I recommend Schmidle’s recent book “Test Gods” if you are interested in Virgin Galactic and test piloting. Schmidle is not an engineer and I would have enjoyed a deeper dive into Virgin Galactic’s design choices, but it is a great book about (among other things) the tensions that emerge when a complex technical project is overseen from a distance by utterly nontechnical, PR-oriented upper management. The company’s communications and business strategies make a lot more sense knowing that the people calling the shots do not comprehend in the slightest how their product works.
For many reasons (some alluded to in this article, many more in the book), SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. Engineering leadership has done what they can to make the vehicle safer (at the cost of performance), but the intractable issue is that any one mistake by a pilot is likely to be fatal (and already has been, in the 2014 accident). Voices like Stucky and Ericson who wanted to acknowledge the inherent danger of the vehicle (which doesn’t mean grounding it) have been ignored and ultimately removed. The company’s business requires the vehicle to be understood to be safe by the public. The chickens will come home to roost.
SpaceShipTwo (and SpaceShipOne) are fascinating to me because they're so _not_ general purpose vehicles, yet are sold and in most cases perceived as such.
SS1 was conceived by one of the most creative designers in aviation as a point solution for the X-Prize contest - the minimal design/implementation to precisely solve that problem in the most cost effective way possible (as detailed in "Test Gods").
This cobbled together, even borderline, solution was reimplemented as a revenue producing, passenger joyride vehicle, without a lot of (apparent) deep understanding of the real problem and the quirks of their existing "solution".
Pretty much, SS2 is Branson and droogs saying, "SS1 is great, just blow it up and start printing money".
One learns quickly in software development not to trust people who say "let's just put this hack in to get the demo out of the way; we'll clean it up later". Later never comes; today's prototype is tomorrow's production.
I'd have thought people would be more cautious with actual physical engineering when lives are at risk, but I guess the incentives are the same everywhere.
trivia tidbit: the "nadsat" language invented for a clockwork orange incorporates russian. the intention was for "horrorshow" to be an english version of хорошо / khorosho, translated as good or OK.
> SpaceShipTwo (and SpaceShipOne) are fascinating to me because they're so _not_ general purpose vehicles, yet are sold and in most cases perceived as such.
I agree. I think much of the value attributed to Virgin Galactic is on the basis of _either_ SS2 being a relatively general purpose vehicle, or the _process_ of building new vehicles having been figured out by them.
The problem is that it's obvious that neither of those are true. Specific use-case vehicles are fine if you have a process that can make you new specific vehicles, but Virgin Galactic took a decade to make SS2 and had a lot of problems along the way.
> SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this.
This comment reminded me of another story from a previous aerospace era (blimp cruise liners aka airships), the summary of which is:
> A British Lord wanted to build the best airship in the world – and so he had two rival design teams battle it out to win the juicy government contract. Competition is supposed to bring the best out of people, but run in the wrong way it can cause people (and the things they make) to fall apart in the most horrifying ways.
Hmm, that certainly colors a rumor I've heard about Apple. That they'll have two or three teams compete on a new product... but they won't tell the teams that they have competition until final demo day.
I know that was effectively true at Nokia in the 2000s, but that was more a sign of corporate dysfunction than a deliberate "battle to the death". (I worked at Nokia in 2010, and the last project I was on turned out to be one that was literally being worked on by four other people across the world, as it turned out.)
I don't think I've ever heard that about Apple, though, at least as standard (even unofficial) operating procedure. There's sometimes competing internal concepts -- the iPhone's operating system probably being the most famous example, with Scott Forstall's team basing theirs on OS X and Tony Fadell's team basing theirs on Pixo OS -- but I don't think they were being kept secret from one another.
I cannot reveal the source or the company but a major household-name automotive company would have several teams working on projects, with one pre-selected as the "real" one and the others not told their work would be discarded. The idea being that this way you can multiply the size of each engineering team and starve the competition of competent engineers. The fact this system exists was not disclosed to the engineers in order to prevent them from quitting. I know this from an engineer who quit after accidentally meeting a member of another team within the company working on the exact same project.
It sounds like a more realistic motivation for that would be to reduce the risk of failure- if the primary team flubbed the project, the secondary team would still be an option. (Such a system would also give you an opportunity to judge how effective either team was.)
Awful thing to do to engineers, but you can understand why management would do it and why they wouldn't want to demoralize the secondary team by telling them.
No, the work of all teams except the pre-selected real one was discarded and never passed on for evaluation. If you wanted to do it for real you would do it up front and ask them all to try different approaches and have rendevous points to compare and evaluate and exchange findings. I suspect that would be much better morale for all teams involved, but would require management to give up on their "chosen" team, and put some real effort into this, which they were not willing to do (and before you ask, yes, the "backup" team suggested this and got rejected, and then got the fuck out)
Something similar apparently happened with the Soviet space program of all things:
> Unlike its American competitor in the Space Race, which had NASA as a single coordinating agency, the USSR's program was split among several competing design bureaus led by Sergei Korolev, Kerim Kerimov, Mikhail Yangel, Valentin Glushko, Vladimir Chelomey, Viktor Makeyev, Mikhail Reshetnev, etc.
Agreed about the chickens and it will have a broader negative impact than the $SPCE stock price.
Fundamentally I think it’s a culture problem. Collaborative engineering that identifies problems, views them as opportunities, doesn’t finger-point, and works each problem. Versus a sales and marketing organization with hard deadlines and a 100% focus on perception and revenue targets.
We don’t need an Apollo 1 in the private space industry. But if it happens, there will be a hard reset in terms of regulatory oversight and safety protocols which will cost us several years. Perhaps it’s needed.
And if not enough blood has been spilled, the rules can't get written. Safety regulations aren't just written in blood, that's all they effectively can be written in.
