Fifty-six hours after landing on the surface of a comet, Philae sent one more round of data about its new home across 310 million miles of space. Then, its power went out.
"@Rosetta, I'm feeling a bit tired, did you get all my data? I might take a nap..." read a message on the @philae2014 Twitter feed.
The Rosetta mission's twitter response: "You've done a great job Philae, something no spacecraft has ever done before."
All the experiments on board the lander had a chance to run and return information back to Earth. Philae's instruments scooped up material from the comet's surface, took its temperature, sent radio waves through its nucleus, and went hunting for hints of organic material. Cameras took the first panoramic images from the surface of a comet.
It has been a whirlwind ride for the lander, which was dropped onto the surface of the mountain-sized comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Wednesday morning. Two harpoons that were designed to tether it to the surface failed to fire, and scientists say the lander made two bounces before becoming stable. The first bounce caused the lander to go one-third of a mile into the air.
Friday morning, ESA officials expressed concern that the lander would not have enough battery power left to send back any more data from experiments it was conducting on its new, icy home.
When Philae landed on the comet on Wednesday, it had enough battery power for about 60 hours of work. Scientists initially hoped that it would continue to operate on solar power, but the lander seemed to have settled in a hole on the comet, where it was surrounded by rock-like structures that block the sun.
Stefan Ulamec, the lander manager from DLR, said the that one of the solar panels on the lander was getting about an hour and 20 minutes of sunlight a day. Two other panels got just 20 to 30 minutes a day, he said.
At a news conference Friday morning before the last signal was received, Ulamec said it was possible that scientists would not hear from the lander again.
"We are hoping to get contact again this evening, but it is not secured," he said. "Maybe the battery will be empty before it talks to us."
Happily, that turned out not to be the case. On Friday evening, ESA reported that all the science experiments had been deployed, and that the lander had been rotated 35 degrees in an attempt to get more sun on one of its larger solar panels.
There is a chance that as the comet flies closer to the sun, the increase in solar energy will allow ESA to communicate with Philae once again.
ESA officials say the odds of that happening are small, but with Philae, the little lander that could, anything is possible.
From www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-philae-lander-data-20141114-htmlstory.html
Fifty-six hours after landing on the surface of a comet, Philae sent one more round of data about its new home across 310 million miles of space. Then, its power went out.
"@Rosetta, I'm feeling a bit tired, did you get all my data? I might take a nap..." read a message on the @philae2014 Twitter feed.
The Rosetta mission's twitter response: "You've done a great job Philae, something no spacecraft has ever done before."
All the experiments on board the lander had a chance to run and return information back to Earth. Philae's instruments scooped up material from the comet's surface, took its temperature, sent radio waves through its nucleus, and went hunting for hints of organic material. Cameras took the first panoramic images from the surface of a comet.
It has been a whirlwind ride for the lander, which was dropped onto the surface of the mountain-sized comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Wednesday morning. Two harpoons that were designed to tether it to the surface failed to fire, and scientists say the lander made two bounces before becoming stable. The first bounce caused the lander to go one-third of a mile into the air.
Friday morning, ESA officials expressed concern that the lander would not have enough battery power left to send back any more data from experiments it was conducting on its new, icy home.
When Philae landed on the comet on Wednesday, it had enough battery power for about 60 hours of work. Scientists initially hoped that it would continue to operate on solar power, but the lander seemed to have settled in a hole on the comet, where it was surrounded by rock-like structures that block the sun.
Stefan Ulamec, the lander manager from DLR, said the that one of the solar panels on the lander was getting about an hour and 20 minutes of sunlight a day. Two other panels got just 20 to 30 minutes a day, he said.
At a news conference Friday morning before the last signal was received, Ulamec said it was possible that scientists would not hear from the lander again.
"We are hoping to get contact again this evening, but it is not secured," he said. "Maybe the battery will be empty before it talks to us."
Happily, that turned out not to be the case. On Friday evening, ESA reported that all the science experiments had been deployed, and that the lander had been rotated 35 degrees in an attempt to get more sun on one of its larger solar panels.
There is a chance that as the comet flies closer to the sun, the increase in solar energy will allow ESA to communicate with Philae once again.
