but this sandwich very likely isn't as expensive as you think, unless the plane is truly purely mechanical (unlikely).
As a former Scaled engineer, I can tell you, the plane is almost purely mechanical. SS1 was completely mechanical, except for an electric trim mechanism for the horizontal stabilizer. SS2 was identical, except the horizontal stabilizer was boosted by a self-contained electromechanical system that took a long time to design with failure modes that were controllable. That means pushrods and cables/pulleys to the control surfaces, large springs for gear extension, and mechanical actuators for the feather and feather locks. Aside from the avionics, one of the few electrical flight controls was the switch to arm and ignite the rocket.
They do have precise procedures about this. Its called the flight test card. The test pilot flies the procedures exactly as they are written on the card. They do nothing else unless some other anomaly during the flight requires them to fall back to basic flight training and just fly the airplane. They brief to that card before the test flight. The practice and train to that card on the simulator. If you know that the cockpit environment is going to be busy, you train your muscle memory to follow that card even if you can't look at it to check off each step.
We've all had things we've done a hundred times in a row, and for no particular reason, that one time, we forgot a step. Mike's muscle memory may have failed him this time and he ended up doing a procedure on the card out of order.
Like every test pilot at Scaled, Mike was a competent engineer in his own right, in addition to being a test pilot. I guarantee that everyone knew that if the loads were high enough the feather would move if it was unlocked, including the pilots. Like I said in another comment, I also guarantee that Mike flew the procedures on that test card plenty of times on the simulator and threw the feather unlock at the Mach 1.4 callout correctly every time. But in a high workload environment, no matter how much training you go through, sometimes the muscle memory that you're trying to train can fail you and you end up doing steps out of order.
You can't design out *all* the failure modes. If you try to, you end up with computer flying the plane and you still end up with some failure modes you can't work around. You can argue that's why spacecraft shouldn't be human piloted, but in this case, there were pilots there for a reason. Developing all that software for the computers takes time and money to write and to design out those failure modes. Scaled is good at flying experimental planes, and good at training pilots to do so. They applied that experience to spacecraft pretty successfully over the course of 17 flights for SpaceShipOne and 54 flights for SpaceShipTwo and did so much more quickly and cheaper than it would have been done if it were all controlled by computers.
As a friend of Mike, a former Scaled Engineer, and one that was directly involved in a previous Scaled accident, I have to completely disagree with your statements.
The culture at Scaled has been and will continue to be focused on nothing but safety. This was the first flight accident that Scaled ever had in its existence since 1982, with dozens of first flights of new aircraft designs and hundreds of follow up test flights. There had been engineering mistakes on many flights previously (I certainly made some), but the safety culture that Burt Rutan instilled in everyone focusing on "Question, Never Defend" was prevalent and always managed to get the aircraft home. The report mentions that no one ever thought about what would happen if a pilot pulled the unlock lever early. I guarantee you, everyone did. But just like a pilot knows not to put the gear down above max gear speed, or do full control movements when faster than the max maneuvering speed because things will break (and there are no interlocks on those things either), it could easily be expected that a pilot would never throw the feather unlock except when they are supposed to. Test pilots fly the test card and nothing but the test card. They are highly trained to follow the procedure on the test card. I'm certain Mike did that card over and over on the simulator and threw the feather unlock at the Mach 1.4 callout correctly every time. For some reason he uncharacteristically did the steps out of order on this flight. The result was catastrophic.
Your analogies don't hold up. If I'm in a car at 60mph and I turn a little too early, directly into a tree instead of on to a highway exit ramp, it can be pretty catastrophic to the car and its occupants. Until our autonomous cars show up, you can't design out the steering wheel. If you don't have time to look at the checklist for your next step because of the environment or because the workload is high and your muscle memory fails and you end up doing steps a little too early, it might also be catastrophic. If the procedure or checklist isn't followed exactly, catastrophic things can happen even on highly automated airlines.