>Safety regulations aren't just written in blood, that's all they effectively can be written in.
I think I may disagree with this. Safety regulations can be written in bloodless terms like probability but, due to all sorts of cognitive biases, people tend to not take them seriously until there is actual physical consequences for ignoring them.
E.g., reliability engineers can use real data to show the probability of something failing but often people will push past the point where its statistically "due" because they've yet to see it happen in their career. I don't know if this was the case, but imagine a distribution of possible foam shedding from the Shuttle. Some points are going to occur during a portion of the flight profile where they become dangerous. But because few (if any) engineers personally experienced that because the vast majority of shedding occurs in less risky moments, the shedding isn't actually viewed as a risk.
Foam strikes happen all the time and we've never lost a craft, please stop making hyperbolic worst-case assessments about a non-issue, it won't help your career path (or mine).
Can you explain? My comment was in the context of Columbia.
“An investigation board determined that a large piece of foam fell from the shuttle's external tank and breached the spacecraft wing.”[1]
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt with your definition of “we”. But your tone seems to point directly to the types of biases I referred to. It’s worthwhile to research the history of the industry as an whole.[2] Prior to the disaster, do you know NASAs response? “Foam shedding happens all the time…it’s ‘in family’ and not a problem.” It was still out of spec for a good reason. The term from the investigation report is “normalization of deviance”.
It seems even as technology progresses, we’ll still be anchored by faults in human psychology.
I think it was an attempt to illustrate the biases that play in and cause safety regulation to be written in blood. Either an attempt at a quote from within NASA, or actually one (I am insufficiently familiar with the entire background of the broken tile to say).
Honestly, Virgin Galactic should be shut down until they can take safety seriously. Space flight is risky, but they’re taking unnecessary risks above and beyond a reasonable minimum. That they’ve already killed 1 pilot out of so few launches indicates that something is seriously wrong there.
This may be a smidgen off-topic, but any good books to recommend about either the Apollo program or SpaceX that do delve a little deeper into engineering challenges and design choices?
This is a thread about book recommendations on rocketry. I feel obliged to mention Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (Rutgers University Press, 1972) now back in print.
The author worked on said propellants between 1949 and 1970 (according to Wikipedia) so there's no SpaceX, but might be some Apollo.
_Angle of Attack_ by Mike Gray is a good one about Apollo, specifically about North American Aviation and how they built one of the Apollo stages (and a bunch of other neat flying things!). Lots of information but definitely a fun read.
Brilliant well written article. Not without bias, but you can see through the words on the page and into the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man. Branson did put his life on the line to achieve that accolade though, which was a gutsy move.
There are other flaws too. Like pretending to bike to the spaceport on the day of, but it was actually filmed the week before and when called out, they said, oops, you're right, sorry!
It's like when Guy Fiery in his hot rod. He pretends he rolls up to the place in his 70s hot rod, but actually it's just rolled out of the truck that lugs it around from location to location and he opens the door, sits, gets filmed getting out, shuts the door and it goes back up the ramp.
OK. That's it! I draw the line at Guy Fieri slander!
That's not fakery. That's every classic car owner's dream. You get to show off the hot rod and not put miles on it. I am sure he does plenty of joyriding in that thing. Guy is anything but phony. He is actually one of thee more wholesome dudes on television ATM. We need more Guy Fieri's.
There have been so many seemingly respectable celebrities that we've gotten to know only to find out they're not really so great. I feel like Guy Fieri is the exact opposite - when I first saw him on TV I just knew this guy sucked. The car, the attitude, the hair - something just rubbed me the wrong way. But the more I've learned about him - his advocacy for gay marriage, his relief for restaurant workers during the pandemic, etc...I have to admit he seems like a good guy.
What if his market research found that his viewers have a positive association with gay marriage and with restaurant workers and they could increase ratings by x-percent by making a public statement on these issues?
For example the Nike corporation. Some groups have heaped praise on them for supporting Kaepernick and related social justice protests. But was it altruism? Of course not. Their market research simply showed that their customers tended to feel passionately about that issue. So they did the math and calculated that the revenue they’d lose by taking a public position was more than made up for with what they’d lose, and better than if they’d remain neutral too - as their founder said “It doesn’t matter how many people hate your brand as long as enough people love it.”. Consider too that Nike now sells a majority of their product overseas to a very American-skeptic market.
Heh. He’s probably a nice guy... and his example is just the one that came first to mind.
It irks me people like Branson are blasé about faking something they don’t have to fake. He’s probably dedicated to the environment even if his activities and businesses aren’t friendly to the environment.
But just faking it like he really did it, he carried on with the ruse during his little speech too. Like, why?
Because he's a professional narcissist, and everything narcissists do is attention-seeking and fake.
There are a number of books about Branson, and they all underline that he's "not a detail person." As in, he literally doesn't understand what he's doing a lot of the time.
He's good at surrounding himself with competent people who make things happen. He's also good at sales - talking a good game, being charming and optimistic in front of the cameras, and getting people to put up money.
But after some early successes - especially the record company and recording studios - his record of delivery is mediocre, with not a few expensive failures.
With Branson everything is a front and not as solid as it appears to be, and he has a long list of former associates, clients, and partners who are not as impressed as they were initially.
That's not ideal for a conventional business. But when you're dealing with experimental aircraft full of rich people having a very risky adventure, the potential for disaster is spectacular.
People have already died on this project, and it looks as if it's only a matter of time before it literally blows up in someone's face in an extremely expensive way.
Bransons ‘businesses’ are anything but conventional…
Mostly setup and then portions sold off, with Virgin licensing their name to the business.
