable and has time constants greater than hundreds of milliseconds the time lag from not having a pilot onboard is acceptable.
For flying qualities again the plane is large enough to be slow enough that remote pilot timelag is not significant.
There is no part of the envelope of this vehicle where you need a pilot onboard. Most of the development here can be done without pilot onboard. Space has been done from unmanned vehicles since the beginning and what they are doing is only barely rocket science.
Putting a pair of pilots in a vehicle with a non-flight-tested rocket engine is just irresponsible.
I like Rutan's company. But what they are doing on this program smacks of amateurism. They got engineers killed on the ground and now pilots killed and injured in flight. Both of which were completely preventable by some basic range and flight safety measures.
It looks like they are cutting corners by doing too much too soon because of management pressures to cut delays. And people are paying the ultimate price for their hubris.
Your forgetting the countless times that a test pilot has saved the aircraft/spacecraft from destruction. If it was unmanned and flown by computer, it would have been a fireball.
At least one shuttle flight would have been lost if the crew didn't fly manually to correct for a malfunction. STS-4 PIO'd on landing and would have crashed if auto-stabilization wasn't overridden by the pilot.
According to wikipedia, it was STS-3 that had (autoopilot-induced) oscillations during landing. The description on Wikipedia seems to imply that they were expected (the autopilot was being tested) and that the dangerous condition was due to the autopilot being left partially engaged after the test.
Correct. There was also an pitch stabilization system that malfunctioned due to the misconfigured (partially engaged) autopilot. Point remains that the pilots flying skills in the cockpit saved the orbiter.
The last of the ALT drops did this (with Fred Haise as PIC, IIRC), as did STS-3 back in 1982 at White Sands. I'm not familiar with the STS-4 incident at all.
Do you have any links?
not in this case. They should have more than one rocket craft for testing. it's ok to fly reciprocating and jet prototypes because Scaled has experience with hundreds if not thousands of those kinds of aircraft, and it's easy to bail out at 200mph. It's much harder to bail out at Mach 3 and 100k ft.
I would beg to differ. SpaceX certainly flown unmanned, rocket powered test flights both from McGregor[1], and Cape Canaveral[2]. Those were in the US last time I checked.
Did you know an F1 car can drive itself around the track? It seems like there's something in human nature, at least among some people that leads them to want to drive the thing themselves.
not today's F1 car. They don't have auto trans, auto steering or auto brakes. Yes they could and audi has been testing an unmanned race car that does round a track, but there is a little chance that an F1 engine will blow up and kill the driver.
This is two fatal accidents, so far. There was widespread speculation in the space community over Scaled Composite's seemingly blasé attitude to Nitrous Oxide, after their cold-flow test fatalities.
You seem to have some sort of inside knowledge none of the rest of us have? Seriously, to say that this is a poorly managed program is something you can't provide any concrete evidence of - there has been a tragedy, but you cannot say that it was poorly managed because you don't know.
In fact, you don't even know that rubber in the hybrid engine blocked the nozzle. You can't know that - you aren't part of the investigating team. And they don't even know yet.
Even under the best circumstances, space travel is risky business. It may well be that this program didn't do all it should have done to mitigate those risks, but both facts can be true it's not mutually exclusive.
> 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.
2. releases a considerable stream of energy at a controlled, steady rate
3. does that in a small system, while flying through the air.
It's a lot easier if you drop one requirement:
1 + 2 = coal-based power plant
1 + 3 = bomb
2 (sort of) + 3 = conventional airplane
All of the above have been done reliably. It's only when you put together all three conditions that you get a rocket, and that's when things get really, really difficult.
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.
This makes me think of all those crazy warning labels that warn you not to do some incredibly stupid thing (ie "don't use the hair dryer while sleeping"). You know every dumb warning has some sort of story behind it. :)
Is it cheaper to pay by adding extra complexity into legal contracts, extra labels, and extra training across organization vs just paying up for fixing the consequences of an outlier accident?
The point is beyond an unintuitively small size outliers become practical inevitabilities. This isn't black swan stuff either, but just simple percentages.
If you're a small company you generally get to deal with each and every case, and do risk assessment up front on an individual basis. When you're big you're doing enough jobs to standardise those assessments (getting the economies of scale going), processes, and any resulting contracts. The problems get going when the supporting bureaucracy has lost track with reality and becomes a self perpetuating beast, but at least in the early stages it should be beneficial.