ESA officials say the odds of that happening are small, but with Philae, the little lander that could, anything is possible.
Got fresh news from the team, they are broadcasting live right now on french TV ! Philae landed, and bounced slowly for 2 hours, and travelled 1km away the targeted site. Yes 1000m. It's now stopped slanted, some cams are shooting the sky, other the ground, and other nearby rocks, as seen on the first photo. It's inside some kind of hole, not much sun for the solar panels.
EDIT1: It landed on the core of the comet, it sees the light from the sun for about 1 to 2 hours per day. In the next days/week the angle of the comet will change relative to the sun, and it very likely the solar panel will get more sunlight so more power for the probe.
EDIT2 : Many labs are performing right now and performed the whole night. For now they put the drilling on hold since they don't know if it's tied to the ground or not. Drilling op is also power hungry so it's kinda a good thing it's on hold since there's not much sun available for the panels. Battery life been re-estimated to 50-55hours due to the lack of sunlight. This includes the 7 hours of descent.They are constantly adjusting missions goals, depending on conditions, power available, etc,
EDIT3 : The probe has been working to gather scientifict data the whole time, including during the bounces. There's already a large amount of data available, whatever happens next.
EDIT4 : It's resting on "hard" ground, with a layer of dust about 30cm, and that's good news because it allows measurements to proceed as planned. As in, it's not burried into soft soil.
EDIT5 : Solar panels are deployed, radio link is up and running, but the fact the probe is slanted/in a hole/random ground limits the time it can communicate with the orbiter, altho that's not jeopardizing the mission. There's already a lot of things transmitted successfully to the orbiter. Contact between the orbiter and the probe can be done twice per day.
EDIT6 : The first place it touched the comet was exaclty where it was planned, flat and cosy, too bad it didn't harpoon there.
EDIT7 : Next contact will be near 19:30GMT, until 23:45GMT approx. This night they made contact with the probe (from the orbiter) at about 4:00GMT, and at 5:30GMT they had safely recovered all the data from the first batch of tests.
From the ESA blog :
The team are ensuring that Rosetta maintains an orbit that is optimised for lander communication support; they are planning a manoeuvre (thruster burn) today to be conducted on Friday that will help keep Rosetta where it should be. Rosetta already conducted a burn last night as part of this effort.
Rosetta is presently sending signals to the ground stations at about 28 Kbps; Ignacio says that the spacecraft's own telemetry downlink uses about 1 or 2 Kbps of this, so the rest is being used to download science data from Rosetta and lander science and telemetry from the surface.
Important press conference from ESA at 13:00GMT. Over now. http://rosetta.esa.int/
EDIT8 : So there was more photos, and details. Important bit, they're planning on righting the lander, studying the best way to do it. First rebound was about 1000m long, 0.38m/s up, lasted 2 hours. 2nd rebound was 0.03m/s, 7 minutes long. Then it stuck itself in the side of the crater at the 3rd impact.
EDIT9 : Harpoons received the signal to fire, but didn't activate. There's no indication of damage on solar panels. The lander can hibernate and may likely still work several monthes from now, even if under limited power. They confirmed the orbiter will make adjustement tomorrow morning (friday) to optimize communication time with the lander. Operations are prioritized, from the less risky to the most.
Those seismologists have left Italy for good. They pulled out, took their equipment and won't be sharing their data with the Italian scientists. I don't blame them.
I just went to GoogleNews and searched "school cheating"... Atlanta school officials speaking how there are all different levels of cheating, NY students paying up to $3,200 to a guy to take their tests, a girl suing over an F she was given after crib notes were found... So, certainly not just Indian students...
Strangely, there are lots of those now bidding in the $200+ range. I was going to post that there is no way they would
ever get their excavation costs back but I might be wrong. What are people buying these for? I also have a large box
of working atari games. You can buy large lots on ebay or at garage sales for next to nothing. Why the
premium? Is it just because of the history?
“Look at this. It’s worthless — ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless. Like the Ark.”
Archive.org prides itself on preserving media that falls under the public domain, but none of the listed games are in the public domain. There's not even any ambiguity about it.