Even before Covid, Virgin Atlantic is a real shit show financially with virtually everything (planes, landing slots etc) pledged as security for debt to some lender
> He's good at surrounding himself with competent people who make things happen. He's also good at sales - talking a good game, being charming and optimistic in front of the cameras, and getting people to put up money.
Sorry, I don't have anything substantial to add to this. But I just had to react with a smiley :-).
Also those shows where they view three houses, then buy one, all in the same week : in reality the producers find someone who has just bought a house, then they make the show using that house and two other random houses, and lo and behold they find a house they like!
I hate those shows with a burning passion my wife cant get enough of them.
I have however gotten her to watch "This Old House" which actually shows real remodeling and home repair as opposed to sledgehammer porn fallowed by contrived drama between the hosts finishing with a walk through of a staged house where they advertise tacky furniture and overpriced appliances.
Wait until people hear about the person I know who was a contestant on "The Bachelor", who is in fact already happily married. Reality TV is fake? The ocean is wet! Sewage is smelly! and other shocking news, film at 11.
I think it was the reverse-gender version of the show? With many male contenders and one woman. The person who is a friend-of-a-friend is a happily married man with two kids, but was "single" for the purpose of the show.
I was on people court as one of the audience members that they interview after the case. I never saw the court case, they just grabbed random people off the street and gave them scenario of the case and asked for their opinion.
Oh dang, for real? That's super weak if true! Also, no wonder they have hundreds of episodes... I'd be curious if you have any links/etc. on the subject to share!
“… The segment was shot in July and it documents Ms. Larsen traversing the Island with her friend and realtor Roxanne Briggs as they tour three Shelter Island homes on the market in the $650,000 to $850,000 range.
Spoiler alert: Ms. Larsen actually bought her Longview home back in 2015, a full year before the show was taped, so the outcome was a foregone conclusion by the time the “Island Life” crew came to town…”
It still amazes me that anyone still believes that the pictures they see on TV are in any way real.
100% of content on TV is fake. I used to say except the news, but now I'm not even able to trust that. If it's a commercial, definitely fake. If it's a TV show, 100% fake. Games shows shoot 5 episodes in a day, so when they say "last week's winner" it was last hour's.
Talk Shows are the worst for this. Many of them have a rehearsal with the guests. It's no surprise that all of the guests have amazingly funny or interesting stories about every topic the host brings up. Once you know this is how they work, it's impossible to unsee it when you're watching them. I'm sorry I ruined talk shows for anyone here who may like them.
Whether it is the preshow pre-interview or the post editing decisions, interviews are hard to trust as well now.
I say this as someone that has been involved in all of it. However, the pre-interview is actually less about necessarily leading the interview but about helping the interview avoiding the dead air, blank stares, um, uhs, wells, type of stuff. Also, it is a great way to calm the nerves of those being interviewed if they are not normally in front of a camera which can be very intimidating to people telling a story they may already be nervous about. Trust me, you should be thankful for them.
It's the post editing decisions that you can really get yourself into trouble. You can totally make a sane person sound insane, or totally change the interview. Anything that is not live must be questioned in how much you trust the producers to actually allow the interview to go out as it was rather than chopped up to fit the producer's agenda. If I was to be interviewed, I would make part of my conditions to the interview being that I would be allowed to have my own camera/audio that could record uninterrupted to be able to counter any shenanigans in the edit bay.
Yes, I actually don't mind the pre-interview. It is a sensible thing to do for a variety of reasons. The thing that makes me cringe is more the late night talk shows (not all of them mind you) where the guest provides the questions to the host because they (or their PR people) have written some anecdotes for those questions/topics.
Except Graham Norton Show, due to the amazing host. They willingly admit (even during the show) that they discuss whether a topic is fine with the guest beforehand, but Graham still brings out the best in people. And since there are several people on the show, he just lets them interact, unscripted.
You honestly believe that the NBA has never had officials go soft on calls for their star players, or not call the rules for how many steps without putting the ball on the floor, or the whole under the ball carrying or whatever the rules are they decide not to call?
You think no officials of any sport did or didn't make a call because of some bet somewhere? You think a sports player didn't make a catch? You think sports players aren't using performance enhancing drugs so that you might be entertained while they get rewards?
Some people just really want to believe that television is real. It's just not healthy to have this much faith in TV.
Unless you're claiming it happens every single game, you're applying the wrong number.
Or are you backing your claim down to "100% of content on TV has some faked element in some episode eventually"? Because that's not a very useful claim.
TV is entertainment, and any faith in the images coming from it is undeserved. Is 100% hyperbole, yes, of course. Is the majority of content on TV fake and over produced, yes, of course it is. It used to be that the label news meant something, but the definitions have been blurred so that opinion shows are now touted as news. After the news label, anything else appearing on the boobtube is meant for entertainment. Believing that the "unscripted" "reality" programming is real is farsical to me. I've worked in production for so long that maybe I'm jaded, but I've worked for religious programming, sports programming, drama/comedy production, live interviews, etc. Everything is touched up in some form or fashion. Education channels exist, but depending on what camp you're in, even those are faking/pushing agendas.
I'm not sure if this comparison really works at all. Virgin risks real human lives every flight. Guy risks maybe a little weight gain for his fans. Shows aren't rocket launches and have little in common.
Guy plays a sort of reality tv fictional persona which is a vamped up version of his own personality. His show is entertainment and not a documentary. Of course, he's not driving through the continental USA constantly to get to restaurants. He's a normal middle-aged man who needs rest and vacation and time off. He sleeps in decent hotels with his staff and they fly to their next destination. Workers deserve, at least, basic amenities and asking people to live a real life cartoony character is a bit silly. He's not hotrodding around everywhere (which would be risky to him and put a lot of miles on a classic car). His production is probably two dozen people. Its a business and should be respected as one from a worker's perspective. All 'reality' tv shows are heavily scripted. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
The Guy Fieri comparison seems like a weird one, since the actual subject of the show (that is, the restaurants) isn't faked. The hot rod and whatever goofy stuff comes with Fieri's persona is just a framing device around the actual establishments.