"when the supporting bureaucracy has lost track with reality"
That's really the key point actually. Things become self perpetuating without anyone even questioning if they are still even necessary.
That said most people don't read contracts (at least most consumers) so in a sense and in certain situations it pays to stuff as many things in there as possible.
What's interesting is how many risky situations you enter into with potential liability where you don't sign a contract.
For example nobody signs a contract to eat a meal at a restaurant. You don't sign away your right to sue if the food is bad or if the meal isn't delivered on time. The car company that sells you a car doesn't require you to sign a contract with them the dealer of course has a sales contract which is different. Car company is big enough to not really have to go that route. They know they don't need a contract to protect against the little things and with a big thing it doesn't matter.
Otoh an electrician just quoted a job to me for under $800. And he sends me this long involved contract (that no doubt he copied from another electrician) which really isn't necessary for this type of job.
I remember when a developer I hired to do work started many years ago. It was a $60k job. Long and involved contract. Ended up signing it (needed the work had no choice). Well we are still doing business 12 years later. But it evolved into a handshake. Nothing in the contract says he has to take my call at 11:00pm on a Saturday night but last weekend he did just that. He and his team finished the repair by Monday morning. I told him to take his wife and family to dinner and we'd pay the bill. Not required but I was really appreciative of the effort. He thanked me and told me it was his job to make sure things were working but he appreciated very much.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> The required scale of technology/economy comfortably puts it in "at least several centuries from now, if we're incredibly lucky and/or devoted".
We went from not flying anything heavier than air to going to the Moon in 66 years. If we really really wanted to, we could go to Mars in thirty. This is a problem of priorities, not technologies (although the technological problems are real, they are not insurmountable).
While true, it is also not as direct of a threat. CO2 is affecting us now, whereas asteroids, etc., are (thankfully) only possibilities. Serious ones, to be certain, but not immediately threatening.
Humans as a species will survive CO2, though, whereas asteroids conceivably can go from "not immediately threatening" to "Earth will be destroyed in a few years" without warning.
> not immediately threatening" to "Earth will be destroyed in a few years" without warning.
Unless the lead time is 50-100 years, years might as well be tomorrow, it's going to kill us all either way. Even that might be stretching it.
> Humans as a species will survive CO2
Maybe, personally I believe humans will cause their own extinction. I'm just not sure yet if we're going to take all life with us or not. Dealing with CO2 is a toss up between making the planet uninhabitable or completely inhospitable to life.
I went with years there to be safe as I'm uncertain about what the detection levels are like for planet-killer sized asteroids. I know we discover house-sized ones passing between us and the Moon after they whiz by.
any vehicle that is dependent upon currently available propulsion systems is a waste of time.
So... what, we just halt development of all vehicles, globally, period? Bye-bye trains, planes, cars, bicycles, and buses?
You can't develop the future of transportation or the future of propulsion systems if you literally shut down global commerce.
Besides, an airplane (for example) is not wedded to the engine. Developments in prop planes carried over directly to jet planes, once the jet engine matured. Any future propulsion system that can replace jet engines will probably not be hard to work into many plane designs of the day.
To be fair space flight has some significant advantages from an environmental perspective. Earth observation satellites are essential for understanding how the atmosphere works and how the planet is changing. Also, the unique constraints of space have lead to the development of sustainable technology such as solar panels, fuel cells, and better water purification.
Who cares? Let's feed the poor first and worry about bigger stuff later. Reminds me of a story about a letter written by Sister Mary Jucunda from Zambia to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. (http://www.meaus.com/whyExplore.html)
Well feeding the world is a more challenging problem than space flight ever will be. It is not like you can just sign a massive check and deploy some engineers and suddenly poor people in Africa will have enough to eat. But the comparatively trivial challenge of space flight can provide real benefits. Weather satellites can let farmers and governments plan ahead. A single remote sensing satellite can map desertification (which destroy farm land), and track floods (which destroy crops).
There are so many structural / societal problems in the way of feeding the poor that it's not a very interesting problem. You would have to re-engineer our society and power-structures.
Better to make incremental progress on poverty, without constraining the innovators to work on problems that don't interest them, or that seem even more intractable than e.g. space travel or AI.
Thanks. I expected the downvotes. But it breaks my heart that we have such a beautiful planet and we treat it like a trash heap, all the while dreaming of Mars and whatnot. Let's put our own house in order before we go off travelling.
