And Today's Space Ambulance Chaser Award Goes To …
.@spacecom – Doug Messier – is already back at his favorite sport: dumping on @virgingalactic – hours after a fatal accident. What a creep.
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) November 1, 2014
.@spacecom – Doug Messier – is already back at his favorite sport: dumping on @virgingalactic – hours after a fatal accident. What a creep.
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) November 1, 2014
Really, Keith? Pot, Kettle, Black ring a bell? This is coming from you? A single glance at your twitter history makes it clear that YOU are a olympian in the sport of dumping on organizations. In this case NASA and its various publicity outlets.
Doug has been on this story for years, doing actual journalism about the iffy safety practices of VG/Scaled, whereas you have been more concerned about making snippy attacks at NASA PR people who don’t meet your level of social media ‘excellence’ level.
I expect this post to be deleted in 5…4..3..2.. but what the heck.
ALSO… Quoting yourself on twitter… Always amusing to see.
Afraid to use your real name? Coward.
I guess I touched a nerve. So you are saying that you *don’t* make a professional sport of dumping on people on twitter?
Yawn. After 18+ years, this is not an old argument. Its so easy (and obviously cowardly) for people to post things and attack people when they use false names … everyone knows exactly who I am. You … well, you hide. Use your real name or this conversation will end.
Hey guy, you want to try being professional here? I don’t think this is the way they teach you to handle comments like this at mod school.
Go visit another website if you do not like this one.
I don’t recall Keith or anyone at NASAWatch dumping on a company or organization within hours of a such a fatality.
I worked for NASA for nearly 19yrs and I find it sad that on many instances the ONLY way I was able to get informed on some NASA issues was from Keith.
NASA managements internal communication network has been hopelessly broken long before I ever came onboard and Keith has been a champion of exposing the extreme dysfunction that “IS” NASA.
The questions he raises seem legitimate to me, especially since they are the same ones that he and others close to the project have been saying for the last several years.
From what i read on this site, hyperj is right. Keith, you have a really tendency to attach the person and not the arguement.
He’s so unprofessional, yet you use his tweets on your blog.
http://nasawatch.com/archiv…
The can’t accept risk argument is a non-sequitur. There is obvious risk in putting people on top of a bomb, propelling them to high Mach speeds through the atmosphere, then into the vacuum of space, and then returning in a blazing ionized fireball, then finally at the end hoping that the last link in the chain the parachute or gliding system works correctly. If NASA, or Americans, or whoever else you are pointing at couldn’t accept risk they would never launch anything, because they know that no matter how hard they try, and how much they test, things can and will go wrong. And by the way NASA is currently sending astronauts on Soyuz, is there no risk to that? And they have astronauts on ISS, is there no risk spending six months orbiting the Earth in a space station?
When an airliner crashes, there is a lot of hand-wringing in spite of millions of successful flights. Why? Because we don’t want people to be killed in plane crashes. We don’t stop flying airplanes but we work towards preventing it from happening again. Same thing with spaceflight, we don’t want astronauts or cosmonauts or anyone else to be killed, so effort is made to try and prevent loss of life. And there is sadness and grief when something is missed or something unforeseen happens and people are killed, and yet we continue to send people into space. So how exactly does that translate into not accepting risk?
A lot of time and money is spent making cars safer – seat belts, air bags, ABS, ESC, etc. And a lot of time and money is spent making airplanes safer – constant inspections, not allowing a plane to fly if there is a mechanical problem, etc. So when the same methods are applied to spaceflight, which is inherently even more dangerous and with much more to go wrong, that is somehow translated as not accepting risk?
In fact some argue that we fall short in making cars safer, aircraft safer, and spacecraft safer. But we proceed anyway, because we accept that there is always risk no matter how hard we try.
Exactly. Was this disaster the result of pushing into the unknown, or because something already known was pushed aside because it was inconvenient? One kind of risk is acceptable, the other isn’t.
True, but hours after a tragedy, when virtually nothing is known about the cause, it is counterproductive for people in the media to cast aspersions, or even insinuations, using non-attributable sources as reinforcement.
Speculation about what caused the accident is understandable, as long as speculation in the immediate aftermath stays within the mechanical causes. However going so soon into speculation about procedural or decisional causes is in my opinion counterproductive. The most important thing at the moment is fact gathering.
Then why do people sue when a car crash is found to be caused by a manufacturer defect? I’ve never heard of anyone saying, “This is price we pay for making cars safer and my dead loved-one is a pioneer.”