You don't think the bicycling, Branson's persona, and the speech where he mentioned the bicycling are just framing devices around an engineering team pulling off a passeneger spaceflight?
I'd be surprised if he even came up with the idea. They probably had a speech written for him, he got busy (or just felt out of it) and didn't bicycle there as planned, so they found some footage to release so they wouldn't have to change the speech.
It's identical. In this thread, Guy Fieri fans jump out to declare his persona actually true and good; on another message board, Branson fans are doing the same thing, explaining how he's nothing like Fieri.
Biking to the spaceport was in the promotional video released a few days before the flight (where they announced "astronauts"), obviously it couldn't be filmed on the flight day.
They didn't say "oops, you're right, sorry". They said they "regret the error", as though they didn't intend to mislead people. And it's not like Guy Fieri; as far as I'm aware, he doesn't generally pretend it's live.
In fairness I don’t think anyone really thinks that Guy Fieri drives from city to city, and the car is a little bit if flair, not really germane to the content of the show.
Better than driving on a real road whilst talking to a camera off to the side, no? Every car scene in every movie and TV show is "fake" too, just so you know.
That's an awesome chase. Of course it's one of the top chase scenes with the orig. Gone in 60 S. What I like a bout Bullit is it documents some of the city from the 60s. The freeways were new, the embarcadero freeway monstrosity is up and the chase skips from Bernal to The Marina and back to the San Bruno Mountains in minutes! It's also kind of realistic. The peelouts and tire burnouts are realistic even the explosion at the end are not too over the top. Today's chases are like Star Wars pyrotechnics, little of it remotely believable.
Apparently they had to do major repairs on the cars every night, because the jumps were so brutal. In one shot, you can see a large plume of oil appear as the car hits the ground and its oil pan is destroyed. :-O
We used to have smart guys in competition. Edison vs. Tesla.
Not we have rich business savy guys with not much of a science background holding the cards.
I have met very few wealthy men, young or old, who had great ideas. It's almost like the money dulls their brains? And their vanity projects are usually way out of their wheelhouse.
It's the same with Writers. I have read very few wealthy guys shop could write. They certainly have the time to write, but it's dribble. They are only read because they have money.
Apparently Edison was much more of a businessman than his legacy suggests - which was intentional on his part. Similar to Bill Gates, they both started as engineers but made their money organizing people.
That's because Edison vs. Tesla was really mostly theoretical with some funds for engineering (and marketing). The space race is really mostly engineering which requires lots of money.
I can't think of anyone powerful enough who isn't also rich. Although "rich" is a vaguely defined term. There still to me seems to be a direct relationship between money and power - billionaires can push the world further than millionaires, than the upper class, etc.
Money and power are two sides of the same coin. Money is literally the unit of measure for power over other people - to the first approximation, a dollar in hand means you can make appropriate people do a dollar's worth of arbitrary work for you.
The more money you have, the more you have of this kind of power mediated by economy. You can, in particular, use this power to have politicians do work for you (many ways of doing this are perfectly legal). Conversely, political power - the kind mediated by legal systems or explicit threats of violence - is directly convertible to money.
(There's also a special variant of the latter - power wielded by organized religions. The power to browbeat others into doing almost any arbitrary work. Of course, that one too is trivially convertible to both money and political power, and vice versa. That's why fully separating business, church and state is fundamentally impossible. They're different facets of the same thing. An Unholy Trinity.)
A managing partner of a $1B fund is more powerful than a person worth $10B on paper whose wealth is all tied up in a minority position in a company they are unable to sell the shares of.
Or consider the power of Biden vs his personal net worth.
Huge difference. Deviating from a flight plan, even majorly, is orders of magnitude less dangerous than glancing at your phone on the highway. Airspace is really big, and flying into area outside their flight path is so unlikely to hurt anyone as to be laughable.
The ballsy part that deserves respect is pushing the envelope on safety, executing perfectly, and playing it off like it's nothing.
> Deviating from a flight plan, even majorly, is orders of magnitude less dangerous than glancing at your phone on the highway.
No. These safety margins are expensive and they are there for a reason. Airliners don't expect a f-ing rocket to shoot by and just the air disturbances caused by it can seriously hurt or kill people.
> The ballsy part that deserves respect is pushing the envelope on safety, executing perfectly, and playing it off like it's nothing.
It does not deserve respect because it risked the safety of other people. I'd agree fully if all they risked was their live, but this way, it's exactly like going 250 km/h on a limited freeway - you're putting the lives of other people at risk and that's not cool.
>These safety margins are expensive and they are there for a reason.
Maybe I missed it in the article but did they elaborate on exactly where they strayed?
The White Sands Missile Range is really quite large, even for restricted military airspace standards. I would assume they would have to really go off course in order to appreciably put people at risk, the irresponsibility notwithstanding.
Edit: This was an honest question, and I was hoping for an answer that would help me to understand. It's a shame that this is getting downvoted rather than someone enlightening me.
The rules I'm referring to are the ones that say "if this light goes red, abort the mission instead of potentially crashing into other people or killing everyone aboard".
The pilots' willingness to risk their lives for an historic flight. It's a bit of a machismo thing, but it takes guts to do that, and a certain amount of comfort around risk.
I also don't think people realize how close to the earth these people still were. Take a globe, hold your finger as close as you can to it without touching, and that's about as high as Bezos and Branson went. As you said, orbital is what matters, and a suborbital flight around the Karman line doesn't mean much.