"we" ? There's no we. There's just various groups of people. If one such group of < 10 000 people (spacex) can go off and build transportation to go to Mars, let them - no one should deny them to do that.
Those same < 10 000 people probably doesn't know nor have the ability to fix all the problems on Earth, but they might be able to get to Mars.
You talk as if we can only do one thing, or as if there's any chance that we will all agree to pull in one direction or agree about what the most critical threats are.
If we can't even save our own home world, there is every reason to believe that we will do damage elsewhere. That being the case, best to stay home until we grow up a bit.
Earth doesn't need saving, it's perfectly fine. Regardless, in a world with practical interstellar travel local damage is irrelevant - the universe is infinite. Milky Way alone contains at least 100 billion planets.
The one easy option, voluntary restraint, isn't even on the table, not that I noticed. So what makes you think that's so likely, what about our current priorities and behaviours makes you so optimistic? Where is the economic incentive to solve the problem? Sure, it means more long-term life and profit, but having even 1% less quarterly profit so that in 1000 years some other company can exist at all is not exactly how we do things around here. Instead companies invested in fossil fuels are happily funding "global warming skeptics".
That proverbial man who plants trees knowing he will never sit in their shade is proverbial for a reason.. it's an amazing and heartwarming little saying because it's a contrast to how we generally behave, as individuals as well as organizations and masses. We learn from repeated catastrophe.. sometimes, maybe. But this problem is not one we can have a lot of attempts at solving. Right now we are still moving into the wrong direction, and probably even accelerating.. sure, hitting a wall can make people change their direction, but not if it breaks their neck, so to speak.
I suspect that in turn depends on whether we're able to create 'digital' humans or not.(I'm not weighing in on whether or not we'll be able to, just pointing out that if we can, 'manned' interstellar travel becomes much, much easier.)
So we kill them. It wouldn't be the first time, and it won't be the last. This is life. Hopefully we'll learn something, except to be paralyzed by fear of doing damage.
What is damage? Life is change. Life modifies the environment. The Earth does seem to be the most interesting body in this region of space, but I don't view it as some sacred jewel that should be protected against all change.
Fundamentally, we don't know where our resources would be best spent. We need to try all the things.
The biggest lever we've got right now is computation, so yeah maybe it would be more efficient to develop AI / IA first and then mass space travel, but we can't be sure.
Also, fundamentally we can accept a few billion deaths. That sounds and is grotesque, but it wouldn't be the end of humanity. I don't see how climate change kills us all in the next 100-500 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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-elo...
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".
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" ...
Ethically speaking, sending non-sentient foreign organisms to an unknown planet that might already be inhabited falls somewhere between spamming and attempted genocide.
No, thanks. I prefer to believe that this task is what our intelligence is for.
I completely agree with you on the spamming point. But disagree on the intelligence side ...
Bacterial colonization is a useful argument for interrogating the "we must colonize spaaaace!" folks' intentions. I mean, why exactly must we colonize space?
"Before the sun leaves the main sequence of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram/the Earth is hit by a comet or irradiated by a GRB" is a meaningless argument. These events happen on a time frame of hundreds to thousands of megayears; while the mean life expectancy of a mammalian species is on the order of one to ten MYa, and for a hominid species like us, it's well under one MYa. These arguments don't hold water. Furthermore, we coevolved with our biosphere and we're really badly adapted to existence without a large subset of it: calling for human space colonization is implicitly a call for terraforming/transporting a viable terrestrial biosphere to other worlds. Which brings us neatly back to bacterial colonization, because that's part of the package deal.
While I can't refute the quasi-religious imperative implicit behind the rhetoric for space colonization, I wish its proponents would recognize that it's essentially a faith-based ideology!
Apart from the usual Manifest Destiny IN SPACE! crap, recently I've been a bit shocked to realize that there might actually be a point in trying to go to remote and harsh places.
The Antarctic being a barren wasteland makes it an attractive breeding ground for penguins precisely because it's so inhospitable to anything alive, penguins included. As long as penguins suck less at living in a barren wasteland than their predators it's a net benefit for them to be there, despite the hardships of the environment.
If we assume there is a group of humans that feel existentially threatened by other humans so much that odds of surviving in an irradiated subterranean Mars colony beat the odds of being exterminated here on Earth, it would be a perfectly rational choice for them to try and move somewhere out of reach.
