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Dream Chaser Damaged In Landing Accident At Edwards AFB
RocketAcademy writes "The test article for Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser spacecraft suffered a landing accident on Saturday when the left main landing gear failed to deploy, causing the vehicle to flip over. NBC News quotes a Sierra Nevada engineer saying that the pilot would have walked away.
Sierra Nevada Corporation is developing the Dream Chaser to support the International Space Station as part of NASA's Commercial Crew and Cargo program. It is not yet known what effect the mishap will have on Dream Chaser development.
A number of rocket vehicles have suffered landing-gear mishaps in the recent past. Several years ago, concerns over spacecraft gear design led to a call for NASA to fund a technology prize for robust, light-weight landing gear concepts."
RTFA, the reporting is fine, you are doing a lousy job at reading.
It was unmanned... that is why there are no injuries.
The damage was such that if a pilot had been in there he would have been able to walk away.
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The ISS should be a private venture, as it gives no returns whatsoever.
So in other words, it shouldn't exist at all. What private company is going to embark on an endeavor with "no returns whatsoever"?
Of course, you're only talking about monetary returns. In terms of scientific value, the ISS experiments and observations have been some of the most productive projects in recent years.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
They do, but their craft space vehicles are a little hoppy for me.
With a crappy economy, record debts to China, and collapsing income, why is the US wasting its time with these boondoggles?
Because there is going to be a future to America, and at some time if you want to have a stronger economy you need to invest into technology development.
BTW, the Dream Chaser vehicle is a private venture. That some NASA funds (hence U.S. taxpayers footing the bill) may be used for its development, that isn't the only source of investment capital or even the largest source for that matter. The idea is that the Sierra Nevada Corporation is going to be using this spacecraft for both government contracts as well as private commercial spaceflight... presumably space tourism as well as launching "microsatellites" and other commercial enterprises in space. If the NASA funds were cut entirely, this vehicle development would continue.
There certainly is no reason to complain about private individuals wanting to dump money on spacecraft when many times this amount is being spent on lipstick and reality television programs. Seriously, this kind of complaining is sort of pointless and demonstrates incredible ignorance of what is even happening here.
Would the passengers also survived? Key question.
Have passengers survived crashes when landing systems didn't work properly with commercial aviation vehicles? In this regard, it is absolutely no different. Furthermore, the part that failed was something that was a standard part for military jet aircraft and would have failed with a similar landing situation (in terms of landing speed and weight of the aircraft) and would have similarly put the pilot and passengers in danger. Besides, if you RTFA you would have seen that Sierra Nevada is planning on replacing that landing sub-assembly with another landing system anyway. All this mishap has done is speed up that replacement.
What failed is already FAA certified and in fact this accident is likely going to force a grounding of other aircraft which use this same landing system. If anything, this engineering test might even save a few lives, which is sort of the point of doing engineering tests like this. Usually you learn far more with failures than you do if it is a flawless success. Because it was an engineering test, it would never have had passengers in the first place so your question is also moot. That is like asking if the engineering tests of the Boeing 777 were ever intended to have passengers?
Jebediah Kerman does this on a daily basis.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
you'd have thought they'd have done engineering tests on the thing before giving it the certification first time around..... :-)
What makes you think they didn't do engineering tests on the part prior to the flight? As I pointed out, it was a part used on other aircraft, which is where the certification came from in the first place. That means engineering data is available from not just engineering tests but also repair logs of numerous aircraft that have this part installed and thousands of hours of flight history to back it up. No doubt that engineering data is going to be used in the accident review.
I think a more pertinent question is - why did it fail this time, not whether the part is just generally deficient mas is the implication if they'll ground all aircraft that use it (do they ground military aircraft like they do commercial ones?).
TFA says that it failed to deploy, which suggests there is nothing wrong with it as landing gear anyway, so it had nothing to do with weight and speed of the aircraft.
Yes, military aircraft are grounded if there is a significant part failure like this. That implies that an engineering review of what caused the part failure will happen by the manufacturer and/or the military command which uses those aircraft. It may simply be having an engineer look at the data and say that the circumstances of this failure don't apply in the other aircraft and the engineer signs off for continued operations or that a more comprehensive fix needs to be applied. This is something that routinely happens in aviation all of the time, so it isn't exactly something new.
BTW, I wouldn't really infer anything from the scanty information presented in this article as it certainly isn't an engineering report but instead a mass consumer news publication. I'm somewhat familiar with FAA engineering protocols which is why I suggest that an engineering review of what caused the part failure (and a failure to deploy is a part failure) will most certainly happen.