Orbit can occur at any distance from Earth if you are the right speed I guess -- although below a handful of fingers you'll get significant drag from the atmosphere. Since the atmosphere doesn't just suddenly cut off at some point, it is a matter of degrees. But for example, the ISS orbits around 400km and needs to be boosted a 'few times a year.'
(The Karman line is around 100km, so if we want to use 500ish km as the threshold for reasonable orbits, we really are in the ballpark of a hand's worth of fingers).
The altitude isn't really the point, so much as the trajectory -- if they miss the ground at least once I say we give them a round of applause.
Bit of a bad comparison of accomplishment. Low Earth Orbit isn't that much higher. But it is much much faster (which is what's hard). Getting into orbit is about going fast enough that the centripetal force from your velocity keeps you aloft. To get into a stable orbit at a precise target altitude requires accurate timings and controls, and lots more energy. The engineering challenge is orders of magnitude more difficult.
> the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man.
So much energy invested in a dick measuring contest. I hope humanity reaches a point in which the incentive structure would stimulate a more meaningful investment of human labor. Not to say I'm not part of the problem...
I would unpack "gutsy" with its overtones of grudging admiration, into a lot harsher terms related to toxic narcissism and what amounts to a pissing contest between competitive men.
I suspect there is a natural evolutionary curb on the somewhat sociopathic qualities at work, whereby bravado is kept in some check by self-culling being commonplace.
All for the best marketing position for the near-space tourism business that Virgin (and, in competition, Blue Origin) is launching and each promoting with the media frenzy around their respective founder-on-board demo launch.
It seems humans need a sense of competition to make progress towards any goal beyond the day-to-day.
If I have to choose between this and nuclear-armed superpowers intimidating each other with super-accurate rockets - I'll take the billionaires.
To be honest I think it's awesome. We need people who are able and willing to push for something beyond the everyday, and it doesn't really matter why they're doing it.
I disagree with that. Why they are doing what they are doing is very important.
Elon is a set of flaws walking on two legs but his plans make sense: Humanity has all their eggs in one basket by being a single planet species. To change that we need to make space travel much, much cheaper than it was. To do that we need reusable and economical spacecrafts. He works alongside this plan.
Branson made people build him the adult version of a coin operated mall kiddie ride. You give it money and it shakes you around and later you can tell people that you are now an astronaut.
Two people, both have a ton of money and both used some of their wealth to assemble a team to build a spacecraft. The difference between them is the “why” they did this.
One if suceeds has changed the history of humankind. If he fails at the grand goal misserably he still made a vastly succesfull space company.
The other if he succeeds has a funfair ride with bragging rights. Meh.
The why is all that matters, because it affects the how and the what fundamentally.
> It seems humans need a sense of competition to make progress towards any goal beyond the day-to-day.
No, you're overgeneralizing.
As counter-examples:
- fitness goals
- financial freedom goals (eg the FIRE communities)
- altruistic goals
- romantic goals (impress a potential partner)
are all proof that humans can be motivated by health/desire for physical well-being, kindness, compassion and personal comfort to progress to goals beyond the day-to-day.
Competition motivates some progress, but there are other sources of motivation as well :)
Altruism is borderline, given how much of "altruistic" activity is really about social signaling and competitive status games through conspicuous giving. Even if subconsciously.
All the above are day-to-day goals though, except perhaps altruism. By not day-to-day I mean something beyond satisfying the desires of your physical body to feel good, fuck, eat well, be safe, be admired, etc. Goals about species, deep time, eternal questions, the fate of the environment or the planet.
> “ A private program can’t afford to lose anybody,” Branson said.
Worth noting that Virgin Galactic is currently the only private space program to have killed anyone so far. This quote is from before the fatal 2014 crash, but the FAA makes it pretty clear that a virgin galactic had a cavalier attitude towards crew safety[0] back then too. Combined with this article, that paints a picture of Virgin Galactic as a genuinely unsafe company that is going to kill a lot of people if it’s not stopped. Manual processes, no safeties, high pilot work loads, and rockets do not mix well.
0 - This was caused by a design that explicitly assumed that highly trained test pilots were incapable of making mistakes. The design required manual activation, had no failsafes, and the pilots were not told that activation at too low a speed would cause the vehicle to break apart. A breathtakingly bad design for a spacecraft.
It is very difficult, and often impossible with all systems operational, to get a modern airliner outside of its flight envelope. I'd imagine a tiny glider with a rocket bolted on is a different story.
Most probably because that tiny glider with a rocket bolted to it, is pushing more / has more dangerous limits than a subsonic airliner.
It's much faster to go outside the designed flight envelope if you're 3x supersonic at FL800 than cruising subsonic at FL320.
I don’t think anyone disagrees with the general assertion that rocket travel is more dangerous than airplane travel. The question is less “is this rocket as safe as an AirBus” and more “is this rocket as safe as other rockets?”
My issue with Virgin Galactic is that their rocket design is fundamentally unsafe. It requires a human crew flawlessly perform a high level of work load with minimal automation and safety interlocks. This isn’t something we’d accept with a commercial airplane, even with the much wider margins of error that those craft provide. For a rocket this is absurdly dangerous.
The designer in fact explicitly said he wants the pilots actually in control of the aircraft directly without automation, which is romantic but incredibly dumb during supersonic ascent, as the fatal crash shows.
This is not true. In most cases you will get warnings but if you are hands-on you can fly into an unrecoverable situation, specially if you are not very high.
The systems prevent you from flying outside of the flight envelope, not from smashing the plane into the ground. Of course you can crash if you want, but the plane will still be within the flight envelope.
You would have a harder time on an Airbus, but on any Boeing it is not difficult at all. The Fly-by-wire and auto-throttle on an Airbus are designed to prevent the aircraft from leaving its flight-envelope, but Boeing airliners have far less of such 'MCAS' style of protection.