It's possible that the people in charge of this service assume that the project fulfils some fair use criteria for being about historical preservation, but I doubt any judge would agree with them. It's also possible that the site owners know that they don't have the rights to host these games, and are hoping to slip under the publishers' radars. Either way, they can probably expect a few cease and desist letters in the near future, so enjoy the service while you can.
That is disturbing. Reminded me of the old "Faces of Death" videotape when the South African tourists eating the brains of freshly slaughtered monkey at a local restaurant.
Your observation of bird decline in Europe is confirmed...
A study found that about 90 percent of a decline occurred in the most common bird species, including grey partridges, skylarks, sparrows and starlings
Europe has an estimated 421 million fewer birds than three decades ago, and current treatment of the environment is unsustainable for many common species, a study released on Monday said.
The population crash is related to modern farming methods and the loss and damage of habitats, according to the study published in science journal Ecology Letters.
"This is a warning from birds throughout Europe. It is clear that the way we are managing the environment is unsustainable for many of our most familiar species," said Richard Gregory of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which co-led the study.
I've pasted an excerpt of ArsTechnica's reader comments below, hope it provides clarification on the subject of VG's engine choices. (IANARocketScientist):
......windnwar wrote:
show nested quotes
http://www.parabolicarc.com/
Go there, they have been following the issues for a couple years now. The original engine was only stable doing a massive injection of helium, more so then could be done in flight, so they switched to a plastic grain and they have been pushing the test schedule to meet deadlines rather than meet the results they needed. The engine was under powered for the weight and they had to change the altitude they were going to be flying too. This modified engine was supposed to end up in the second version of spaceship two due to the modifications that would be needed, instead it ended up in the first one as they didn't have time.
The program is appears to be a mess, and they don't appear to be following a safe testing schedule. Even in the press conference today they were asked had this engine flown and he answered yes, though it had not, the engine had to be reconfigured for the different fuel grain, so it has not flown. Its not just a simple swap of the grain.
Given the description of multiple people that witnessed the flight, it suffered a hard start that destroyed the motor and led to the loss of the craft and one of the pilots lives.
Bullshit, of course. Travel is mainly driven by business interests, not vacation trips. What's the business interest in sub-orbital hops ?
Global air traffic in 1/10 the time, or even less. Halfway round the world in an hour wouldn't be cheap. Just like the SST, this is probably not a viable long term business.
Now that someone has actually died, I wonder how many of the people who have already bought tickets still want to go. Before this accident it was going to be basically just a thrill ride. These people falsely assumed their flight would be a safe and routine one. I expect to hear of more quarter million dollar refunds being made in the near future.
FTA: " Peter Theobald, computer forensics investigator with TC Forensics in Syosset N.Y., said that while he would not be "terribly surprised to find out that someone in the government could or would hack her," he also did not think the video proved "anything."
"If a hacker were to infiltrate her laptop and delete her files there would be better ways to do it, it wouldn't be so obvious to her," Theobald said. "It did not look like a hacker attack to me."
All of the experts agreed that hackers would more typically use other methods to delete documents from a computer.
"The way to do it wouldn't be to hold down the delete key," explained Sam Plainfield, of Syntax Technical Computer Forensics in San Francisco, which is what he thinks appears to be happening in the video. Instead, "you wouldn't see a visual indicator that files are deleting, [they are] just gone."
Brothers-McGrew noted "in our experience if you have the ability to be able to access and submit keystrokes on someone's computer, you generally have system level access where you can just delete or modify the file yourself. The user would not ordinarily see what is going on."
He added, "If the government were in there they would most likely be doing it without making themselves known."
This uses nitrous oxide for the mixture. 3 VirginGalactic engineers died, 3injured, during a test where no fuel was used, just the nitrous oxide. From the Article linked below, posted one day before this accident.....
...But, there was a deeper, more fundamental problem that Rutan wasn’t even aware of, one that has bedeviled the program to this day.
SpaceShipOne had reflected Rutan’s strengths in designing radical flying machines. The use of lightweight but strong carbon composites and the unique feathering system for re-entry were innovative. They represented major advances over the X-15 rocket plane that had flown suborbital missions 40 years earlier.