"The pilot would have walked away, if the flight were not unmanned."
vs
"The pilot would have walked away, if his legs hadn't been replaced with wheels as a child."
"Would have" was used appropriately in both sentences, yet the meanings of them are drastically different. Use if the definite article "the", without establishing which specific pilot we're talking about (the one who flew the test or a hypothetical pilot), is not proper English. English has an indefinite article, "a", which would have made the sentence much clearer. Using the indefinite article: "A pilot would have walked away," strongly implies that there was no pilot onboard and that we're referring to a hypothetical pilot.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Yes, but the craft flipped over, so he would have spilled his beer.
And if he doesn't, well, we can rebuild him.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
At least they didn't say "There were no survivors".
Have gnu, will travel.
Dude, can it with the jokes. This thing barley survived its landing.
Too much? Want more? I've got a tun of them.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
do they ground military aircraft like they do commercial ones?
Yes, when I was in the USAF they often grounded whole fleets. The C5As were out of service for a few months after a piece of equipment used to service the tail fell over and killed a guy. Unlike civilian planes, when military planes get grounded it seldom makes the news.
Free Martian Whores!
Everything you say is going to happen with an engineering review of the accident. Even though this was a civilian flight test (or rather even more so because it was civilian and not military), the FAA is going to be all over this and treat it just like an accident investigation like any other flying mishap. It certainly is going to be a major point of review on granting any flight worthiness certificate on this vehicle and any attempt to whitewash this incident during that review process is going to have the engineers involved treated like a bunch of idiots who need to go back to college if they don't have answers to every one of your questions.
What happened with NASA in regards to the Space Shuttle is that the inspectors who should have had the authority to prevent those launches had elected and appointed politicians over them who overrode their decision making authority and demanded that the vehicles were launched in spite of very legitimate engineering concerns. The causes of both "loss of vehicle" events of the shuttle were well known before either of those launches took place, and there were formal engineering reports demanding a grounding of the shuttle fleet until those problems were fixed. Hell, the fiasco which destroyed the Columbia was known about even with STS-1 (aka the very first flight of the Shuttle).
In this case, Sierra Nevada is not even remotely powerful enough in term of lobbying power nor has the Dream Chaser the huge political necessity to fly like the Shuttle to get such kind of games to be played. This is also one of the reasons why programs like this need to be done, as there are at least four manned spaceflight vehicles under development (five if you include Orion) which each have their own flight histories, engineering teams, and certification reviews. If one of those vehicles is grounded due to some significant engineering problem that could endanger the crew, passengers, or the uninvolved public (aka having the vehicle or a part of it land on somebody's house and kill somebody on the ground), it won't stop crewed spaceflight from happening. That unfortunately did happen with the Shuttle, but even more unfortunately seven people needed to die each time those engineering reviews finally happened. The Space Shuttle would never have been given an air/space worthiness certificate if it had to go through current FAA-AST regulations.
NASA can turn a profit too. All they need to do is start an impact avoidance program where they charge everyone a set fee to take steps to avoid crashing any space vehicles into their building on de-orbiting. Likewise the NSA can sell your info for profit on the black market, the military can rob banks in occupied countries, the forest service can chop down all their trees for lumber, and so on -- government becomes profitable, taxes disappear, everyone is happy.
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One of many innovative aspects of Burt Rutan's Spaceship One design was the design of the landing gear. Rutan's designs have a Bauhaus-like spareness to them - especially when pushing the envelope as in Spaceship One, his practice was to eliminate cost and weight by eliminating the complexity that drove them.
SSOne's landing gear is a perfect example - ordinary landing gear (such as used on the Shuttle) is heavy and complex, with lots of hydraulics to be able to deploy and retract, and even more large, heavy oleo strut stuff to absorb the impact of landing.
Rutan's insight here was typically brilliant: In flight, the landing gear never needed to retract, only deploy, and even that only once, reliably. The model became that of a switchblade knife: A powerful spring reliably forces the landing gear down to engage a locking catch. The comparatively spindly landing gear struts themselves are designed to be springy enough to absorb the expected landing impacts.
Of course, NASA can't bring itself to admire or declare acceptable what a "private cowboy" like Rutan has done, so they need to spend more money to figure out some other way, rather than adopt what's been shown to work quite well (at least for space vehicles that aren't obese, which is admittedly a foreign concept to NASA - the Shuttle was 20% overweight (!!), making it too heavy to launch Air Force satellites into polar orbit, one of the things that justified it in the first place!)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last