There are lots of potential scenarios why such groups might come into existence, and not all of them involve outright genocide. For example, a group could form just as a result of concerned citizens wanting to go to some place very, very remote once kids start playing Pokemon with their newfangled RNA synthesizers.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
a) Travel within the solar system? where do you want to go live, Mercury, Venus? Mars is almost as worthless too, its gravity is 1/3 Earth's. Can't live there for long.
b) We just need to make it cheaper? how, exactly, are you going to get up there except by burning obscene quantities of solid (fossil) fuel, as we do now?
That's where the thermodynamics things comes in play: you have to pay the energy cost, there's no elegant "oh, we're just going to fold space" or some such bs. And fossil fuels are finite by definition, need I remind you.
It's not "we just need to make it cheaper". It's coming up with new breakthroughs in physics that no one can assure even exist.
a) Mars.Your notion that humans cannot survive for long in 1/3 gravity is interesting. While it has not been proven that we can live long and healthy lives in 1/3 G, many very intelligent and informed people believe we can. Do you have a particular reason to believe we cannot?
b) You have to pay the energy cost but that is not the hard part. Fossil fuels are finite, but we don't need to use fossil fuels and even if we did setting up a civilization on mars would take a tiny portion of earth's fossil fuels. We are not going to run out of hydrogen as long as we have the energy to split water and plenty of energy hits the earth in the form of sunlight every day, not to mention fission or fusion.
So no, the laws of thermodynamics are not the problem. We "just" need to make it cheaper.
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)
This is very bad. Not just for the family and friends of the poor guy who died, but for commercial manned spaceflight in general.
SpaceshipTwo is considered the 'simplest' and 'safest' of all the upcoming manned commercial vehicle. It has many features that should help keep it reliable. For example, instead of a real liquid rocket engine, it uses a hybrid engine; it has almost no moving parts apart from a valve or two. No turbopumps or gimbals or much mechanical stuff to go wrong. It only goes suborbital, so it does not need a heatshield because there's no re-entry. The landing system uses wings & wheels similar to any commercial jet. This stuff is mature and tested.
In fact, the only novel thing about SS2 is it's wing-feathering system. It's lets the craft to descend vertically still under the pilots control. I wonder if (and this is complete speculation) there was a problem restoring the wings to their 'atmospheric' flight position which prevented them from landing normally.
The consequences for commercial manned spaceflight will be quite severe, I think. I imagine that many Virgin Galactic customers will cancel their pre-orders. The flight test program is dead in it's tracks at this point; even those who don't cancel will be unlikely to fly for many more years while investigations and improvements are concluded.
Other manned providers such as SpaceX and XCor will likely be extra cautious before allowing people to fly in their vehicles.
The image of manned commercial spaceflight will take a hit. If the 'Safest' of the commercial vehicles can crash before it even enters service, I worry that many potential customers will be put off. It never hurts to remember that Spaceflight is a dangerous business.
It's a sad day to top off a bad week in spaceflight. :(
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 cold-flow test. Very tragic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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).
The engine has been the bane of SS2. The original rubber/N2O design was problematic enough that Virgin switched from rubber to a plastic. Apparently this was the first powered flight to use the new fuel.
While the design lacks complicated turbopumps and cryogenic fuels, it does have one drawback: the N2O is contained in a pressure vessel. If that tank is damaged while still full (or close to), bad things can happen.
Looking more into their design turns up all sorts of issues with nitrous oxide as a propellant. It's used all the time in dentist offices, so it's easy to misunderstand as an innocuous gas. At higher pressures and relatively normal temperatures it can go supercritical and become very, very volatile. At that point it's an even better solvent than supercritical CO2, and still a very strong oxidizer:
Don't forget that this is not the first fatality associated with this engine. In 2007, 3 people were killed in an explosion during a static test at Mohave Air & Space port.
So they traded sometimes dangerous moving parts that could lead to a mission fail to a rarely dangerous pressurized vessel that would lead to casualties?
Is this a case of not seeing safety's big picture? Cutting accidents in half (or by whatever) is great, but not if that means the remaining accidents are fatal. A more frequent controlled failure is a much better scenario, but I imagine hurts the bottom line too much.
I'm wary that for-profit companies aren't going to invest enough in private manned spaceflight's safety when there's a profit incentive at work dictating otherwise. At least without a fair bit of regulation.