And generally you design failsafes and interlocks to prevent them from being applied outside the designed flight envelope. Especially when the consequence is “the vehicle breaks up in 4s”
> “I don’t know how we didn’t lose the vehicle and kill three people,” Todd Ericson, a retired Air Force Colonel and Virgin Galactic’s then vice-president of safety and test, told me in a 2020 interview.
I'm pretty impressed by this guy. Not only did he quit his VP job when he saw these safety problems, but he went around giving interviews about them. It strikes me that very few people would have done the same.
> Not only did he quit his VP job when he saw these safety problems
Agree, great guy, putting his ethics ahead of his career
> but he went around giving interviews about them
Hmmm, gets a bit murky here. If he wanted to save lives, there's a very clear path to alerting the FAA. But he didn't do that. This sounds a bit more like he was trying to save his career. Which brings in question why he quit in the first place, and how voluntary that was to begin with.
> If he wanted to save lives, there's a very clear path to alerting the FAA.
Is there? I doubt you can just call up the FAA and be like, "hey, my former employer is going to get people killed." The FAA will naturally call the employer and the employer will naturally defend themselves, calling the ex-employee a kook.
You probably need to generate awareness of the issues in public and show the FAA you're not the only engineer who thinks those practices are unsafe. Then, and only then when you have some accredited clout behind your accusation, can you start holding the FAA's feet to the fire for inaction. And after that, maybe they will investigate.
Color me skeptical that this would carry any weight against Branson, Musk or Bezos. That's just my perspective from the last decade as government agencies appear reluctant to act against the wealthier businesses without significant public support.
> And now they were accelerating to Mach 3, with a red light glowing in the cockpit. Fortunately for Branson and the three other crew members in the back, the pilots got the ship into space and landed safely
It seems like we’re missing the crucial step of how it all turned out OK. 2 paragraphs earlier they’re saying how red lights ought to ‘scare the shit out of you’ and ‘it’s too late once it turns red’.
Yes, the red light is supposed to mean that they failed to boost enough to be able to glide back to their target runway. But... they did anyway? Apparently? Something is missing from this account.
Satnavs are actually too polite - explicitly telling the driver that they went wrong (sans insults of course!) is useful information that could avoid a lot of confusion.
I imagine the reason that this is not done is the same reason as lots of sound engineering is compromised - marketing dweebs.
I don't much care for a machine saying "please" and "thank you". If it's not going to insult you, it could at least say "yes, your worship" or "by your command".
Depends on the UI/UX. An oil indicator light doesn't warn about impending low oil, it tells you your oil is too low. An RPM dial does the same. Other indicators warn of impending issues; stall warnings, wear indicators on tires etc.
For an aircraft/spacecraft, red indicators should be used to inform the user to the most critical factors; stall warnings, fuel state warnings etc. And most importantly, the user should be able to act on these warnings, otherwise they're just too much noise and not enough signal.
Low oil doesn't tell you engine is dead, it tells you of an impending danger that engine may be damaged. There are any number of actions driver can take.
Same for tachometer - red says you are outside design optimal parameters and you should take an action (slow down) rather than risk possible impending engine damage.
Neither is "bad thing happened, it's done, there are no actions you can take any more" in my interpretation.
I would have thought that too but in the article they don’t describe it like that. There’s a yellow warning light and a red ‘game over’ light they all seem terrified of.
I think the red and yellow light are degrees of warning, there's a quote with the pilots debating which one scares them, to me that means neither of them are beyond the point of no return. I did have the same thought when I first read the article though.
> Eight days after Branson’s flight, an H.R. manager booked time on his calendar, and then fired Stucky over Zoom.
Such a shame. You can bet that this will come back to bite Virgin, and should a serious accident happen and they get sued, Stucky could be a prime witness.
> ... On the morning of the flight, Branson, an outspoken environmentalist, appeared on the “livestream” arriving at the spaceport on a bicycle. But this turned out to be false: Branson did not pedal to work that day; the bike ride was filmed a week earlier and then made to look like it happened that morning. When Reuters called out the company, an anonymous official said, “We regret the error and any confusion it may have caused.”
But this was no "error":
> Branson also told spectators about the bike ride during a post-flight celebration at the spaceport, Reuters said. "It's so awesome to arrive on a bicycle, across this beautiful New Mexico countryside," Branson was quoted as telling the crowd from a stage.
Even without the red light, this incident speaks volumes about what's going in inside this "company."
As long as Branson is at the helm, VG's prospects as a going concern seem dim. You can't merch your way into space with the usual marketing game plan. Mother Nature always calls bullshit.
Good article, but I did not like the way it referred to Scaled Composites as a company "contracting" for Virgin. IIRC Burt Rutan (founder of Scaled Composites) began the whole program (Spaceship One. etc.), but became associated with Branson later, and that eventually led to an acquisition. I suppose that like many others, the acquisition deal required the re-writing of history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites
Scaled Composites was contracting for Virgin Galactic though. Rutan and Scaled did SpaceShipOne for the X Prize, then Branson contracted them to do SpaceShipTwo for Virgin. Also, i don’t follow what you are saying about the acquisition - Scaled was acquired by Northrop Grumman back in 2007, not Virgin Galactic / Branson.
Telling they fired Sturckow when he was pretty outspoken such as this:
In another e-mail, in 2019, he urged his fellow test pilots to be more transparent: “Failure to admit mistakes in flight test is a cancer that must be nipped at the bud.” Stucky, whom I wrote about in the magazine in 2018, had been particularly troubled by Mackay and Masucci’s unwillingness to take responsibility for what he perceived to be their mistakes on the July, 2018, flight.