Similarly, since a car's crumple zone, seat belt or airbag probably won't save an occupant that crashes into a tree at 200mph (lets up the speed since Mach 1+ is quite a bit higher than most average planes), you can probably understand that at certain speeds, you can't design in similar safety systems. This is called tradeoff analysis and is part of engineering, not malpractice.
I know this because I work at Scaled, but if you read all of the info on the Scaled website about SpaceShipOne, you'll know that SpaceDev only provides a small portion of the rocket to us. The rocket is actually a Scaled design with assistance given to us by SpaceDev on the bulkhead between the nitrous tank and the solid rocket and a lot the hardware and valves. We also manufacture the rocket casings, using a nozzle made by a supplier, and send them to SpaceDev to mold the solid fuel in place.
Wait till you see some of our future projects which could put a 200lb satelite into orbit for until $750k.
I'll be there as well.....but that's cause I'm a Scaled Composites employee.;)
And for those that have wondered, as far as I know, Mike Melvill will be the pilot, Burt's long time friend from the Voyager days and the same that flew the last flight.
I've participated in solar-car racing events now for over 8 years, yet I still think there is little chance of seeing a practical solar car on the road any time soon. Consider that on a perfectly sunny day, with a solar array of 8m^2, with solar cells that are 100% efficient in converting solar energy to electricity (we're at a max of a little more than 30% now), you still could only generate 11hp of continuous power. We are as close to 100% efficient solar cells as we are to cars that only need 11hp. These cars drive as fast as they do because they are purpose built race cars, with aerodynamics, control systems, lack of creature comforts, and weight control to match.
Actually, the solar cells were developed and manufactured in the US by companies like Spectrolab and Emcore. They are then assembled and encapsulated by Hans Gochermann in Germany. ESA only purchased the cells and sponsored them to the Dutch team. But they are GaAs cells that were to be used on space satelites.
As the driver of both the '99 and '01 Michigan cars, I still have to point out of the 7 American races, the Universtiy of Michigan has still won 3 of them.;) Still, congrats to Rolla....this win was well earned.
The problem I'm seeing with this race though is that as the cars have gotten faster and faster, there is much less strategy involved. Part of the reason this years race was faster was because of the addition of another staged stop in Albuquerque. This essentially changed the race from a cross country endurance run where strategy and energy management were important, to a string of all out sprints where the cars can run right at the speed limit the entire time. If something goes wrong or breaks on a team's car, they are suddenly out of the running for a win. There's no way to catch up if everyone is running at the speed limit. Don't get me wrong, reliability has always been part of the race, but it shouldn't replace strategy as the only way of winning. That's part of the appeal of this kind of race. Its not just about the car and the level of technology on it, but how the weather can change things rapidly, and how you best manage the amount of energy you have.
Now these are purpose built race cars and most of the technology that goes into them will not and can not be used in real-world applications, just like NASCAR and F1 cars are nothing like whats on the road. The extremely fragile solar cells are for the most part (before sponsorhsip and discounts) worth way more than most homes, let alone another car. But the purpose is not just to develop technology, its to allow students to work in a practical engineering and small company environment and really develop a vehicle using the princples they've learned in class. It was _the_ most useful part of my education at Michigan.
The regulations for the American race haven't put restrictions on solar cells or batteries since 1999. The stock class still has these limitations, but the open class is just that: wide open. That still doesn't mean that weight, efficiency, strategy, and especially aerodynamics don't play a big part in how fast these cars can go. No solar competition that I know of allows a battery swap-out without a huge penalty involved.
