Virgin Galactic Is Rattled, but Undeterred, by Deadly Space Plane Crash

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/science/space/virgin-galactic-is-rattled-by-crash-but-undeterred.html?ref=science&_r=0

by dnetesn • 12 years ago

33 26 12 years ago

nytimes.com

austinz• 12 years ago

This article (which was posted to HN yesterday but failed to gain traction) discusses the history of the SpaceShipTwo engine in significant detail. It's a worthy follow-up read.

http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/10/30/apollo-ansari-hobblin...

neurotech1• 12 years ago

Doug Messier (Parabolic Arc) is known for his bias against Virgin Galactic.

I thought his comments about Kevin Mickey (President of Scaled Composites) not wanting to stick around for questions yesterday were way out of line.

rodgerd• 12 years ago

That's a much friendlier puff piece that some others:

"It also emerged that three senior Virgin Galactic executives - the vice-president in charge of propulsion, the vice-president in charge of safety, and the chief aerodynamics engineer - had all quit the company in recent months."

"The Sunday Telegraph disclosed that Sir Richard's company, as well as US authorities, were warned about safety issues on numerous occasions, as long ago as 2007 when three engineers died in an explosion during testing of a rocket engine on the ground."

"Tomasso Sgobba, executive director of IAASS and the former head of safety at the European Space Agency, said that Virgin Galactic had refused to share information with industry experts outside the company and declined to have its rocket design peer-reviewed. Representatives of Virgin Galactic had refused to come to IAASS meetings, he said."

There's heaps more.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/richard-bransons-v...

pulkitpulkit2• 12 years ago

Think we have to differentiate between using these as signals of bad practice or process and using them as scapegoats or excuses in hindsight. Once something goes wrong, it's really easy to create a case for guilt by using many small, unrelated, eventually inconsequential pieces of evidence - often greater than the sum of the parts and I feel this can be really unfair.

coldtea• 12 years ago

There are far too many signals of bad practice, arrogance and refusal to cooperate to just leave them alone.

Of course if there was success people wouldn't be looking into this (as much), but that's par for the course.

When bad practices are involved, you either (a) succeed so all is OK, or (b) face the consequences when you fail.

The third option, (c) have bad practices and be left alone after you fail is not really productive or helpful for the industry.

krisoft2• 12 years ago

It really rubs me the wrong way that you seemingly refer to the previous test related death of 3 people as a "small" incident. I'm sure that's not what you intended to write. Maybe what you say is that it's unrelated, therefore "has a small relevance" now. Even then I would argue that evidence of blatant disregard of safety protocols in the past is a relevant piece of the puzzle.

But declaring it a small incident? I would not.

lutorm4• 12 years ago

Which aerospace companies have their designs peer reviewed?

hga3• 12 years ago

I would hope that if you're developing a brand new rocket engine design to carry people, you'd welcome offers of peer review and do everything else you can reasonably do to help make it safe (like avoiding PR driven deadline pressure).

In the history of manned space flight, lots of unmanned experience was made before crossing that threshold.

InclinedPlane2• 12 years ago

Here's a much more hard hitting article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

It's tempting as a space enthusiast to see criticism of Virgin Galactic and Scaled's operations as attacks against spaceflight or commercial space activities or the space tourism business in general. But people should not let their enthusiasm carry them to far into ignoring the very real problems at VG and Scaled.

They have unquestionably taken a lax attitude toward security, as demonstrated most abundantly by the previous fatal accident at Scaled/VG which took 3 lives during a test that should have not injured a single person if they had been following standard safety practices. Moreover, they've consistently turned a deaf ear on criticisms of their engine design and its safety, criticisms which now appear to have been quite well founded.

Yes sometimes rockets are tricky. Sometimes bad things happen to otherwise good designs. That's the nature of probability. But bad things happen to bad designs too, and we should be sensitive to those circumstances.

7952• 12 years ago

Beyond issues with the engine I wonder if people underestimate the risk of the actual concept. It seems very complicated. Flying at high speed in the atmosphere is a serious undertaking even without a rocket motor. However advanced aeronautics may be the atmosphere is still a very hostile environment.