It's not that he should or shouldn't have, it's that once you make that decision, certain consequences become likely.
I place it more on the author trying to paint a victim narrative, given the guys board resignation (he knew his fate), and the fact that the author directly benefitted from the decision that got him fired.
> I place it more on the author trying to paint a victim narrative,
If he should have, he's a victim; if he shouldn't have, he's not. If you "place it more" on the author trying to paint a victim narrative, you're explicitly saying that it is about whether he should or shouldn't have, and that you think he shouldn't have.
The author has an interest in making him a victim of Virgin Galactic, because if he's not, that makes him largely a victim of the author's published writings.
Separately, I'm saying that there's no universal truth to "should have" or "shouldn't have". It's a personal moral and ethical judgement call, and is complicated by differences in professional opinion. The author makes it seem like a clear A/B choice, and it's not.
Disobedience is more black and white, and requires pretty substantial justification.
Assessing risk can be one of the most difficult and contentious aspects of engineering. People are going to disagree.
This isn't a case of "safety at all costs". It's an inherently risky business and discipline. To some extent he is comfortable putting test pilots and others lives' at risk, because that's ultimately his job.
Barring some absolute smoking gun (ie violating written risk policies versus differences of professional opinions), I think he made a deliberate choice that precludes victim hood.
Too much narrative and too little facts. I don’t care how much the journalist hates space travel, just get to the point. All that rumble means, he personally believes that “a more risky” correction for a red light was taken because the pilot was afraid of Branson being angry. A bit of a silly argument when you are talking about life and death situation.
This highlights why having automated pilots in spaceships is so critical. Software can be tested more thoroughly than humans, and cannot override safety protocols.
If the rules say to abort, the software aborts. Humans get to say "I think we'll be fine", and put lives on the line.
Automation is critical, but also the ability to override software that fails is critical, too. Armstrong overrode the failed LEM computer to land safely. Of the 3 737MAX software stab trim runaway incidents, only one crew followed the stab trim override instructions and saved their plane.
Pilots are never perfect, and neither is the software. Need both watching each other.
> If the rules say to abort, the software aborts. Humans get to say "I think we'll be fine", and put lives on the line.
But logic errors and bugs in "thoroughly-tested" (subjective, determined by humans/corporations) software-controlled systems kills too. Interesting thought experiment: How many humans will die in 2031, across all industries, because of bad software?
In this case the human pilots were right. The red light was mostly a bureaucratic instrument that wasn't really a safety risk for the mission beyond getting in trouble with the authorities by going over an arbitrary line. The spaceship and crew landed safely and even the article points out that they were never in any real danger.
In contrast, humans can also say: "It's saying to abort because the sensor reading is incorrect, we'll be fine." It's tricky... in the airplane world, I think it is understood that the current state of the art is an extremely well trained and competent pilot coupled with a nice advanced cockpit is the gold standard. Where each of their responsibilities lie, and how well they work together, is where the rubber meets the road. The record is beyond question that increased automation has drastically reduced airplane fatalities, while there are also being many, many fatal accidents which are quite clearly a case of automation gone awry. Effectively putting both of them together is quite a fascinating problem, and one I think we are still in the infancy of fully understanding, particularly in brand new domains that are emerging like self-driving cars, etc.
> Software can be tested more thoroughly than humans, and cannot override safety protocols.
Humans have had millions of years of testing and can be robustly relied on to take action to avoid dying.
I’m not saying humans are perfect, because obviously they are not. But software isn’t either.
And software and software testing are done by humans too, so the issue is not fallible human vs machine. Pilot vs automation is just comparing two different modes of human fallibility.
This program used test pilots to test their space ships, killed one of them in the process, and later fired the director of their test flight program under dubious circumstances.
SpaceX employees haven't gone to space. Just NASA astronauts on SpaceX rockets. And this privately paid for mission coming up.
I don't think it's the CEO's job to be a test pilot. I think that's pretty crazy actually.
I know someone who is a test pilot. He's trained a long time to do it. You want someone in the craft that is an expert at both piloting spacecraft and the engineering of the craft. Musk is certainly no pilot and the job of CEO does not require you to have those skills.
It could be argued that since these systems are fully automated that you don't need anyone with special skills there. But being a programmer I don't trust software for every situation. So I sure think if you are going to put a person on it, they should be able to intervene if needed. There should be a purpose to their risk.
I think it's worth pointing out that Virgin is literally trying to enable space tourism, which is just a side effect for SpaceX. Branson was testing and advertising his product, Elon would be taking valuable time away from his mission.
Hope those billionaires won't dare to force for their faces to be put on future postal stamps, I grew up as a kid having Laika [1] on them, I wouldn't want for future postal-stamp collector kids to have to look at the faces of Branson or, God forbid, Bezos.
Isn’t that the principle of football and space conquest: Giving plebs something to dream about, so we can shove them with ads and admiration for absurd ideas (like nationalism or love for any idea, maybe sovietism, patriotism, Richardbrandsonism, or for the belief that we’re in together pushing for a better world).
To be honest I don't think the current "pleb" generations dream about space conquest anymore (I'm part of that "pleb", of course), people have gotten accustomed to the idea that everything relatively close up there is either very dark of very cold or both, so why all the fuss about some piece of rock located in those dark and cold places?
Unless we discover some new laws of physics and the accompanying new technology I think we should put firmly in our heads that's no way for us as a species to get passed our solar system, so maybe we could better use the "space exploration" resources for something closer to home.
Maybe not the plebs but the Musk fans are typically well to do white collar professionals that do dream of space and all that jazz. They don't have the problems of real plebs so they still actually care.
“On my first time skydiving, there was one cord that opened the parachute, and one that got rid of it. I pulled the wrong cord by mistake. I was falling through the air before an instructor managed to yank my spare ripcord.”
