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Explosion at Scaled Composites Kills 2, Injures 4
Animats writes "Details are scant at this time, but a explosion at the Scaled Composites rocket test facility has killed two people and seriously injured four more. The Los Angeles Times reports that the explosion was 'ignited by a tank of nitrous oxide.' This is Burt Rutan's facility, and the home of SpaceShip One and Virgin Galactic spacecraft development."
Condolences to their families and loved ones...
an asteroid with botox treatment.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
CNN is also reporting on this story: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/07/26/spaceport.blast/i ndex.html
My prayers are with the lost and their loved ones. What a shame. There are two gone, but 4 are still with us, though in really bad shape. So... send your prayers, positive vibes, your "mojo", or your voodoo. It doesn't matter now. These people are working hard to help push our knowledge as humans further. So we should stand by them and do what little we can.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
The article's a little light on details, but explosive failure is pretty rare for hybrid rocket motors such as this, isn't it?
Usually mis-ignition will just cause rapid release of the N2O oxidizer, and designs are such that a clogged nozzle which would actually cause an explosion generally causes a safety valve to open and vent the excess pressure.
Yeah, everything I've seen on hybrid motors says they are non-explosive with a near zero TNT rating.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
I've been chasing news articles for a little while now.
Details are very scarce, but apparently this was a cold-flow test -- they weren't intending to light the motor, just flow nitrous through it. Tank ruptured, and a big fireball. Evidence visible from pictures etc suggests nothing detonated. Apparently people a couple miles away at the airport proper didn't hear an explosion -- they just saw clouds of dust and smoke, not abnormal for a motor test. I haven't seen anything about causes etc.
My condolences to the families.
All I have to say on the matter is that rocket science is dangerous business, the same goes for any kind of challenging engineering. Sometimes people die because other people fuck up, sometimes people die in spite of every sane precaution that could possibly be taken. I just hope this is the latter and not the former. I just hope it isn't symptomatic of a corporate mentality takeover after the buyout.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"Where's the kaboom?.. There was supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom" It was earth-shattering for their families, earth-shattering for the injured. For the dead, they're not feeling anything.
Man, I can usually appreciate sympathetic dark humor but that joke just comes across as so dickish and it isn't even funny in an inappropriate "NASA=need another seven astronauts" kind of way.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Do you think I'm going up in that thing sober?
Besides the obvious tragedy of human loss, I hope this doesn't also sway them from continuing. With NASA spending money on colonizing the moon, guys like this may be our only chance for the future of interesting and pioneering science.
*cough* apollo 1 *cough*
NASA has NOTHING to do with this project. This is most likely scaled composite's facility (though details are missing). In fact, it is possible that 1 of the 2 was burt rutan. If he dies, then Scaled will fold up in the same fashion that cray research did. Rutan IS Scaled.
My condolences to the families.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Different people take humour in different ways. I like the NASA one, hadn't heard that before. Seriously though, you are saying earth shattering for injured and families.. Oh no. 6 or 7 people hurt/killed. How many are murdered each day in America? How many murdered killed, die of famine each day, killed in Iraq from bombs, blown up by landmines, crushed to death? Really, i'm sick of the double standards we humans have. Certainly condolences to the families, but I'll be damned if I'm going to make these deaths any more or less special than any other.
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
I work with munitions both guided and unguided with the AF, General Purpose Bombs and Guided Missiles, More then likely just complacentcy was the factor, hardly ever is there an accident with explosives that takes place that doesn't involve that factor. This day and age explosives are not as fragile as Nitro once was, it takes a hell of alot to set them off. Even with the solid rocket motors of the missiles the tech data states that a spark of static electricity could set them off however after working with them long enough you learn to respect the potential there but also know what you can and can not do with them. But in the end they will find a scapegoat and blame it on someone or a group of people to help keep the heat off themselves.
Vampires Vs. Werewolves
Whats next for space news? a new discovery? or more paris hilton type shit?
Ah, just wait till the Russians show off their Lindsay Lohan type shit...
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Burt Rutan is not one of the casualties. He's spoken to the press since the accident. All six casualties were Scaled Composites employees.