InclinedPlane2• 12 years ago

If they had a rocketplane that had a reasonable rocket motor in it that would enable them to do quick turnarounds by simply refueling, doing a little bit of inspection, and reflying, then it might be possible to validate the idea through an extensive test flight program, just as we've done with airplanes. Put in a hundred or so test flights exploring the flight envelope and it would be possible to gain some confidence in the system.

With the design that Virgin Galactic / Scaled have now I don't see that as a reasonable possibility, and I don't think it is a safe system (largely due to the rocket, the airframe might be a perfectly fine design).

hga3• 12 years ago

Here's another: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/11/01/what-happened-to-virgin...

Where Raul Simberg makes the point that the fallacy of sunk costs is likely in play:

I also suspect that this will be the nail in the coffin for the hybrid program. Many in the industry (including me) told Virgin after the fatal test-stand explosion in 2007 that they needed to redesign and go to a liquid engine, but they had designed the airframe for the hybrid, and a liquid would have had different mass characteristics, probably necessitating a spacecraft redesign, which they were loath to do. The company appears to have been stuck in a “sunk cost” trap for years, with the belief that, despite all the years of delays, just a little more money and a little more time would finally get them to a workable engine. Yesterday morning, the trap snapped shut.

spikels• 12 years ago

Branson and the Vigin team are absolutely brilliant at PR. All day the top headlines on Google News have been about his "determination" to "find the cause of the crash" and "move forward" with little reflection on how big a screw up this was.

This (along with good HR) has been the secret to Virgin's success in what are basicly commodity businesses (retail, music, telecom, airlines). The free advertising and friendly governments (also PR targets) are a big advantage against competitors. Very little innovation required. However it is of limited value in a business requiring overcoming multiple technical challenges.

The cheap spaceports and celebrity endorsements are still quite valuable. They just need a partner that could actually make it fly but apparently these are in short supply. Perhaps only SpaceX?

justincormack• 12 years ago

Not quite all, the tone has shifted "Space dream in doubt after crash" http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/01/sir-richard-b...

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

That headline requires an almost willful misinterpretation of the quote it's based on, though.

k-mcgrady• 12 years ago

Yeh, they really twisted what he said. Here is a direct quote from Branson in the same article:

“And once we find out what went wrong, if we can overcome it, we will make absolutely certain that the dream lives on.”

In other words unless there is a flaw in the design that makes it financially unviable to continue they will solve the problem and push on.

mbbau2• 12 years ago

Serious question: why do people care about this?

krisoft2• 12 years ago

I don't know why people care, but I can tell you why I care. I believe that becoming a multi-planetary specie is a worthy goal. I don't see if making rich people fly high for bragging points is a good step towards that goal. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. But it is similar enough goal that laypeople might confound them.

So what I see is that they have a less ambitious goal. Even if they are 100% successful it won't give us a fundamentally new capability. The project is seemingly mismanaged, and they have a terrible safety record. Further more events like this might alter the perception of 'space tourism', affecting the business prospects of other respectable organizations.

derekp72• 12 years ago

I was curious what the ultimate goal of Virgin Galactic, and the other sub-orbital space companies are. Since they are sub-orbital, they can't really take anyone to what I would consider "space" -- you have this big rubber band (gravity) attached to you that immediately starts pulling you back home. So is the idea just so passengers could say they've "been to space" (really, just reached a height high enough to be in a super thin atmosphere)? Or is the idea that by going high enough that you get a few minutes of free fall, to give passengers a glimpse of what being in space is like?

Now I realize that the early Mercury program was sub-orbital too, but that was gaining knowledge and practice prior to developing Mach 25 (orbital) technology. Is that also the goal of Virgin Galactic, to use the current design as a stepping stone?

lutorm4• 12 years ago

There is no connection between being in space and being in orbit. You can be really far out in space without being in orbit (or rather, you are in an orbit that intersects the Earth's surface.) You are no less "in space" than the ISS crew just because you are only there for a few minutes.

derekp72• 12 years ago

I agree with that, but my point was that it doesn't seem very valuable to go "to space" when you can't stay -- kind of like how flying across the country, and flying over Nevada is different than "going to Vegas". So to me, the fact that they reach space really isn't the selling point, it is the fact that it is a thrill ride which lasts for however many minutes (more in line with a super roller coaster ride, or a step up from one of those parabolic curve plane flights).

Virgin Galactic Is Rattled, but Undeterred, by Deadly Space Plane Crash

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