People sue to get cash, and sometimes only for that reason. Of course I realize that your point is that there can be a moral aspect related to negligence, which I agree with but I think that is a separate topic to what I was referring to. A better example using cars related to my point would be why do people continue to buy Toyotas when people have been killed by manufacturing defects in Toyotas (or in Fords, or in GM cars). It’s because they understand that there is risk but as long as they believe that the manufacturer has taken steps to mitigate the risk then they will continue to purchase and drive their cars. If they don’t believe that, then they won’t.
There was a reason for my comment about people suing just for the cash. I think in some cases the same can also be true when people in the media begin attacking a company that has made a mistake or appears to have made a mistake, it could be that they are only looking for the attention that comes with making the attack. Certainly that is not true of all or even most people in the media, but I believe that it is true for some of them, just as some people sue just for the money..
Doug Messier is outstanding. He reports the true story!
Kluger is against space flight – plain and simple.
SpaceShipTwo is a flawed design. Pictures of the accident show that it went into a tumble (for whatever reason). At one point it was flying backwards with the wings broken off, and continued to tumble. The crew had no ejection seats. Imagine the g-forces in the tumbling craft. It’s a wonder anyone was able to bail out and survive. Thank God it wasn’t full of passengers. A rocket powered craft with human passengers requires some type of escape system. SpaceShipTwo has none.
Unfortunately an escape system is no guarantee of survival in a launch vehicle or spacecraft contingency. Consequently a commercial passenger aircraft or spacecraft must be thoroughly tested and potential failure modes most must be resolved by appropriate design changes.
Well said Keith.
One thing that I can state, having worked for and flown for Virgin (not Galactic or the Airline) for 11 years, safety was emphasized and implemented at every point. The aircraft I flew was very, very different from SS2, but the culture was very much safety first.
I would like to believe that,
But 3 people getting killed on a ground test stand says differently. Granted this may have been considered a Scaled Composites accident and not the fault of VG-but same location, same people, same mindsets.
I have plenty of high energy testing experience and we were NEVER in an area where we could have been killed during testing and always a two fault tolerance for safety at the minimum.
The biggest mistake that they may have made is to make the unwarranted assumption way back in the beginning that a hybrid rocket engine was inherently safe. There is no such thing as that but it was sold to them as being so. Burt Rutan is not a propulsion guy and he relied on those outside experts that helped them win the Ansari X Prize. Sometimes you have to learn by doing. There are dozens of streets not far from the crash site that bear the names of a previous generation that had to learn by doing. Computer simulations are not enough and sometimes reality bites you, hard.
There are also some that would claim that hybrids are inherently unsafe. This is what Joel Brenner claimed on CNN right after the crash. Neither of these extremes are true.
There are several arm chair rocket scientists who are claiming that they should have used a liquid engine but as some astute observers have pointed out, an all liquid design coming apart often has a high heat signature associated with it as was seen just a few days ago with the Antares explosion. It is a miracle that even one of those guys survived. It is far less likely that this would have been the case had the crew compartment been in the center of a fireball of liquid oxygen and kerosene or other liquid propellant.
I think you have hit the nail on the head. I’m not saying that hybrids are intrinsically unsafe. I’m just saying that they have a safety profile comparable to other types of rocket propulsion and so any new design requires extensive testing before it can be considered reasonably safe. As I understand it, XCOR did a great deal of testing with its liquid-fueled engines before using them in manned aircraft.
It would be helpful to understand what led to the break between SNC and Virgin.
Great observation Dennis,
I believe the success and smoothness of the Ansari competition may have lulled everybody into certain degree of complacency.
As you said every propulsion system has its dangers.
I was pondering this weekend as to why they didn’t consider a solid rocket system?
Well it looks like in this instance it was not the propulsion system at all…..But the point stands that those screaming that hybrids are inherently unsafe are as wrong as those who claim that they are inherently safe.
Agreed, and yes we might actually be looking at an unintentional flight control reconfiguration and ultimately a structural failure.
This is what bothered me the most about the screaming about “everyone knew that the engine was the problem!”. If you look at the pictures of the parts on the ground and look at the flight images publicly released, you see no explosion. As I have said in many forums, there is nothing inherently safe, or inherently unsafe about the hybrid motor.
I’m scratching my head, and scouring the Internet, trying to figure out which writing you mean, Keith, the only thing I could find that seemed appropriate to your criticism was http://www.parabolicarc.com…, but that was published some 12 hours before the accident.
Go to his Twitter account @spacecom – https://twitter.com/spacecom
Thanks, Keith. Twitter’s structure invites knee-jerk comments that lack depth or reflection. That’s the antithesis of the sort of journalism that a complex issue requires.
Thanks for linking this article. A must read if you want to understand what led to the sad present situation.