The Scaled Composites website says they are "NOW HIRING!"
http://www.scaled.com/
The entymology I am more familiar with, and would seem more believable, is rooted in the Fench revolution. The French peasants trampled the landlords' crops by stamping on them with their sabots. Much more believable!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If anything, I would say this is a sign of progress (although, the loss of life is terrible). When you're at the edge of the frontier and pushing forward, lives will be lost. For historical significance, please reference the last 6000 years of civilization.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"The Los Angeles Times reports that the explosion was 'ignited by a tank of nitrous oxide.'" Just goes to show that nitrous oxide is no laughing matter.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
How many are murdered each day in America? How many murdered killed, die of famine each day
This is a non-convincing argument. Pro-war people say the same thing "Oh how many people get murdered each year?" Rapists say "at least I didnt kill anyone." Murders say "at least I'm not a pedophile." This is moral relativism and a slippery slope. If you cant defend private enterprise launching millionares into space as something to die for then that should tell you about how weak your position is.
Well, first of all this rocket business is just that: a business. Its someones fucking job and they got killed at the workplace. You CAN prevent that. You CANT prevent sensless street murder. You CANT stop famine and overpopulation. People should expect a safe work environment. At the end of the day these people died so Burt can launch millionaires into near orbit for 250k a pop. Not exactly a noble calling.
Now, I fully expect the government to come in and regulate these guys. At least put in some real NASA-level safety precautions. NASA isnt perfect but their safety record and procedures are pretty good. I think this is the beginning of the end for the "wild west" approach to space exploration. Now the responsible adults need to step in and protect the worker and protect the customers. We've seen a milliom times in america. From little children working at the looms losing fingers to men losing their hands in meat packing. Some new industry comes up and safety is the last concern. No more, thanks.
My condolences to the families.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Context is everything...
Why does the needless death of a beautiful baby in a war torn nation touch us or tug harder at our heart strings than the equally tragic death of an old man in a traffic accident? Part of it is the loss of possibility, a life unfulfilled. Part of it is the sadness of losing something innocent to something so depraved and heartless as a snipers rifle or terrorists bomb.
In the same way, we are especially touched by the loss of heroes. Heroes of the mind who force back the darkness, heroes of the will who challenge what's possible for people, and heroes of the heart who throw themselves fiercely at life's dare. Along the way we lose some of these heroes and a little piece of us dies with them, and that's why we mourn, that's why their passing is something special.
It doesn't diminish the humanity or worth of others, it doesn't diminish the depth or breadth of the trajedy of losing others. It is however a special loss, and these men and women deserve our acknowlegement, our respect, and our tears at their passing. It will always be hardest when we lose that which is the best of ourselves.
Who we make heroes... and how we mourn there passing more than anything else says something about who we are.
The increased U.S. efficiency in handling goods is not worth the price in human lives.
While corporations are profiting from increased handling capacity, our brave young men and women are dying unnecessarily.
Ban forklifts!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Exploring space is dangerous. Getting there uses lots dangerous fuels, and once there, it's not that hospitable of a place for the human body. We live in fantastic times. People in their 20s and 30s will live longer then any earlier humans. There is much less danger on a daily basis then in any other time in human history. Space is dangerous. Getting there is dangerous. You can mitigate the risk as much as possible. At the end of the day, there's still a hell of a lot of risk.
Those people were professionals. They knew what they were doing and they knew the risks. That's not to be cold hearted, but the opposite. They did their jobs despite the risks and suffered for it. That's the price of pioneering. They're not heroes for suffering, they were heroes before, for living and working on the edge. Heroes will replace them. Some of those will get hurt, and so on.
The first thing that occurred to me was whether Rutan was there. He wasn't, but he could have been. It's his way to keep his hands in things. That would have been an enormous loss to aero- and space development. He's one of the all time geniuses of all things flyable. Any really good aerospace engineer could write a definitive book on composite construction. It took genius to do so in 28 pages. It'd be damn hard for Scaled to go on without him, even with Northrup buying them out.