In terms of its propulsion system, SpaceShipOne was actually a step backward. The X-15 had used the XLR-99, a sophisticated bi-propellant liquid engine that could be throttled, restarted and used multiple times. It was complicated and prone to failure; one blew up on Scott Crossfield during a static test, destroying the vehicle but sparing the pilot’s life.
Rutan steered away from liquid engines; he viewed them as being overly complicated and possessing too many failure modes. Instead, he developed a novel hybrid motor that used nitrous oxide (laughing gas) to burn a large chunk of rubber fuel. SpaceShipOne was the first time a hybrid engine had been used in human spaceflight.
The hybrid worked well enough for SpaceShipOne. However, the motor ran rough, shaking the ship due to the uneven burning of the rubber. On one flight, the pilot heard a loud bang and feared the ship’s tail had been blown off. It turned out to be a chunk of rubber that had shot out the nozzle. The tail was still there.
The hybrid also was expensive because the rocket casing containing the rubber and the attached nozzle needed to be replaced after each flight. Like the space shuttle, the partially reusable nature of SpaceShipOne drove up operating costs and complexity. It was like driving a car from Mojave to Los Angeles and back, and then installing a new engine before making the trip again.
After the Ansari X Prize, some people tried to convince Rutan to replace the hybrid with a reusable liquid engine. He rejected the advice. Rutan came out of SpaceShipOne’s short flight test program believing the hybrid engine was simple and safe, and that it could be easily scaled up for the much larger SpaceShipTwo. He was wrong on both counts.
The first belief was shattered on a hot summer afternoon of July 26, 2007. Scaled engineers were conducting a cold flow of nitrous oxide that did not involve igniting any fuel. Three seconds into the 15-second test the nitrous tank burst, resulting in a massive explosion that destroyed the test stand and killed three engineers. Three others were injured.
"
Back in 1784, hanging out in Paris and heady with Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin had an idea. Struck by the fact that Parisians were sleeping during sunlight hours and then staying up late at night by candlelight, he calculated the number of candles that were being wasted -- and came up with a very impressive number, 64 million pounds worth of them. Franklin therefore jokingly proposed a massive schedule change, noting that a fortune could be saved through "the economy of using sunshine instead of candles," and even suggested at one point that perhaps cannons be fired at sunrise to get everybody out of bed."
.... "The researchers also had the cooperation of Duke Energy, which provided a massive data set of monthly utility bills for nearly 230,000 Indiana residents, organized by their locations. And they had weather data, meaning that they could chart energy use against temperature fluctuations (which are obviously a very central factor in heating and cooling). And the results, at least for followers of Franklin, were shocking: Daylight saving time increased energy use in the counties that had just switched to it, by about 1 percent during the period when it was in effect. The overall cost translated into $ 3.29 per person per year -- nearly $ 9 million overall across Indiana. And on top of that, the added pollution resulted in an additional $ 1.7 to $ 5.5 million per year in “social” costs. Ouch."
Found this blog from the comments section of an ArsTechnicas followup story. It gives the reader an interesting timeline of the VirginGalactic spaceships.
Slashdot Mirror
This ESA blog link has a Gif of the landing from Rosetta... http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2...
Fifty-six hours after landing on the surface of a comet, Philae sent one more round of data about its new home across 310 million miles of space. Then, its power went out.
"@Rosetta, I'm feeling a bit tired, did you get all my data? I might take a nap..." read a message on the @philae2014 Twitter feed.
The Rosetta mission's twitter response: "You've done a great job Philae, something no spacecraft has ever done before."
All the experiments on board the lander had a chance to run and return information back to Earth. Philae's instruments scooped up material from the comet's surface, took its temperature, sent radio waves through its nucleus, and went hunting for hints of organic material. Cameras took the first panoramic images from the surface of a comet.
It has been a whirlwind ride for the lander, which was dropped onto the surface of the mountain-sized comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Wednesday morning. Two harpoons that were designed to tether it to the surface failed to fire, and scientists say the lander made two bounces before becoming stable. The first bounce caused the lander to go one-third of a mile into the air.
Friday morning, ESA officials expressed concern that the lander would not have enough battery power left to send back any more data from experiments it was conducting on its new, icy home.
