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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...
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?
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.
The Scaled Composites website says they are "NOW HIRING!"
http://www.scaled.com/
"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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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!
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
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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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.
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.
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.
Your use of the word 'entymology' really bugs me...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."