I think it's very hard to make that determination. In spaceflight, all accidents are likely to be fatal.
Also, I have no problem with a profit-motive; killing your passengers is very bad for business.
They just switched to a new liquid powered engine because their hybrid engine was not powerful enough. This was the first powered test flight with their new engine, and given the information so far it sounds like it exploded in-flight. Very, very, tragic.
edit: I'm wrong. They simply switched to a new type of fuel for their hybrid engine.
Interesting. I might actually be wrong about the details then. Maybe the new engines they were using is actually a new type of hybrid (nylon)? I know for a fact that they are working on their own liquid engine, but perhaps it wasn't involved in this crash.
Well Soyuz still flies and has exceptionally low human fatality rates in the last decades. So if safetey realiability is desired it could be just "buy a ride on a Souyz" for now.
I think it won't be that dire. People who sign up to fly into space on a new design would probably be aware of the risks involved.
Many people still climb Everest, dive into caves, and jump from clifs with wingsuits. I think there won't be a shortage and the future is bright and exciting.
SpaceShipTwo is meant to get to zero velocity at ~105km up. Soyuz gets to 17,450 mph at 200km up (and then catches up to the station at 400km up). Only the speed sideways is important, and there is more than one order of magnitude difference.
> SpaceshipTwo is considered the 'simplest' and 'safest' of all the upcoming manned commercial vehicle.
XCOR's culture of safety is pretty good, though it's the school of thought quite close to Virgin Galactic . At least rocket engines in XCOR are designed with the highest standards of safety.
Yes, looking at the twitter feed, multiple sources state that it blew up. This means that either the tank (which takes up the whole rear half of the vehicle) failed catastrophically (unlikely; CF-wrapped tanks tend to develop hairline cracks which slowly leak out) OR the engine exploded.
What's interesting is that the SS2 engine fuel was swapped out very recently for a new thermoplastic polyamide solid fuel for better performace. Maybe this new fuel was not tested as well as it should have been?
This is a time when you re-read Gene Kranz's famous speech to the flight control division after the Apollo 1 fire.
Gene Kranz is the gentleman sitting in the flight director's chair in the Apollo 13 movie, wearing the white vest. He helped create the Mission Control organization at NASA.
"Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work.
Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dammit, stop!’ I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.
From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘Tough’ and ‘Competent.’ Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect.
When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write ‘Tough and Competent’ on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control."
...and then it was Enterprise, Atlantis etc.
No matter how tough and competent the organization is, failures cannot be eliminated when we are talking about so complex systems/operations.
While I can't imagine how tragic this must be for the families of the pilots, I just want to say that one of the pilots has given his everything for this cause: that one day we will not be a one-planet species.
Someone dying is devastating. Trying to conquer space a handful of people at a time is the slow and dangerous way of accomplishing this task. We should be building machines to explore the solar system. This can be done for a fraction of the cost, time, and it will allow him to allow us to iterate quickly.
In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now than if we move slowly trying to reduce the risk in order to keep humans safe.
But people take far greater risks for far less reason. Monster Truck rallys. Motorcycle racing. Skiing. We don't change national priorities every time somebody dies at those activities.
SO lets keep it in perspective, and salute the brave folks who are trying to expand human boundaries.
Those aren't really fair comparisons as they are several orders of magnitudes less dangerous than space flight. My quick estimates say that roughly 1-3% of people who try to get to space die during some point of the journey. Some quick Googling put the fatality rate for skiing at roughly .00002%. If 1% of people who tried skiing died, you could bet there would be national discussions about it.
About 0.4% of people working in the Alaska crab fishery die on the job, and people seem to be relatively okay with that. And it's much, much better than it was years ago. I know people who were crabbers in the 80s --- stories that would curl your hair (or straighten it, if it's already curly).
I think you're kind of missing the point. The Alaska crab program doesn't come to a complete stop for a couple years while there's an investigation and an attempt to make it safer. It won't be on the cover of the NYT. You don't need to go to Congress and request an additional $1.7 billion for another ship.
We are moving into Space at a snail's pace because we keep insisting on spending lots of money to try and send humans there "safely", and that's not really working out so well for us.
Perhaps, you haven't noticed but I'm using this accident to discuss our national space program. Virgin Galactic has a plane that goes to 62 miles/100km. While this is great, in the short-term, it doesn't help our space program.