When Philae landed on the comet on Wednesday, it had enough battery power for about 60 hours of work. Scientists initially hoped that it would continue to operate on solar power, but the lander seemed to have settled in a hole on the comet, where it was surrounded by rock-like structures that block the sun.
Stefan Ulamec, the lander manager from DLR, said the that one of the solar panels on the lander was getting about an hour and 20 minutes of sunlight a day. Two other panels got just 20 to 30 minutes a day, he said.
At a news conference Friday morning before the last signal was received, Ulamec said it was possible that scientists would not hear from the lander again.
"We are hoping to get contact again this evening, but it is not secured," he said. "Maybe the battery will be empty before it talks to us."
Happily, that turned out not to be the case. On Friday evening, ESA reported that all the science experiments had been deployed, and that the lander had been rotated 35 degrees in an attempt to get more sun on one of its larger solar panels.
There is a chance that as the comet flies closer to the sun, the increase in solar energy will allow ESA to communicate with Philae once again.
ESA officials say the odds of that happening are small, but with Philae, the little lander that could, anything is possible.
Fifty-six hours after landing on the surface of a comet, Philae sent one more round of data about its new home across 310 million miles of space. Then, its power went out.
"@Rosetta, I'm feeling a bit tired, did you get all my data? I might take a nap..." read a message on the @philae2014 Twitter feed.
The Rosetta mission's twitter response: "You've done a great job Philae, something no spacecraft has ever done before."
All the experiments on board the lander had a chance to run and return information back to Earth. Philae's instruments scooped up material from the comet's surface, took its temperature, sent radio waves through its nucleus, and went hunting for hints of organic material. Cameras took the first panoramic images from the surface of a comet.
It has been a whirlwind ride for the lander, which was dropped onto the surface of the mountain-sized comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Wednesday morning. Two harpoons that were designed to tether it to the surface failed to fire, and scientists say the lander made two bounces before becoming stable. The first bounce caused the lander to go one-third of a mile into the air.
Friday morning, ESA officials expressed concern that the lander would not have enough battery power left to send back any more data from experiments it was conducting on its new, icy home.
When Philae landed on the comet on Wednesday, it had enough battery power for about 60 hours of work. Scientists initially hoped that it would continue to operate on solar power, but the lander seemed to have settled in a hole on the comet, where it was surrounded by rock-like structures that block the sun.
Stefan Ulamec, the lander manager from DLR, said the that one of the solar panels on the lander was getting about an hour and 20 minutes of sunlight a day. Two other panels got just 20 to 30 minutes a day, he said.
At a news conference Friday morning before the last signal was received, Ulamec said it was possible that scientists would not hear from the lander again.
"We are hoping to get contact again this evening, but it is not secured," he said. "Maybe the battery will be empty before it talks to us."
Happily, that turned out not to be the case. On Friday evening, ESA reported that all the science experiments had been deployed, and that the lander had been rotated 35 degrees in an attempt to get more sun on one of its larger solar panels.
There is a chance that as the comet flies closer to the sun, the increase in solar energy will allow ESA to communicate with Philae once again.
ESA officials say the odds of that happening are small, but with Philae, the little lander that could, anything is possible.
This blog pic shows just how far that bounce was... http://blog.wolfspelz.de/2014/...
Astronomers Discover Planet Identical To Earth With Orbital Space Mirror http://www.theonion.com/articl...
ArsTechnica article, with cool buggy zombie pic... http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...
The llink changed, pic in this ArsTechnica article.... http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...
Here's one of the bugs... http://spherical-sphinx.com/ac...
EDIT4 : It's resting on "hard" ground, with a layer of dust about 30cm, and that's good news because it allows measurements to proceed as planned. As in, it's not burried into soft soil.
EDIT5 : Solar panels are deployed, radio link is up and running, but the fact the probe is slanted/in a hole/random ground limits the time it can communicate with the orbiter, altho that's not jeopardizing the mission. There's already a lot of things transmitted successfully to the orbiter. Contact between the orbiter and the probe can be done twice per day. EDIT6 : The first place it touched the comet was exaclty where it was planned, flat and cosy, too bad it didn't harpoon there. EDIT7 : Next contact will be near 19:30GMT, until 23:45GMT approx. This night they made contact with the probe (from the orbiter) at about 4:00GMT, and at 5:30GMT they had safely recovered all the data from the first batch of tests. From the ESA blog :
The team are ensuring that Rosetta maintains an orbit that is optimised for lander communication support; they are planning a manoeuvre (thruster burn) today to be conducted on Friday that will help keep Rosetta where it should be. Rosetta already conducted a burn last night as part of this effort.
