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Virgin Galactic's SpaceShip Two crashes.

quagmire

quagmire

macrumors 604
Original poster
Apr 19, 2004
7,045
2,587
Bad week for space flight. First with Antares launch failure now SpaceShip Two has crashed which is a manned vehicle with the condition of the pilots unknown.

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo had taken off at 12:19 p.m. ET from Mojave, California for what the company was calling a "Halloween treat."

But less than an hour later, the company tweeted that something had gone wrong. The vehicle was manned, the company said in a statement provided to NBC News, but the fate of the pilots is unknown.
Click to expand...

http://mashable.com/2014/10/31/virg...Partial&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner
 
You need very brave, very skilled people who are willing to take risks in order to move aeronautical science forward. Test pilots have been dying in crashes for a more than a hundred years. And we are all the beneficiaries of the lessons learned, paid for in their blood and sweat.

I don't know if Virgin Galactic will ever launch a paying passenger. But I give them credit for exploring new technologies to take us into space.

Prayers and best wishes for the pilots, especially the family of the person who died.
 
While what Richard Branson is trying to push space travel, his plans are nothing more than expensive novelty. $250,000 for a few minutes of weightlessness is not the space travel future we need.

We need true public space travel. I hope that is Branson's final goal.
 
As someone who knows people involved in private spaceflight (although nobody at Virgin Galactic or Scaled Composites,) my heart goes out to the friends and family of the crew. I sincerely hope that the pilot recovers, and goes back to it.

As others have said: Space is hard.

As to the "end goal," yes, Branson and Rutan have said that the plan is to move on to more "mass commercial" spaceflight. The follow-on to SpaceShipTwo is supposed to be a point-to-point edge-of-space transport. Think: Concorde on steroids. And they also have spoken publicly of eventually getting to an orbital craft.

These are not the first fatalities in spaceflight. Nor are they likely to be the last. We still have commercial airliner crashes regularly, we shouldn't expect that spaceflight will be any different. We should obviously do all we can to minimize the risk, but it will never go away. We can only honor those who risk their lives to push the boundaries in the name of human achievement.
 
So they change the fuel used and the engines. Was this more of a engineering accident?
 
MacNut said:
While what Richard Branson is trying to push space travel, his plans are nothing more than expensive novelty. $250,000 for a few minutes of weightlessness is not the space travel future we need.

We need true public space travel. I hope that is Branson's final goal.
Click to expand...

Small steps, they can not do a full travel if the rockets are exploding at this stage still. And after this accident the plans can be delayed 10 more years easy.
 
Condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of the pilot who perished. May he rest in peace. And best wishes for a speedy recovery to the other pilot.

The interesting comment (from an investgatiion standpoint) is that the feather lock/unlock should not be deployed before the craft reaches Mach 1.4 to avoid aerodynamic disruption, even though it's not supposed to deploy until the deploy handle is ALSO moved.

To me this sounds like VG & SC already knew that the feathers would move if unlocked without being 'deployed' - which sounds like a design oversight. Certainly 'arresting' the aerodynamic forces on the feathers once unlocked must be a big ask, but if being unlocked means they can move uncommanded, an additional safety device perhaps should have been fitted to prevent unlocking at the lower Mach.

Time will hopefully tell.

3rd NTSB on-scene press conference is indeed interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjYVhGvUSNc
 
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