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

No it does not. The Navy nuclear power program is one example organization that does not have this happening. Likewise commercial aviation as a whole has been fantastically good about safety. I agree that a great many organizations will put money ahead of people, but not all organizations all the time.

 

In the past week, I see Elon Musk and Space X looking pretty, although they must be aware they could be next.

 

This article suggests they don't know what they are doing > Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo Crash: Branson's Biographer Says Crash Was 'Inevitable'

Some ventures succeed while others fail.

This does not look good.

 

The lawsuits will finish it off leaving it to the Chinese in 10 years time.

 

I've always noticed a big difference between engineering companies lead by engineers vs. entrepreneurs. Musk vs. Branson? We are talking vastly different cultures. Musk is building vehicles for serious space exploration. Branson was leading a effort to develop an over the top disney ride.

 

Well this is interesting;

BBC News - Virgin Galactic crash: Descent system 'deployed early'

A safety device on the Virgin Galactic spacecraft that crashed on Friday killing a test pilot had been deployed early, US investigators say.....Media reports had focused on the fuel tanks and the engine, but both were found intact.

 

Space exploration is a dangerous enterprise, but the worst thing that could happen is giving up; the sacrifices would all be in vain.

 

We're heading out to the planets and are at the point we were in about 1514 as regards sailing to other continents. What's happened to the acceptable risk of being an adventurer? If we give up on getting to the Moon and Mars we may as well give up as a race.

 

If I remember, the chance of being in a fatal car accident is in the range of 1 in 200 to 1 in 1000 over a lifetime. Not going into space is hazardous to your health. So properly disciplined space exploration can be made reasonably safe but not perfectly safe....as nothing can be made perfectly safe.

But there are two additional considerations. There needs to be a payoff to the risk. Just shooting oneself into space to see if you survive is not any sort of exploration. It's just the world's most expensive game of Russian Roulette. The other consideration is exploration should be the domain of true explorers. This is someone aware of the consequences of what they are doing. Sending teachers into space (e.g. Challenger fatality) or joy riders (numerous other ongoing ventures) into space can only result in exploration of space being restrained. It's not enough to just go into space, there has to be a meaningful return for doing this.

 

I concur about Thresher, but not about Scorpion....but that's a different story for a different forum.

'Careless' might or might not accurately characterize some of these incidents, depending on how you deal with hind-sight.
Thresher went down in '63, and she was something like the 20th hull with a nuclear plant in a crash program of just a few years..
She was the lead ship in her class, understandably renamed the Permit class, and she represented cutting-edge submarine technology for that time.
Thresher's loss did identify some lapses in submarine systems design that are sometimes but not necessarily always inherent in new technologies.
Commercial Jets went through similar trials with de Havilland's Comet with three well publicized hull-loss accidents, but FL_Prius_Driver accurately pointed out the US Navy has a peerless....almost dang perfect record of operating nuclear power plants without noteworthy accidents for over 60 years and hundreds of reactors.

The thing with Virgin's programme is that it's largely crowd funded.
You wanna ride?
You pay big and you takes your chances.
My beloved government will certainly regulate them, but you still might wind up being an greasy red smear in the desert, or you might get to do something that only pioneer nations got to do a few decades ago.
It's different in scope from the morons who pay tens of thousands of dollars to climb Everest in that we'll get different companies taking different approaches to space tourism.
Someday somebody is going to come up with a better way of doing it, like VG is (was) trying to do with their second vehicle, and WHEN breakthroughs occur, we will all benefit.
.....There will almost certainly be more accidents, including probably, some fatal ones just like the airlines are continuing to suffer.
You deal with that......or you stay home.


Yer call.

 

Space exploration requires near-perfect engineering, otherwise catastrophe can result. Automotive engineering has to be good, but when it's not, they just sell more parts & service.