The second that occurred to me was that it'll put a damper on hybrid motor development and use. The motors are much safer than solid or liquid, but the handling equipment isn't safe by any stretch. Amateur rocketry has been using them for years, but nobody is willing to break the high-power certification barrier and make them available to low and mid-power rockters due to the liability factor from the ground equipment. It may come to nothing more than headlines for the media and PR for some politicians, but I expect a call for the FAA's Office of Space Transportation to rethink certifying of hybrid powered human rated craft.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
And people die each week so you have the convenience of buying a pepsi at 3:00am.
The grandparents point is simply that a death is a death, although when their is something unique or spectacular about it we make it a bigger deal than if it's simply a "routine" death. Now I don't mean routine to the family, but routine in a page 26 kind of way, as opposed to something that makes the front few pages.
And I would expect that sending someone to orbit is a very noble calling to many. How many non-goverment employees have ever sent someone to orbit? I'm guessing not very many.
Pretty quick of you to assume that safety wasn't a concern. It was actually a cold test run when it happened. There were bunkers onsite to ensure safety. That's just the from the story we know now. When it's been determined that safety wasn't a high priority then I'll be on your side but for now you are just assuming....
There's a big difference between accepting death as a natural result of an activity, and measuring the progress of that activity in terms of death. When one goes to war, one expects to lose soldiers. That doesn't mean that whoever lost the most soldiers has necessarily won.
Hindsight is 20/20. From this initial report, it sounds like this particular incident was a result of known factors, and thus avoidable. The Challenger and Columbia incidents were the result of factors which, while known, were under-appreciated. The Challenger factors were managerial, while the Columbia factors were the result of engineering.
There's also the matter of economics. It's simply not economically possible to guard against every threat. If it were, then someone on this planet would be nigh-immortal.
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Get off your high horse. Moral relativism, my ass.
And I'm someone who's first action on reading the headlines (before slashdot even noticed them) was to call a friend who has been closely involved with the x-prize and scaled composites to make sure she wasn't one of the ones hurt.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Chuck you, Farley.
At the end of the day, these people died so Burt could launch millionaires (instead of billionaires) into near orbit for $250K a pop (instead of $30M a pop).
Given the situation in Unistat, and the likelihood of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (TANSTAAFL is something Heinlein derived as a likely result of living in a hostile environment) coming true after a critical mass of humans is achieved outside of earth orbit, I'm willing to bet that the people working at Scaled Composites were on their way towards doing more for human freedom than NASA did in the past 40 years.
Until NOC bought them out, of course, ending all hope of cheap civilian access to space.
> Now, I fully expect the government to come in and regulate these guys. At least put in some real NASA-level safety precautions.
Chuck you again, and the horse you rode in on, Farley.
Columbus and those who followed him didn't cross the Atlantic because they thought it was safe. They did so because he thought he could make a fuckload of money by doing so.
NASA safety precautions are appropriate for people who will sue you if your spaceship blows up.
The meek (and that's you, Farley) can have the earth. The rest of us only want the right to sign a waiver that we may take our chances with the stars.
Don't stop.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
This is very sad, but not unexpected. Every major construction project will have an estimated number deaths associated with it before it starts. Every skyscraper, every bridge, every tunnel, every road through bad terrain, and yes, every space mission.
Most people (other than the safety engineers and insurance folks) rarely stop and think about what it costs in human lives to move forward. But there is a cost.
In a perfect world it would never happen, but we are imperfect and it will always happen. People make mistakes. Equipment malfunctions. Bad weather. Mislabeled products. Acts of nature.
The people that do this work benefit their species; a true higher calling. Take a moment to think about their sacrifice and thank them.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
I disagree. A zombie army will come in handy when fighting patent battles. Lawyers can't suck the lifeblood from a zombie, because it doesn't have any.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If this is were NASA, they would ground the shuttle for two years as Congress and a bunch of jackass administrators poured over every detail in the name of safety. But, this is the private sector, and they will say that playing with explosives sometimes get you killed, and order the people back to work within the next day or so. By the time even NASA were to appoint a committee to form committees, the company will have cleaned the place and started building again.
Look, this sort of thing happens every day in the private sector. Fisherman drown, taxi drivers get shot, construction workers die in falls, and life goes on, with hardly missing a beat. If you want space to be really privatized, the right way to look at this whole accident is to say, yeah, it sucks that they died, but, back to work people.
This is my sig.
They're pretty well-regulated already today, you want more regulation?