The cord is designed to get rid of an incorrectly opened main parachute. Not an unopened one. This is to allow safe deployment of the reserve parachute.
On modern parachutes it won't actually get rid of an unopened main parachute. A main parachute that refuses to open at all is actually scarier than a poorly opened one, because it could get open anytime. Including after you have opened the reserve one. Then you have two parachutes open, and they can get into surprising unstable aerodynamic configurations (a downplane). And you can't easily get rid of an unopened main parachute.
I don't know how it was in 1986, but today you have 3 "chords". One in the back is the primary chute and hopefully the only one you need. On the front you have two. One cuts the primary, whether or not you've opened it, and the other deploys the secondary.
I understand it has pretty good glide characteristics, MUCH better than the space shuttle, allowing for abort at basically any stage of the flight. Also they actually get given parachutes, unlike pre-Challenger STS missions.
It's a glider, but a glider capable of mach 3 flight. So, approach speeds will be much faster than a typical glider. Probably higher speed than an airliner. That would be dangerous to land off field.
Also, it could mean the vehicle is exposed to aerodynamic conditions it is not designed for, operating outside of the flight envelope.
I don't believe the intention of that test was to try and safely put a plane down in a desert.
It was a remote controlled crash test.
The wiki page[1] says the descent rate was 1500 feet per minute.
A typical touchdown rate according to the linked MIT article about this crash[2] puts airliner landings at 10-20 feet per minute.
Interesting article regarding Virgin Galactic safety practices. I'm not sure about this comparison though?
> Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin [...] profits depend on making frequent and safe human spaceflight a reality.
For SpaceX, their profits are largely driven by unmanned launches. Maybe the point was just to mention a better known company to the general public?
Please don't post flamebait, especially not flamebait tropes. And please don't take HN threads further into flamewar generally. This is entirely avoidable and should be avoided.
FDA approves particular formulations of drugs for particular uses, generally in the context of being prescribed by a medical professional who understands when the treatment is appropriate and what the correct dosage should be.
To the best of my knowledge it has not approved people randomly going down to the pet shop and chomping down on the horse dewormer just because they've chosen to eschew interventions that actually help but also don't want to get scarred lungs and/or die.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Here's what the FDA has to say on the subject:
Let's hope Elon Musk gets cold feet and doesn't fly on that ship. SpaceShipTwo is a pretty atrocious design, safety-wise, compared to what you can accomplish with a capsule and vertical rocket for suborbital spaceflight.
I hope Musk values his self-imposed mission enough to not take that risk. If he actually takes that flight it would be the single biggest threat to the future of space exploration.
I didn't realize this was a sub 100k flight... wow. What a sad regression. I went to Vandeberg in 2004 to watch the X-prize launch which actually hit 100k. It was anticlimactic as an event... No confident confirmation of the accomplishment at the time, which is pretty great in retrospect, comparing to Branson's bravado at... not even hitting space, but marketing it as hitting space. Get tossed.
Despite his ever growing amount of haters, Musk & Co. do really seem to be placing safety fairly high up on their priority list, if not at the top where Musk says it is.
Branson... does not particularly seem to be doing so. I'm unaware if he's ever repeatedly claimed safety is Virgins top priority though.
I don’t think anyone who seriously follows the space sector hates SoaceX (perhaps except those with vested interests elsewhere who are being embarrassed) - they’re doing incredible things.
People may hate Musk’s public profile, or some of his Twitter mistakes, or dislike his approach to ‘Full Self Driving’ at Tesla… but let’s not confuse this with antipathy to SpaceX.
Given
- how easy it supposedly would be to find someone to bribe with the inheritance one would get from someone like Bezos and Branson,
- how many people work on getting these rockets into space and those men back
- how complex and fragile rockets are
- how dangerous the whole endeavour is commonly believed to be
- that they both came back alive
Can we assume that all these murder mystery tv shows and movies have lied to us all along?
Unless falling victim to convoluted plots to murder rich relatives for the inheritance only happens to the rich but not the ultra-rich?
You would need the inheritee and the engineer to both be willing to commit murder and run the calculus that the money is more valuable than the risk of them going to jail and losing their inheritance forever, which is probably a really bad bet given one of them is a spacex engineer or something and the other is, what, an heir to the bezos fortune?
Most heirs are not going to attempt to murder for the money. They normally are already enjoying that wealth. And if the money maker stays alive it just grows even more.
Now even if they have a motive. How are they going to connect to the right engineer? They likely don't have the skills to even identify an employee that could deliberately sabotage the system.
And you likely couldn't do it with just one employee. There's at least one other person reviewing their work. And tons of inspections and tests you'd have to hide it all from. So you'd end up with a heist movie.
That said, the groups that could do things like this are state actors. But then we are talking about a very well funded group that can afford to spend years placing people in key positions. And then we get back to motive. Only state actor that would really want to hold back SpaceX or Blue Origin would be China. But the reaction from such sabotage could go a lot of ways. Not worth the resources.
We just got our asses kicked by Syria and, more recently, the Taliban. Even our idiot generals aren't eager for more of that. They'll be able to justify several trillion dollars more in "defense" spending before needing to incite another war. Expect the next freedom-haters to be a somewhat smaller nation, like Grenada.
For many reasons (some alluded to in this article, many more in the book), SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. Engineering leadership has done what they can to make the vehicle safer (at the cost of performance), but the intractable issue is that any one mistake by a pilot is likely to be fatal (and already has been, in the 2014 accident). Voices like Stucky and Ericson who wanted to acknowledge the inherent danger of the vehicle (which doesn’t mean grounding it) have been ignored and ultimately removed. The company’s business requires the vehicle to be understood to be safe by the public. The chickens will come home to roost.