Rosetta is presently sending signals to the ground stations at about 28 Kbps; Ignacio says that the spacecraft's own telemetry downlink uses about 1 or 2 Kbps of this, so the rest is being used to download science data from Rosetta and lander science and telemetry from the surface.
Important press conference from ESA at 13:00GMT. Over now. http://rosetta.esa.int/ EDIT8 : So there was more photos, and details. Important bit, they're planning on righting the lander, studying the best way to do it. First rebound was about 1000m long, 0.38m/s up, lasted 2 hours. 2nd rebound was 0.03m/s, 7 minutes long. Then it stuck itself in the side of the crater at the 3rd impact.
EDIT9 : Harpoons received the signal to fire, but didn't activate. There's no indication of damage on solar panels. The lander can hibernate and may likely still work several monthes from now, even if under limited power. They confirmed the orbiter will make adjustement tomorrow morning (friday) to optimize communication time with the lander. Operations are prioritized, from the less risky to the most.
permalink
If the History Channel has taught me anything in the past couple of years, whatever the puzzle is, it was Aliens.
That's theft, plain and simple.
Those seismologists have left Italy for good. They pulled out, took their equipment and won't be sharing their data with the Italian scientists. I don't blame them.
I just went to GoogleNews and searched "school cheating"... Atlanta school officials speaking how there are all different levels of cheating, NY students paying up to $3,200 to a guy to take their tests, a girl suing over an F she was given after crib notes were found... So, certainly not just Indian students...
Strangely, there are lots of those now bidding in the $200+ range. I was going to post that there is no way they would ever get their excavation costs back but I might be wrong. What are people buying these for? I also have a large box of working atari games. You can buy large lots on ebay or at garage sales for next to nothing. Why the premium? Is it just because of the history?
“Look at this. It’s worthless — ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless. Like the Ark.”
It's possible that the people in charge of this service assume that the project fulfils some fair use criteria for being about historical preservation, but I doubt any judge would agree with them. It's also possible that the site owners know that they don't have the rights to host these games, and are hoping to slip under the publishers' radars. Either way, they can probably expect a few cease and desist letters in the near future, so enjoy the service while you can.
That is disturbing. Reminded me of the old "Faces of Death" videotape when the South African tourists eating the brains of freshly slaughtered monkey at a local restaurant.
A study found that about 90 percent of a decline occurred in the most common bird species, including grey partridges, skylarks, sparrows and starlings
Europe has an estimated 421 million fewer birds than three decades ago, and current treatment of the environment is unsustainable for many common species, a study released on Monday said. The population crash is related to modern farming methods and the loss and damage of habitats, according to the study published in science journal Ecology Letters. "This is a warning from birds throughout Europe. It is clear that the way we are managing the environment is unsustainable for many of our most familiar species," said Richard Gregory of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which co-led the study.
www.france24.com/en/20141103-europe-has-421-million-fewer-birds-30-years-ago/
On topic, since songbirds have always been around us humans, it occurs to me perhaps we learned scales and melody from our prehistoric avian friends?
......windnwar wrote: show nested quotes http://www.parabolicarc.com/ Go there, they have been following the issues for a couple years now. The original engine was only stable doing a massive injection of helium, more so then could be done in flight, so they switched to a plastic grain and they have been pushing the test schedule to meet deadlines rather than meet the results they needed. The engine was under powered for the weight and they had to change the altitude they were going to be flying too. This modified engine was supposed to end up in the second version of spaceship two due to the modifications that would be needed, instead it ended up in the first one as they didn't have time. The program is appears to be a mess, and they don't appear to be following a safe testing schedule. Even in the press conference today they were asked had this engine flown and he answered yes, though it had not, the engine had to be reconfigured for the different fuel grain, so it has not flown. Its not just a simple swap of the grain. Given the description of multiple people that witnessed the flight, it suffered a hard start that destroyed the motor and led to the loss of the craft and one of the pilots lives.