If you want to shoot off anything bigger than a bottle rocket these days, you can bet your anatomy that you'll be hip-deep in Feds and the weight of the paperwork will exceed the weight of the bird. After all, they don't want anybody other than government contractors building WMDs, now, do they? Even indulging in high-powered rocketry on an amatuer basis takes a license. They don't just put them in Cracker Jack boxes. You need to be TRA AND NAR Level One certified to light off a big one. And bonded. Don't show up for your certification run with a six-pack of anything other than soda, they'll never even let you set up.
As far as man-rated vehicles go, you couldn't afford the paperwork for them on an amatuer basis. And that's just to build one. To launch it is a whole 'nuther set of paperwork. "Wild wild West" approach to space exploration? Only in Hollyweird.
Here's what the FAA says about model rockets: http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ec fr&sid=a327e61307f208ad26c413bc89920ba6&rgn=div5&v iew=text&node=14:2.0.1.3.15&idno=14#14:2.0.1.3.15. 3. Finding the sections on man-rated rockets is left as an exercise for the curious, as those who just want to shrug off private-sector space travel as 'unlicensed and unregulated, send in the Feds' won't bother to look, they'll just post here demanding 'Something Be Done'.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Some of the articles say that one Glenn May was killed. I wonder if this was him? http://bikerodnkustom3.homestead.com/danger.html
The Airforce Thunderbirds pilots should never be at the edge or pushing any boundaries - they are airshow display pilots with specific artificial boundaries that protect the crowds, and they are nowhere near the performance envelopes of the aircraft.
Not only that -- when the leader of the Thunderbirds was on the Daily Show, he said something I found kind of surprising. He's been the leader now for (I think) 3 years or so, and he has not changed the routine from what it was before he was there. They most definitely do not push boundaries of any kind; they perform a very calculated show to wow people, kind of like circus acrobats. Is it dangerous? sure. Pushing the limits? Not so much.
gameDB
No libertarian would ever suggest anything being a government job beyond preserving individual freedoms and rights, beyond that govenment has no place.
Given this incident occurred during a oxidizer flow rate test I am left wondering if particle impingement somewhere in the NO2 system may have been the culprit.
I blend a great deal of "exotic" breathing gases used for technical scuba operations and one of my primary concerns is having O2 "clean" equipment. The goal is to avoid any particles of material (dust, lubricant, etc) in the valves, lines, regulators, and cylinders that may be forced through very tiny orifices at high speed. The resulting friction inside a high pressure line, valve, or regulator can be enough to cause ignition of the particle. Of course, in the presence of an oxidizer, even a tiny bit of ignited material can cause other components in the system to fail. Valves and regulators are made of brass and have internal components made of nylon and rubber. The resulting cascade of failures can be quite devastating, especially if the pressure vessel is compromised.
Just a thought...
He gave nearly the same presentation at the AIAA Joint Propulsion Conference two years ago now. It was a good talk, over all. However, he is a bit of a dreamer. I'm not saying that is completely a bad thing. But if you believe for one second that SpaceShipOne can be scaled up to an orbital vehicle - something he implied in his presentation - I have oceanfront property in Arizona you might be interested in. Nice bridge, too ...
... Government funded space programs have sent probes from the sun, to past Pluto, to Mars, landed men on the moon, hosted men and women in earth orbit. What has Burt Rutan done again? Two suborbital space shots? I think NASA did that back in the 50's...
(I'm an aerospace engineer. I also used to work for the Army designing missiles, I now work for NASA designing Ares. You might think I'm biased, but I do know people working in alt.space. I wish them all the best, and from my discussions with some of them, they know what their position is in history. What they are doing has been done before, their goal is to lower the cost of entry and raise the flight count per year. Achieving that will be a great success and open up space to the masses...)
He is right that the little guys have their chance at space - look at Armadillo Aerospace, XCOR, Masten Space Systems, etc. They are all realizing the dream, watching their budgets and doing their best to lower the cost of entry to space. And if they do, that will be something unique.
A third and tangential point - NASA and the alternative space community have differing goals; so the 'If you think a government space program has any chance of accomplishing anything' really doesn't make much sense. 'Burt Rutan and his goals and how he hopes to accomplish them'