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Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo Crashes
Fallen Kell writes: Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo has crashed. "'During the test. the vehicle suffered a serious anomaly resulting in the loss of the vehicle,' the company said in a statement. "The WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft landed safely. Our first concern is the status of the pilots, which is unknown at this time.'""
ABC says one person is dead, and another injured. This was the craft's fourth powered test flight, and its first since January.
I think I may have posted years ago this was sadly inevitable and a bad investment for states subsidizing “space ports”. We may put up with the occasional loss of life in pursuit of loftier goals, but suffer any deaths in pursuit of “space tourism” and it would probably be the death knell for the industry.
Have any of these “space ports” entered the construction phase? Surely backers will see this as good money after bad now. This coming so shortly after the Antares rocket explosion can only seem to amplify the perceived risk of attempting flights into space.
I’m all for progress, but how about we wait until access to space for industry and government is routine before we think about tourism?
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But it sure as hell refutes the attacks on NASA that were saying "the private sector will do space flight cheaper and safer".
NASA made space flight looked so routine with the space shuttle program (i.e., boring) that people stopped paying attention. When space flight becomes dangerous (i.e., Challenger and Columbia disasters), people pay more attention. For a while. After the problems are fixed, and space flight becomes routine again, no cares about it.
Heroes? They were bus drivers.
Burt Rutan, the designer of the Spaceship One and Two, has been a hero, perhaps the hero, of my life. A passionate, innovative aircraft designer; unbelievably aggressive in trying new things, pushing boundaries that nobody even knew existed.
His first plane design, the VariViggen was an astonishingly different design than anything out there before; designed while a student at Cal Poly and built in his garage. And it flew beautifully. I saw that plane, his later VariEze and LongEz flying in formation at the Oshkosh Fly-in in 1980.
He set up a shop at the Mojave Airport, called Rutan Aircraft Factory (RAF). In the middle of nowhere, nothing there but space to build new planes, and he built many. Each one more exotic than the last. His Boomerang, his last personal plane, is so far from the standard boring airplane designs that most people wouldn't believe it could fly; but it does fly, efficiently, safely, and every apparently crazy design idea has absolutely solid engineering and aerodynamic backing.
I took my 14-year-old daughter to see the first flight into space of Spaceship One in 2004. Burt's long-time co-worker and chief test pilot, Mike Melville, flew it that day. As it was climbing to space, it started to spin, pretty fast (about 60 rpm.) Melville said that he was scared for a second, but then decided to wait until he was "in the safety of space" to arrest the spin. A test pilot, flying an experimental winged spaceship, who has never flown to space before, in a plane spinning at Mach 3, decides in a second to wait until he was in the safety of space. And of course, it worked out; he was able to use the reaction control system to arrest the spin; took out some candy to float around the cockpit, took some photos out the windows, and enjoyed the five minutes of weightlessness. Just one of a thousand, maybe ten thousand adventures in Burt's long career.
I've wondered my whole life about how Burt responds when people die flying planes of his design. In 1983, while at Oshkosh, a VariEze crashed approaching the airport (it looks as if the linkage between the control stick and the elevator failed.) Burt, up on stage, described his trip out to the crash site. As professional as he could be, but I felt it must have been tearing him up inside. He gave the gift of flight to thousands of enthusiasts, but those great planes took the lives of some of those people. How do you reconcile that? I'm not sure I could have, or can today.
Burt got out of the homebuilt airplane business after being sued too many times by the survivors of crashes. In the last suit, the guy built the plane incredibly wrong, instead of using the 10 layers of fiberglass to attack the fins to the wing, he just glued them on. Astonishingly, it held up for years, but finally broke during a low-high-speed pass. Burt won all the lawsuits, but it was clear that he would spend years defending himself instead of doing what he loved, so he closed the shop.
Burt retired a few years ago, and lives up in Idaho instead of Mojave. Sadly, for all the innovation he created over the years, there were no commercial successes. This looked like it might be the one, but it's never going to happen.
This is not the first death in the program; sadly. While testing a previous engine about 5 years ago, the nitrous oxide detonated, killing three of his engineers. I mourned for them, and for the pilot today. My joy over my whole adult life in seeing the achievements of Rutan and his team are about evenly matched by the heartache I feel for them today. They haven't announced the name of the pilot who died today, but may he rest in peace.
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The benefits of every technical achievement went to the rich people first. From the toilet, to electric lighting, the automobile, the iPhone, etc. Every one.
Even military advances. Thanks God that it turned out, starting in the 1600-1700s that private enterprise - working independently of the aristocracies - led to wealth generation outside of the political structure. This gave societies as a whole the power to increasingly influence governments, leading to popular revolutions in America and France, and the neutering of royal power in England.
Absent several technological breakthroughs that are each tantamount to magic - this technology doesn't scale to cheap, useful, access to space. It's pretty much limited to being a thrill ride.
No, this is just yet another problem that needs solving. Like somebody else mentioned earlier, you used to have to be pretty wealthy to be able to afford privately owned automobiles and airplanes. At that time, everything you just said applied to those as well.
I know it's the "hip" luddite/social justice thing to talk about making everything cheaper is a race to the bottom that only costs the common man his job and such, but the truth is that whole concept of being a race to the bottom itself is such a lie to begin with it's pathetic. If that notion was even remotely true, we'd have a global 90% unemployment rate by now seeing how long ago the industrial revolution was. Things being cheaper makes them more accessible to all.
They built one of the greatest buildings ever designed, it's still stands today because of their unquestionable skill. They knew exactly what the risks were when they started that Job. Even today construction workers risk their lives to build masterpieces. Any of them could easily get a job building ranch style houses in the Midwest for about the same pay, yet they chose no to.
Wow. That's some real hero worship.
My grandfather worked on one of those megaprojects. It wasn't really some noble pursuit. That was his trade and it was where the work was.
They certainly took pride in it of course, as they are, after all a big, highly visible, project. But nothing so grand as you make out.
People were injured, and died. It was certainly dangerous work. But he certainly didn't think it was especially "heroic" work.
Those of us sitting in chairs with our lumbar support and wrist protecting keyboard trays have no business declaring anything about the goals and risk of men that do real work for a living.
Right because, as even the 20th century steelworkers knew, a real hero works the tuna boats, where each season its not a question of whether someone would die, it was just a question of whom.
Those steelworkers with their safety lines attached to rigid structures on dry land, and for whom when the weather becomes just too wild can go back inside and have a coffee to wait it out instead of riding it out in small tub on an angry sea.
What does a steelworkers know of real work? /sarcasm