The classes refer to the regulations and limitations placed on the the solar cells and batteries that can be used in a car. O is open class, where there are no limits on solar cells or batteries. Most cars in this class are using some type of multi-junction gallium arsenide solar cell with efficiencies better than 20% and some variety of Li-ion battery. S is stock class, which is limited to a specific list of readily available terrestial solar cells and also lead acid batteries. The solar cells in the list are inexpensive and can be obtained by anyone, but also have lower efficiencies in the range of 13%-18%. Lead acid batteries are cheap, but are very heavy. While there were no extremely competitive stock class cars this year, Arizona shocked many teams in '01 by finishing 9th and beating many open class cars. Thier strategy involved only using half of the allowable weight of batteries, sacrificng extra energy storage for keeping thier weight down to make it over the mountains.
Some of the drivers are very small, but to take the drivers weight out of the equation, every driver is ballasted to 80kg, or 176lbs. Some of the smaller girls end up having to carry around 60lbs of lead shot before they get into the car.
And as the driver of both the '99 and '01 Michigan cars, I still have to point out of the 7 American races, Michigan has still won 3 of them.;) Still, congrats to Rolla.
The problem I'm seeing with this race though is that as the cars have gotten faster and faster, there is much less strategy involved. Part of the reason this years race was faster was because of the addition of another staged stop in Albuquerque. This essentially changed the race from a cross country endurance run where strategy and energy management were important, to a string of all out sprints where the cars can run right at the speed limit the entire time. If something goes wrong or breaks on a team's car, they are suddenly out of the running for a win. There's no way to catch up if everyone is running at the speed limit. Don't get me wrong, reliability has always been part of the race, but it shouldn't replace strategy as the only way of winning. That's part of the appeal of this kind of race. Its not just about the car and the level of technology on it, but how the weather can change things rapidly, and how you best manage the amount of energy you have.
Now these are purpose built race cars and most of the technology that goes into them will not and can not be used in real-world applications, just like NASCAR and F1 cars are nothing like whats on the road. The extremely fragile solar cells are for the most part (before sponsorhsip and discounts) worth way more than most homes, let alone another car. But the purpose is not just to develop technology, its to allow students to work in a practical engineering and small company environment and really develop a vehicle using the princples they've learned in class. It was _the_ most useful part of my education at Michigan.
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but this sandwich very likely isn't as expensive as you think, unless the plane is truly purely mechanical (unlikely).
As a former Scaled engineer, I can tell you, the plane is almost purely mechanical. SS1 was completely mechanical, except for an electric trim mechanism for the horizontal stabilizer. SS2 was identical, except the horizontal stabilizer was boosted by a self-contained electromechanical system that took a long time to design with failure modes that were controllable. That means pushrods and cables/pulleys to the control surfaces, large springs for gear extension, and mechanical actuators for the feather and feather locks. Aside from the avionics, one of the few electrical flight controls was the switch to arm and ignite the rocket.
They do have precise procedures about this. Its called the flight test card. The test pilot flies the procedures exactly as they are written on the card. They do nothing else unless some other anomaly during the flight requires them to fall back to basic flight training and just fly the airplane. They brief to that card before the test flight. The practice and train to that card on the simulator. If you know that the cockpit environment is going to be busy, you train your muscle memory to follow that card even if you can't look at it to check off each step.
We've all had things we've done a hundred times in a row, and for no particular reason, that one time, we forgot a step. Mike's muscle memory may have failed him this time and he ended up doing a procedure on the card out of order.
Like every test pilot at Scaled, Mike was a competent engineer in his own right, in addition to being a test pilot. I guarantee that everyone knew that if the loads were high enough the feather would move if it was unlocked, including the pilots. Like I said in another comment, I also guarantee that Mike flew the procedures on that test card plenty of times on the simulator and threw the feather unlock at the Mach 1.4 callout correctly every time. But in a high workload environment, no matter how much training you go through, sometimes the muscle memory that you're trying to train can fail you and you end up doing steps out of order.