Btw, you don't think they need to revisit safety to assure their customers that it's not a one way trip? Do they even have a second plane? There's not a chance that there will be a commercial flight carrying paying customers within the next 2 years. Branson was saying this year just a month ago.
Summiting Everest, then? At some point, it was >10% mortality, yet people still did it, and it was considered acceptable, given that it was people doing it voluntarily. I believe that it's now in the ~1-3% mortality range.
I think you're overlooking the fact that Virgin Galactic isn't a national priority, it's a commercial venture. And it'll probably take years of testing to convince many people to take their flight, assuming they want to spend the money.
The ability of the United States to send people to space ended because of the last shuttle accident. So, yes, people dying did affect our national resolve. I think if you do the math, flying in the space shuttle was more dangerous. There were only 135 flights? We lost $3.5 billion of hardware and 14 lives in 2 accidents.
Virgin Galactic is American. We don't reserve that name for government employees. There are several such commercial ventures in America right now. And some of them are close to sending Americans into space.
Its a priority for these Americans to send people into space. I don't think I've overlooked anything. The importance of this adventure (to the people involved) has so far been worth the risk, partly because they regard it as far more important that motorcycle racing.
Some people want to do stuff now, not a hundred years from now, and they don't insist on perfect safety. The test pilots were fully aware of the risk, and I honor them for it.
There are a lot of people like that. Mountain climbers. Surfers. Volunteer soldiers. Alaskan crab fishermen.
You don't see anyone proposing that crabbing be banned until we can develop automated machines to do the job, right?
I didn't say ban manned space flight. We keep trying to restart our space program by sending people to Mars. I think we should start a more extensive national unmanned space program. For example, if the Hubble, or its replacement, needs to be fixed, we should have an unmanned answer, for instance.
We should start building on Mars without humans. If our machines can't do that yet, then we should invest in them until they can.
I guarantee you that if there was sufficient profit motive, you'd see hundreds of companies being formed to go to space.
Right now the risk makes it too expensive, so the profit isn't there. Much of the work Virgin Galactic and the others are doing will lower the cost eventually. When it gets low enough, there will be people lining up around the block to become asteroid miners, etc.
One potential benefit of developing the automated solution is that life support is HEAVY. You can send up much larger payloads when you don't have to worry about keeping humans alive.
Not to say that there aren't large drawbacks (huge amounts of R&D, for example). Robot space travelers are also relatively uninspiring.
>> We should be building machines to explore the solar system. This can be done for a fraction of the cost, time, and it will allow him to allow us to iterate quickly.
One man on mars for a day will be more informative than all the remote hardware we've sent so far. There is no substitute for being somewhere in person.
Is that your opinion, or do you have some facts to support that statement? As part of the program, we should be building better machines and not crawling along at 12 inches a day, of course.
Well, sure. Just look at all the jobs that are still being done by humans. Even fairly simple and formulaic jobs like working in a fast food restaurant are still in the human domain (that may be starting to change, finally, but it hasn't happened yet).
For that matter, look at the problem of operating an autonomous vehicle right here on Earth. Everyone from DARPA to MIT to Carnegie-Mellon to Google has been working on that one for the last sixty years or so. It's now gotten to where it kinda works. Sorta. In some conditions.
Remote control doesn't work well when there's a large speed-of-light lag between the earthbound operator and the vehicle. Mars is 6 minutes away, round trip, minimum and that's about the best case. For the outer planets, forget it. The Jupiter system is at least an hour round-trip (not that we'd be landing people on Jupiter itself, but there's a lot of interesting stuff in the system).
Your vehicle is toast long before you figure out that there's a problem.
The Google Space "Car" won't need a license on Mars. If it wrecks after 6 months, we send another. The idea is that sending machines is cheaper, and when things go wrong, it's not as much of a big deal.
That's why I keep emphasising developing the machines and sending them.
I'm sure that is why things move 12 inches a day. If the remote operator sees a big rock/hole/whatever a few feet away, they have a day or two to steer left. It just might take a couple weeks to go around it though. LOL
Can you justify this? I don't understand why that should be. (I also suspect that sending one person to Mars for a day will cost an order of magnitude more than all the remote hardware we've sent so far, so the comparison is unfair.)
I find it absolutely reckless and inexcusable to require live humans riding on a prototype rocket when you have all the processing power needed to automate/remote manage the vehicle literally in your pocket.
