Virgin Galactic Spaceship II has crashed...one dead...

at least it was in the desert. there's so much of this going on, something is bound to happen in a populated area sooner or later. can is doing their usual overhype.

 

Wow, not a good week for spaceflight....
It's one thing when an unmanned rocket explodes, but when ppl start dieing- it's a very different matter.

 

It happened in the early days of aviation - this is no different as difficult as it is.

 

Supposed to be a press conference at the top of the hour. Like now.I hope y'all can get that press conf - not here on CCTV

 

Do you get Youtube?

 

one dead, one injured, hundreds or thousands have been dying from ebola in africa.

 

The difference is the budgets of private companies versus what NASA had at their disposal

 

and they are all tragedies. Some greater than others but still worthy of note.Witness: Space tourism rocket explodes in desert - Yahoo News

 

agreed. some risks are known and accepted, while others are not.

 

The difference is the budgets of private companies versus what NASA had at their disposal

 

CCTV showed a few minutes of the press conf. As you would expect w/in a few hours, mostly about the emergency response and concern for affected families. The Scaled Composites guy responded to the question about flying a new fuel mixture.

As I understand the situation, they had for a long time been comparing two fuels in ground testing, They are synthetic rubber and polyamide (which you might call nylon or kevlar). The oxidizer for both is nitrous oxide.

Three previous powered flights had all been with rubber fuel. Somewhat better performance in ground tests with polyamide so they decided to fly with it this time.

Scaled had a ground explosion in 2007, apparently caused by a nitrous oxide tank explosion, not directly the engine. There were three fatalities.

For today, Scaled/VG has only two pilots only their roster AFAIK. But they are not yet naming the victims so neither will I.

 

Isn't the solid rocket fuel made out of recycled tires?LoL! Brillant minds think alike!!!

 

the synthetic rubber (which was not today's fuel) is a polymer of butadiene. Four carbon atoms, two double bonds. Tires contain some mixture of this polymer and latex (tree sap) rubber. When used as a solid rocket engine fuel, I suppose that they use 'fresh' polymer rather than recycled.

 

Thanks, unlike other solid fuels I think they use this mixture in order to throttle up and down.

 

Yes, a throttle-able solid rocket engine is a substantial technical departure. VG news website mentions that they decided to changeover to polyamide fuel in 2014 May. Sierra Nevada Corporation builds the engine for this, and their own planned Dream Chaser. I am unaware of other throttle-able solid rocket engines.

Elsewhere I see that their pilot roster has 4 or 5 names on it, not just two.

 

He is stationed in China, where YouTube and a lot of other stuff is blocked.

 

You can count of an overreaction online these days.

Richard Branson is being accused of being out of his league - space is not a place for billionaires to toy with. I say, we need people like him to open up the final frontier. Some will succeed and others will fail - that's business. One report says they changed the propulsion on this test flight and it failed catastrophically. Hope it gets fixed.

 

This was an interesting article.

Branson spaceship explosion: The 'missed' warnings - Telegraph

The really interesting aspect of this was the change in fuel composition. Most rocket engines are custom designed exactly to match the fuel they are using. That even holds true for car engines. What one can say for sure is inadequate engineering was performed at the front end when fuel formulations are being altered in the flight testing stage. When inadequate engineering is being funding, usually the only option for an engineer is to quit....which is exactly what happened prior to this disaster.

Space travel using rockets may be hard...but it looks like the disasters and lose of life this week was due to gambling on the easy shortcut.