Explosion at Scaled Composites Kills 2, Injures 4 239
Animats writes "Details are scant at this time, but a explosion at the Scaled Composites rocket test facility has killed two people and seriously injured four more. The Los Angeles Times reports that the explosion was 'ignited by a tank of nitrous oxide.' This is Burt Rutan's facility, and the home of SpaceShip One and Virgin Galactic spacecraft development."
First and foremost (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, damn! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not surprised... (Score:5, Insightful)
All I have to say on the matter is that rocket science is dangerous business, the same goes for any kind of challenging engineering. Sometimes people die because other people fuck up, sometimes people die in spite of every sane precaution that could possibly be taken. I just hope this is the latter and not the former. I just hope it isn't symptomatic of a corporate mentality takeover after the buyout.
Re:sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
"Where's the kaboom?.. There was supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom"
Man, I can usually appreciate sympathetic dark humor but that joke just comes across as so dickish and it isn't even funny in an inappropriate "NASA=need another seven astronauts" kind of way.
shame (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
Complacentcy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not surprised... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:sorry (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:sorry (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a non-convincing argument. Pro-war people say the same thing "Oh how many people get murdered each year?" Rapists say "at least I didnt kill anyone." Murders say "at least I'm not a pedophile." This is moral relativism and a slippery slope. If you cant defend private enterprise launching millionares into space as something to die for then that should tell you about how weak your position is.
Well, first of all this rocket business is just that: a business. Its someones fucking job and they got killed at the workplace. You CAN prevent that. You CANT prevent sensless street murder. You CANT stop famine and overpopulation. People should expect a safe work environment. At the end of the day these people died so Burt can launch millionaires into near orbit for 250k a pop. Not exactly a noble calling.
Now, I fully expect the government to come in and regulate these guys. At least put in some real NASA-level safety precautions. NASA isnt perfect but their safety record and procedures are pretty good. I think this is the beginning of the end for the "wild west" approach to space exploration. Now the responsible adults need to step in and protect the worker and protect the customers. We've seen a milliom times in america. From little children working at the looms losing fingers to men losing their hands in meat packing. Some new industry comes up and safety is the last concern. No more, thanks.
My condolences to the families.
Re:Not surprised... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not surprised... (Score:3, Insightful)
It Happens (Score:5, Insightful)
The first thing that occurred to me was whether Rutan was there. He wasn't, but he could have been. It's his way to keep his hands in things. That would have been an enormous loss to aero- and space development. He's one of the all time geniuses of all things flyable. Any really good aerospace engineer could write a definitive book on composite construction. It took genius to do so in 28 pages. It'd be damn hard for Scaled to go on without him, even with Northrup buying them out.
The second that occurred to me was that it'll put a damper on hybrid motor development and use. The motors are much safer than solid or liquid, but the handling equipment isn't safe by any stretch. Amateur rocketry has been using them for years, but nobody is willing to break the high-power certification barrier and make them available to low and mid-power rockters due to the liability factor from the ground equipment. It may come to nothing more than headlines for the media and PR for some politicians, but I expect a call for the FAA's Office of Space Transportation to rethink certifying of hybrid powered human rated craft.
Re:sorry (Score:4, Insightful)
The grandparents point is simply that a death is a death, although when their is something unique or spectacular about it we make it a bigger deal than if it's simply a "routine" death. Now I don't mean routine to the family, but routine in a page 26 kind of way, as opposed to something that makes the front few pages.
And I would expect that sending someone to orbit is a very noble calling to many. How many non-goverment employees have ever sent someone to orbit? I'm guessing not very many.
Pretty quick of you to assume that safety wasn't a concern. It was actually a cold test run when it happened. There were bunkers onsite to ensure safety. That's just the from the story we know now. When it's been determined that safety wasn't a high priority then I'll be on your side but for now you are just assuming....
Re:Not surprised... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hindsight is 20/20. From this initial report, it sounds like this particular incident was a result of known factors, and thus avoidable. The Challenger and Columbia incidents were the result of factors which, while known, were under-appreciated. The Challenger factors were managerial, while the Columbia factors were the result of engineering.
There's also the matter of economics. It's simply not economically possible to guard against every threat. If it were, then someone on this planet would be nigh-immortal.
Re:sorry (Score:4, Insightful)
Chuck you, Farley.
At the end of the day, these people died so Burt could launch millionaires (instead of billionaires) into near orbit for $250K a pop (instead of $30M a pop).
Given the situation in Unistat, and the likelihood of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (TANSTAAFL is something Heinlein derived as a likely result of living in a hostile environment) coming true after a critical mass of humans is achieved outside of earth orbit, I'm willing to bet that the people working at Scaled Composites were on their way towards doing more for human freedom than NASA did in the past 40 years.
Until NOC bought them out, of course, ending all hope of cheap civilian access to space.
> Now, I fully expect the government to come in and regulate these guys. At least put in some real NASA-level safety precautions.
Chuck you again, and the horse you rode in on, Farley.
Columbus and those who followed him didn't cross the Atlantic because they thought it was safe. They did so because he thought he could make a fuckload of money by doing so.
NASA safety precautions are appropriate for people who will sue you if your spaceship blows up.
The meek (and that's you, Farley) can have the earth. The rest of us only want the right to sign a waiver that we may take our chances with the stars.