EDIT: To those downvoting, you should really check that all current spaceplanes have the capability to fly and land autonomously--Boeing X-37, Dream Chaser, even Buran was fully autonomous and that was 25 years ago. There is simply no excuse for Virgin for being sloppy.
I think armchair quarterbacking is reckless and inexcusable. These people has been working on airplanes and space crafts for some time now and I would trust their judgment. Especially given that they put their own lives on the line.
"These people" that designed the spaceplane didn't put their lives on the line, they put the lives of the pilots on the line. And I would trust the judgment of the engineers at Boeing, Sierra Nevada, SpaceX, Lockheed-Martin and the entire Soviet space program over theirs.
Really... You are going to trust the entire Soviet space program compared to the engineers behind this project? I really don't think they were being reckless with having pilots. Ultimately, their plan was to take other patrons up to space. You will need personal (experienced space flight attendants) while conducting the flight. This is obviously tragic and my thoughts go out to the families affected. However, when you are trying to do something as complex as space travel and leaving earth you will unfortunately have mishaps and deaths.
Please read the context of the first post--I'm referring to the engineers behind the specifically mentioned Buran program, an autonomous spaceplane that launched, flew and landed with no crew.
If the Soviets deemed it too risky for human pilots and managed to automate it 25 years ago maybe that should put it into perspective just how risky and reckless what Virgin are doing is.
>I find it absolutely reckless and inexcusable to require live humans riding on a prototype rocket when you have all the processing power needed to automate/remote manage the vehicle literally in your pocket.
I think people should make that decision themselves.
The following is purely personal opinion. Feel free to disprove me.
I think at the moment, and into the foreseeable future, a human at the pilot seat for an experimental craft, where all sorts of unexpected scenarios could pop up, would be much better suited than an automated "test" pilot, given that sometimes you don't even necessarily have the correct parameters of your plane/rocket to program a successful autopilot.
Keep in mind that people at Virgin Galactic will have finite resources. Even if you can automate something that can access very unexpected situations and make a correct decision on what to do, the cost of doing that vs a test pilot is going to be much higher.
As far as I'm aware, aircraft autopilot systems do not perform well when unexpected mechanical failures occur and usually defer to humans by sounding alarms and such.
As for rockets, especially test ones, usually the automated system that makes a call when mechanical failures occur involves self destruct to prevent collateral damages.
It looks like this was the first time they turned on the engine with a new fuel plastic base fuel. I don't understand why they had humans strapped in when testing an experimental fuel in an experimental rocket engine.
"During the nine months since the previous rocket-powered test in January, Virgin Galactic switched SpaceShipTwo's fuel mixture from a rubber-based compound to a plastic-based mix"
I dream of one day becoming a test pilot. Especially in ships during their developmental stages, unaccounted for situations will come up, and a human capable of assessing and managing these situations are necessary.
For each of the technologies involved with the X-37, et al., that technology required testing with a human-in-the-loop to act as the judge for if the control output made sense. It simply isn't feasible to begin testing your robot pilot without first testing it with a pilot there in the first place.
Condolences to the friends and family of anyone who may have perished in this event.
While this is a major set-back and bummer, at the same time it is far better that something like this happen during a test than during a commercial flight. Whatever the design, manufacturing, or process issues are, they will now be sussed out reducing the chance of a failure later on.
I sincerely hope this is not such a huge set-back that it totally derails Virgin/Scaled's approach as I love the fact that we have competing commercial concepts working at the same time.
This is awful. I hope that problems like this don't result in more regulations and barriers to private spaceflight. It's about as dangerous of a job as they come and we have to expect companies will lose men. Every astronaut is a hero for humanity and progress.
Tangent: I think it's safe to say that HN -- on this thread in particular -- is populated by many people who are deeply interested in space travel.
I'd like to recommend everyone select as their next book for pleasure reading Andy Weir's "The Martian".
Here's my GoodReads review:
It's not high-brow literature by any stretch. But it's not about the writing per se, it's about the story. I challenge anyone to read it without caring what happens to the protagonist. I recognize that he (and perhaps by extension the author?) may be borderline juvenile on a few occasions... but for me it hardly detracted from the reading experience. On the contrary, I was sufficiently immersed in being on Mars in the shoes of this bold and lonely astronaut that the book per se disappeared nearly the entire time I read it. Pausing to re-read a noteworthy turn of phrase or analyzing it as literature might well have detracted from the author's intent. The story is the thing. For me, the writing got out of the way. And I'm glad it did. This is an extremely well-researched, gripping, exciting page-turner. If you are remotely interested in space travel, imho it's a must-read.