You can't design out *all* the failure modes. If you try to, you end up with computer flying the plane and you still end up with some failure modes you can't work around. You can argue that's why spacecraft shouldn't be human piloted, but in this case, there were pilots there for a reason. Developing all that software for the computers takes time and money to write and to design out those failure modes. Scaled is good at flying experimental planes, and good at training pilots to do so. They applied that experience to spacecraft pretty successfully over the course of 17 flights for SpaceShipOne and 54 flights for SpaceShipTwo and did so much more quickly and cheaper than it would have been done if it were all controlled by computers.
As a friend of Mike, a former Scaled Engineer, and one that was directly involved in a previous Scaled accident, I have to completely disagree with your statements.
The culture at Scaled has been and will continue to be focused on nothing but safety. This was the first flight accident that Scaled ever had in its existence since 1982, with dozens of first flights of new aircraft designs and hundreds of follow up test flights. There had been engineering mistakes on many flights previously (I certainly made some), but the safety culture that Burt Rutan instilled in everyone focusing on "Question, Never Defend" was prevalent and always managed to get the aircraft home. The report mentions that no one ever thought about what would happen if a pilot pulled the unlock lever early. I guarantee you, everyone did. But just like a pilot knows not to put the gear down above max gear speed, or do full control movements when faster than the max maneuvering speed because things will break (and there are no interlocks on those things either), it could easily be expected that a pilot would never throw the feather unlock except when they are supposed to. Test pilots fly the test card and nothing but the test card. They are highly trained to follow the procedure on the test card. I'm certain Mike did that card over and over on the simulator and threw the feather unlock at the Mach 1.4 callout correctly every time. For some reason he uncharacteristically did the steps out of order on this flight. The result was catastrophic.
Your analogies don't hold up. If I'm in a car at 60mph and I turn a little too early, directly into a tree instead of on to a highway exit ramp, it can be pretty catastrophic to the car and its occupants. Until our autonomous cars show up, you can't design out the steering wheel. If you don't have time to look at the checklist for your next step because of the environment or because the workload is high and your muscle memory fails and you end up doing steps a little too early, it might also be catastrophic. If the procedure or checklist isn't followed exactly, catastrophic things can happen even on highly automated airlines.
Similarly, since a car's crumple zone, seat belt or airbag probably won't save an occupant that crashes into a tree at 200mph (lets up the speed since Mach 1+ is quite a bit higher than most average planes), you can probably understand that at certain speeds, you can't design in similar safety systems. This is called tradeoff analysis and is part of engineering, not malpractice.
I know this because I work at Scaled, but if you read all of the info on the Scaled website about SpaceShipOne, you'll know that SpaceDev only provides a small portion of the rocket to us. The rocket is actually a Scaled design with assistance given to us by SpaceDev on the bulkhead between the nitrous tank and the solid rocket and a lot the hardware and valves. We also manufacture the rocket casings, using a nozzle made by a supplier, and send them to SpaceDev to mold the solid fuel in place.
Wait till you see some of our future projects which could put a 200lb satelite into orbit for until $750k.
I'll be there as well.....but that's cause I'm a Scaled Composites employee. ;)
And for those that have wondered, as far as I know, Mike Melvill will be the pilot, Burt's long time friend from the Voyager days and the same that flew the last flight.
I've participated in solar-car racing events now for over 8 years, yet I still think there is little chance of seeing a practical solar car on the road any time soon. Consider that on a perfectly sunny day, with a solar array of 8m^2, with solar cells that are 100% efficient in converting solar energy to electricity (we're at a max of a little more than 30% now), you still could only generate 11hp of continuous power. We are as close to 100% efficient solar cells as we are to cars that only need 11hp. These cars drive as fast as they do because they are purpose built race cars, with aerodynamics, control systems, lack of creature comforts, and weight control to match.
Actually, the solar cells were developed and manufactured in the US by companies like Spectrolab and Emcore. They are then assembled and encapsulated by Hans Gochermann in Germany. ESA only purchased the cells and sponsored them to the Dutch team. But they are GaAs cells that were to be used on space satelites.