Actually, the article I excerpted from was posted the day before the accident.
Bullshit, of course. Travel is mainly driven by business interests, not vacation trips. What's the business interest in sub-orbital hops ?
Global air traffic in 1/10 the time, or even less. Halfway round the world in an hour wouldn't be cheap. Just like the SST, this is probably not a viable long term business.
Now that someone has actually died, I wonder how many of the people who have already bought tickets still want to go. Before this accident it was going to be basically just a thrill ride. These people falsely assumed their flight would be a safe and routine one. I expect to hear of more quarter million dollar refunds being made in the near future.
"If a hacker were to infiltrate her laptop and delete her files there would be better ways to do it, it wouldn't be so obvious to her," Theobald said. "It did not look like a hacker attack to me."
All of the experts agreed that hackers would more typically use other methods to delete documents from a computer.
"The way to do it wouldn't be to hold down the delete key," explained Sam Plainfield, of Syntax Technical Computer Forensics in San Francisco, which is what he thinks appears to be happening in the video. Instead, "you wouldn't see a visual indicator that files are deleting, [they are] just gone."
Brothers-McGrew noted "in our experience if you have the ability to be able to access and submit keystrokes on someone's computer, you generally have system level access where you can just delete or modify the file yourself. The user would not ordinarily see what is going on."
He added, "If the government were in there they would most likely be doing it without making themselves known."
SpaceShipOne had reflected Rutan’s strengths in designing radical flying machines. The use of lightweight but strong carbon composites and the unique feathering system for re-entry were innovative. They represented major advances over the X-15 rocket plane that had flown suborbital missions 40 years earlier.
In terms of its propulsion system, SpaceShipOne was actually a step backward. The X-15 had used the XLR-99, a sophisticated bi-propellant liquid engine that could be throttled, restarted and used multiple times. It was complicated and prone to failure; one blew up on Scott Crossfield during a static test, destroying the vehicle but sparing the pilot’s life.
Rutan steered away from liquid engines; he viewed them as being overly complicated and possessing too many failure modes. Instead, he developed a novel hybrid motor that used nitrous oxide (laughing gas) to burn a large chunk of rubber fuel. SpaceShipOne was the first time a hybrid engine had been used in human spaceflight.
The hybrid worked well enough for SpaceShipOne. However, the motor ran rough, shaking the ship due to the uneven burning of the rubber. On one flight, the pilot heard a loud bang and feared the ship’s tail had been blown off. It turned out to be a chunk of rubber that had shot out the nozzle. The tail was still there.
The hybrid also was expensive because the rocket casing containing the rubber and the attached nozzle needed to be replaced after each flight. Like the space shuttle, the partially reusable nature of SpaceShipOne drove up operating costs and complexity. It was like driving a car from Mojave to Los Angeles and back, and then installing a new engine before making the trip again.
After the Ansari X Prize, some people tried to convince Rutan to replace the hybrid with a reusable liquid engine. He rejected the advice. Rutan came out of SpaceShipOne’s short flight test program believing the hybrid engine was simple and safe, and that it could be easily scaled up for the much larger SpaceShipTwo. He was wrong on both counts.
The first belief was shattered on a hot summer afternoon of July 26, 2007. Scaled engineers were conducting a cold flow of nitrous oxide that did not involve igniting any fuel. Three seconds into the 15-second test the nitrous tank burst, resulting in a massive explosion that destroyed the test stand and killed three engineers. Three others were injured.
www.parabolicarc.com/2014/10/30/apollo-ansari-hobbling-effects-giant-leaps/
Source : www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/31/daylight-saving-time-may-increase-your-energy-bill/
I don't think the purpose of VirginGalactic is spaceflight. It's true end goal is a 1/2 hour NY to Tokyo flight.
www.parabolicarc.com/2014/10/30/apollo-ansari-hobbling-effects-giant-leaps/
Ars story here:
arstechnica.com/science/2014/11/spaceshiptwo-crash-virgin-galactic-to-assess-what-went-wrong/