Please, Burt (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:shame (Score:2, Insightful)
Not unexpected (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people (other than the safety engineers and insurance folks) rarely stop and think about what it costs in human lives to move forward. But there is a cost.
In a perfect world it would never happen, but we are imperfect and it will always happen. People make mistakes. Equipment malfunctions. Bad weather. Mislabeled products. Acts of nature.
The people that do this work benefit their species; a true higher calling. Take a moment to think about their sacrifice and thank them.
Re:It Happens (Score:1, Insightful)
Thank you for these words. Someone in a different thread was going on about how this happened at a workplace, so it should have been prevented. I was so incensed that I couldn't find a way to respond in any clear or coherent manner. I'm glad I continued reading, because as it turns out, you said precisely what I had hoped to and it has calmed me down.
One doesn't come to work at a company like Scaled Composites by accident, or because there's just no better job available. These individuals were incredibly passionate about their jobs, they were more qualified than anyone else to be doing the work that's being done there, and - yes - they knew that there were risks. We must respect them for that, and we should accept the fact that whatever comes of this tragedy will be knowledge for future improvements. We must acknowledge that the loss of these two lives, and the critical injury to four others, can only result in better designs of future tests and deployments.
There are no words that any of us can put forth right now that will console the families and friends of those lost. But I think they'll know and understand - more than the rest of us ever will - the sacrifice of their loved ones. You don't conquer a new frontier without losing many amazing people along the journey. This has always been true of space exploration, and is a fact that even NASA cannot deny during its many expeditions into unfamiliar territory. What works one day will not always work the next, and as previous tragedies have shown, even with the weight of the government behind you, you cannot guarantee success.
To all those who have been lost in the pursuit of space exploration, godspeed. I wish I had the gumption and the sheer knowledge to join you.
Not at all (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, this sort of thing happens every day in the private sector. Fisherman drown, taxi drivers get shot, construction workers die in falls, and life goes on, with hardly missing a beat. If you want space to be really privatized, the right way to look at this whole accident is to say, yeah, it sucks that they died, but, back to work people.
Is it just me... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:sorry (Score:2, Insightful)
For the Nth time (where N approaches infinity), as gets mentioned several times every time an article about Scaled comes up, they were doing no such thing. They're working on a pricey joyride which does very little to advance the state of the art of spaceflight, whose operating envelope is more akin to a supersonic aircraft than that of a spacecraft, which gets to skip out on all of the *real* challenges of spaceflight (ISP to mass ratios, thermal protection, etc) and take the much, much easier routes. It'd be like me claiming that I'm advancing the state of the art on ocean crossing because I built a powered dinghy that can only survive 5' waves but has a really neat wiring system.
This all doesn't make any of these people's deaths less tragic (and my heart goes out to their families), but let's not use their deaths as a chance to portray them as some sort of heroic visionaries leading the way into the future. They were working on a job and died in an industrial accident.
If anything, perhaps this accident will put lie to the concept that hybrid rockets are somehow inherently safe.
Re:shame (Score:1, Insightful)
SpaceShipN series vehicles are NOT launch vehicles by any means. Launch vehicles, by definition, propel a craft to orbital or escape velocities. Virgin Galactic's plan, on the other hand, is to get to 0km/h vertical at some point above the internationally defined 100km space/earth boundary and then come back down in a parabolic path, simulating weightlessness. Think "Vomit Comet" with a longer flight.
The shuttle is important because it's the only launch vehicle able to carry parts of the ISS up. You said the ISS has no point? Well, without the ISS, SpaceX -- and virtually every other orbital space startup -- has no real market for the human rated launch vehicles. You can point at the money NASA spends on a project, then the "successes" of similar-sounding ventures (which may or may not really be all that similar) of private companies, and then conclude that private enterprise is doing much better. Trouble is, they're either doing things that have been done decades before (parabolic flight) or are based off the results of the huge research budgets that NASA entertained years ago (launch capsules). And even though NASA has had failures in the past, these newer companies also have problems just as often. SpaceX hasn't had a 100% successful launch yet, SpaceShipOne had controls issues on its first flight, etc etc etc. There's a reason these projects take hundreds of engineers close to a decade to complete - these systems are far more complex than the Web 2.0 products built by a pair of recent college grads in an apartment near campus over a summer. Nothing against the people building the apps, but a lot of people seriously underestimate the complexity of launch systems, especially those rated for human flight.
Re:Not surprised... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A couple more details (Score:4, Insightful)
It just looks like that one tank trailer fell over, but in fact it has to have rolled over 270 degrees to be where it's lying now. Also, the container just past it was both hit really hard in the side by expanding gas, and knocked over.
But there's no massive fragmentation damage or burn mark anywhere to be seen.
What is instructive however, is that there's something missing, and something else tipped over. The other thing tipped over is the test stand itself, which is a large blue steel truss structure, which is now about 10 feet away from where it started and lying on its side.
What's missing, is a large (roughly 7 foot diameter and 10 foot long) composite "flight tank" which would hold the nitrous oxide for the motor during a test or flight, and any sign of the injector or a chamber assembly. They're just out and out gone.
The missing tank, test stand knocked over, lack of fire or fragmentation damage seems to indicate that nothing burned much if at all, and nothing detonated. This has all the hallmarks of a large pressure vessel explosion.
I for one am going to try to attend the memorial service.
Re:Is it just me... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not surprised... (Score:2, Insightful)