As the driver of both the '99 and '01 Michigan cars, I still have to point out of the 7 American races, the Universtiy of Michigan has still won 3 of them. ;) Still, congrats to Rolla....this win was well earned.
The problem I'm seeing with this race though is that as the cars have gotten faster and faster, there is much less strategy involved. Part of the reason this years race was faster was because of the addition of another staged stop in Albuquerque. This essentially changed the race from a cross country endurance run where strategy and energy management were important, to a string of all out sprints where the cars can run right at the speed limit the entire time. If something goes wrong or breaks on a team's car, they are suddenly out of the running for a win. There's no way to catch up if everyone is running at the speed limit. Don't get me wrong, reliability has always been part of the race, but it shouldn't replace strategy as the only way of winning. That's part of the appeal of this kind of race. Its not just about the car and the level of technology on it, but how the weather can change things rapidly, and how you best manage the amount of energy you have.
Now these are purpose built race cars and most of the technology that goes into them will not and can not be used in real-world applications, just like NASCAR and F1 cars are nothing like whats on the road. The extremely fragile solar cells are for the most part (before sponsorhsip and discounts) worth way more than most homes, let alone another car. But the purpose is not just to develop technology, its to allow students to work in a practical engineering and small company environment and really develop a vehicle using the princples they've learned in class. It was _the_ most useful part of my education at Michigan.
The regulations for the American race haven't put restrictions on solar cells or batteries since 1999. The stock class still has these limitations, but the open class is just that: wide open. That still doesn't mean that weight, efficiency, strategy, and especially aerodynamics don't play a big part in how fast these cars can go. No solar competition that I know of allows a battery swap-out without a huge penalty involved.
The classes refer to the regulations and limitations placed on the the solar cells and batteries that can be used in a car. O is open class, where there are no limits on solar cells or batteries. Most cars in this class are using some type of multi-junction gallium arsenide solar cell with efficiencies better than 20% and some variety of Li-ion battery. S is stock class, which is limited to a specific list of readily available terrestial solar cells and also lead acid batteries. The solar cells in the list are inexpensive and can be obtained by anyone, but also have lower efficiencies in the range of 13%-18%. Lead acid batteries are cheap, but are very heavy. While there were no extremely competitive stock class cars this year, Arizona shocked many teams in '01 by finishing 9th and beating many open class cars. Thier strategy involved only using half of the allowable weight of batteries, sacrificng extra energy storage for keeping thier weight down to make it over the mountains.
Some of the drivers are very small, but to take the drivers weight out of the equation, every driver is ballasted to 80kg, or 176lbs. Some of the smaller girls end up having to carry around 60lbs of lead shot before they get into the car.
And as the driver of both the '99 and '01 Michigan cars, I still have to point out of the 7 American races, Michigan has still won 3 of them. ;) Still, congrats to Rolla.
The problem I'm seeing with this race though is that as the cars have gotten faster and faster, there is much less strategy involved. Part of the reason this years race was faster was because of the addition of another staged stop in Albuquerque. This essentially changed the race from a cross country endurance run where strategy and energy management were important, to a string of all out sprints where the cars can run right at the speed limit the entire time. If something goes wrong or breaks on a team's car, they are suddenly out of the running for a win. There's no way to catch up if everyone is running at the speed limit. Don't get me wrong, reliability has always been part of the race, but it shouldn't replace strategy as the only way of winning. That's part of the appeal of this kind of race. Its not just about the car and the level of technology on it, but how the weather can change things rapidly, and how you best manage the amount of energy you have.
Now these are purpose built race cars and most of the technology that goes into them will not and can not be used in real-world applications, just like NASCAR and F1 cars are nothing like whats on the road. The extremely fragile solar cells are for the most part (before sponsorhsip and discounts) worth way more than most homes, let alone another car. But the purpose is not just to develop technology, its to allow students to work in a practical engineering and small company environment and really develop a vehicle using the princples they've learned in class. It was _the_ most useful part of my education at Michigan.