This reminds of studying the Space Shuttle Challenger as part of my Engineering training at school. We studied it as part of an ethics in engineering lesson. The Space Shuttle labels certain components as "Criticality 1". A Criticality 1 component means there is no back up system and failure can lead to catastrophic consequences during Space Shuttle operation, especially at launch. As you may guess the O-rings on the Space Shuttle rocket boosters were graded as Criticality 1. The Space Shuttle had over 700 components graded as Criticality 1.
Space vehicles and space exploration is a very dangerous and high risk endeavor. This week we are unfortunately reminded of this fact. Thoughts go out to the families of the brave pilots and those with the Virgin Galactic program.
China launches 3 rockets in one week[1]. Russia launches a resupply of the International Space Station, ready to fly just 9 hours after yet another space vehicle crashes here[2].
Say what you want about "cheap spaceflight", there is something dysfunctional going on here. This latest disaster makes me wonder if the US even has a current capability of space flight. Pinching a few pennies isn't worth it.
With regular flight in regular airplanes being so common and safe these days, it is easy to forget the lives that were lost so many years ago when brave men and women were testing the new technology of the time. Always pushing for faster planes, longer flights, higher altitudes. Lives were lost every step of the way. But it got us here. Today. We can cross oceans in a matter of hours rather than days (weeks?). So we continue to push the limits. And lives are lost each step of the way. Will I ever reach space? It is possible... but not likely. But I see no reason why my children won't. And it will be all because brave men and women, like the man that died today, continued to push the limits.
I was lucky enough to attend the first public flight of SpaceShip One; it was one of the most inspirational things I've ever witnessed. Very sorry for the family of the pilot who died and generally everybody involved.
Virgin Galactic was set up so eventually the average person can experience the wonder of space flight. The company didn't have Elon Musk type aspirations, but it is a big part of the process that will eventually allow us to colonize the stars.
These type of events show that even though we have the smartest scientific wizards in the world working on these things, there is still so much we have to learn, almost a half century after we landed people on the moon.
My thoughts are with the Virgin Galactic team. Spaceflight is difficult, dangerous, and I believe crucial to the future of humanity. Test piloting is always dangerous, more so with space vehicles, but that doesn't make it any less heartbreaking or impactful when you lose someone. I'm sure they will learn from this even as they mourn the loss.
Virgin Galactic, especially those you lost today, you have my deepest respect for Daring Greatly.
I am really sad to hear about this crash. In case anyone is interested in the technology behind SpaceshipTwo here is a brilliant documentary about Burt Rutan, Scaled Composites and the development of SpaceshipOne:
This highlights how important crew escape systems are. The issue isn't just crew survival, but also the effect that loss of crew has on the program. If crew loss is a real danger, it will happen, and after it does the PR often kills the public will to press on.
Innovation can't happen without risk - it's a damn shame that pilots lost their lives in this, but it's an inevitability in the course of human progress. Best we can do is learn from the mistakes that happened here and try again.
It's not inevitable, as evidenced by all the other accidents that have been... evited. You just don't hear about those. (Yes, evited is a word, it's just weird.)
I believe the OP here meant not that this specific incident was inevitable but rather that the death of a private astronaut at some point was statistically inevitable.
> current spaceplanes have the capability to fly and land autonomously--Boeing X-37, Dream Chaser, even Buran was fully autonomous and that was 25 years ago. There is simply no excuse for Virgin for being sloppy.
The point being there shouldn't have been human pilots in those seats in the first place.
It is demonstrably avoidable, there is zero need to risk human lives when doing testing these days. This is why Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser has the capability to land autonomously and is precisely why when it had an accident in 2013[1] nobody was hurt.
The Antares flight used refurb-Russian engines, and Antares could not be used for manned flight anyways. Even if Antares was flying great, the US would still depend on Russia for rides to the ISS. If the Russians wanted to sabotage something to make sure that the US remained reliant on them, it would be one of the launchers that will be used for manned flights in the near future; Atlas V or Delta IV (CST-100) or Falcon 9 (Dragon 2).
Virgin Galactic threatens approximately fuck-all of what the Russians do. Their spacecraft cannot bring people into orbit. In no conceivable way did Space Ship Two make the US any less reliant on the Russians.
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.