Some corrections: Thanks to @slome815 for pointing out there was one other launch system with no escape provision: Voskhod. I completely forgot about that one. I said FBW was ‘the norm’ in 1968. That’s not correct. Irreversible controls were but fbw was in its infancy. There is a correction to kind of address it at 49 minutes and I’ll be doing an entire video about it in a few weeks. Thanks @SoloRenegade
A future system also lacking a LES is the SpaceX Starship, though that project has such an array of fundamental issues facing It that I doubt that it will even fly freight to orbit.
@@Miata822 I've made the decision to only do videos on things that already exist (ie not CGI renders or half baked tests). If Spacex put humans in anything that even remotely resembles their starship proposals, I'll go there.
Gemini also didn't really have an escape system. Sure, they nominally had ejection seats, but a) Those would only be good for the first 40 seconds of launch, after that the spacecraft would be going too fast for the ejection seats that were fitted to be reliable, and b) I really do not like the prospects of firing an ejection seat charge inside a spacecraft that is pressurised to 1 atm with pure oxygen and has been soaking in that pure oxygen for over an hour prior to launch.
@@zuthalsoraniz6764 That's part of the design. The flash fire in the cabin as ejection motors fire helps precondition the astronauts and seats for the presumptive fireball they are ejecting into. /jk
One of the Mercury/Redstone engineers is still with us. He is 92 years old and comes to our shop for little machining jobs he can’t do in his home shop. Talked to him about meeting Wehrner Von Braun down in Alabama. He described the man as a skilled publicist and salesman as much as he was a scientist and engineer. Old Lyle is living history. Every time I see him is a bonus.
A Nazi is a Nazi but Von Braun was exceptional. He killed more people assembling his V-2 than did the business end of it. By the gods that is what it is about wasn't it, the eradication of the Jews. How soon we forget what the man did just so we could get to space. NEVER FORGET! It is another sin this country has to endure that we didn't punish him and his countrymen, the greedy lot we are.
I was volunteering at a space museum this weekend alongside a 96 year old data reduction specialist who worked on the Snark program. He did a bit of work with computers to extract data for Von Braun when he was having trouble getting data in a timely fashion at Cape Canaveral, but only with the consent of Jack Northrop since that's who he really worked for (!). Fascinating, fascinating guy, really glad I got to spend some time with him this weekend.
My Uncle used to be one of Werner Von Braun's pilots when he was based in Alabama. (IOW, he flew one of the planes that Von Braun used to get around the country)
Years of testing separate Virgin Galactic from Oceangate. If Titan tested as hard as Spaceship Two it would have imploded years before it started carrying passengers
There is one major difference: One of them knew what he was doing despite taking very weird and somewhat unsafe approach. Other was a rich idiot. One is alive, other is red mush.
@@banksuvladimirit's one guy and one company, but one exception is enough to disprove the rule of "but the pilots wouldn't be in it if it weren't safe"
With respect to the "pilots wouldn't do it if it wasn't safe": I know one of the astronauts who was on the return to flight mission after the Columbia shuttle disaster. He told me that the pilots and most of the astronauts (at least) would have gone up in a shuttle the next day if they had been allowed to. They are probably more capable of understanding the risks of spaceflight than most people. They would have been willing to take the flight before anyone really even understood what happened. I would be willing to count that as "informed consent" but it had nothing to do with whether they believed it was safe (to the extent that spaceflight can be safe.) They understood the risks as well as anyone and decided it was worth it. Many people would do these things despite them being unsafe, and that's fine, but for a layman to have informed consent, the risk needs to be appropriately characterized.
True. To make a car compassion. I don't think any enthusiast wouldn't want to drive a F1 cat. Problem is 95% wouldn't even be able to press the brake pedal hard enough to stop fast enough when actually going fast.
"I had been conditioned to believe that there is nothing more dangerous than the arrogance of ignorance; now I would learn that it does not compare with the arrogance of knowledge, knowledge that is often confused with wisdom." -John Piña Craven, 1959, on being appointed Chief Scientist of the US Navy.
That's the same period of time that John Clark (author of _Ignition!_ (1972), a great technical autobiography of rocket fuel development) was running the rocket fuel lab at the US Naval Air Rocket Test Station (NARTS) for 17 years while avoiding any time-lost accidents. From some of the stories he tells, it was by careful understanding and caution when pushing near any sort of limit, whether knowledge or operation.
Military systems engineer here. "Procedure" is *literally* the second to last choice for risk mitigation (the last choice being a placard, i.e., "YOLO - here's a sign to tell you to watch out for that!").
Depends on kind of person you're designing it for. I remember seeing something to the effect of "don't weld with ammunition present" on an ammo box on a US WW2 era warship.
@@ellhask This is what makes safety engineering in military systems so interesting to me as a civilian layperson. You can do all the traditional risk mitigation that you want, but to have an effective military you absolutely will need to put people with a wide range of backgrounds, education, and life experience directly in the path of some pretty dangerous situations even in peacetime. Finding where to draw the "we've done all that we can" line under such circumstances must be quite challenging, with some serious repercussions if you get it wrong.
@@sketchyAnalogies I've always wondered about this hierarchy. Whether administrative or PPE are less effective controls depends a lot on context. For instance, shoes are a form of PPE, but they're a much more effective control against foot cuts than a sign saying "sweep up all sharp objects". But administrative controls are definitely more effective in high risk cases. For instance, arc flash suits and ejection seats are absolutely the last line of defense.
The mirage III had hydraulic controls, but the stick was linked to mini-control surfaces in the middle of the delta wing giving back-force to the pilot
For all the bigger jets back in the day the AMM/IPC was all on microfiche for that reason; I've seen a full 747 AMM and it was something like I think 12 or 13 binders, each SUPER thick, like 6" thick. Literally 2 binders just for all the wiring diagrams
6:40 “Once you’re up there you get a few minutes of weightlessness” I fear statements like this unintentionally lead to even more confusion about space. There’s nothing about being high enough or ‘out of the atmosphere’ that makes you weightless - you being weightless is entirely a function of your rate of descent…as in…if you descend from *any* altitude at a rate that sufficiently counteracts Earth’s gravity, you will be weightless, no matter what height you start from. You do *not* have to go 80km up to experience it. You can experience it briefly on roller coasters…if you were in a phone booth and someone pushed you off the Grand Canyon, you’d be weightless for a few seconds… (The beauty of being in orbit is that your lateral velocity is high enough that you keep falling but don’t hit anything, making your weightlessness virtually perpetual)
My trust of transport platforms is now is based on the probability of an incident being followed up with the global engineering community collectively asking "well what did they expect?"
As someone with a passion for engineering this is the kind of content i crave. its a refreshing break from alot of the content out there that basically just reads off the wikipedia page. also as a sidenote, ive also designed my own hybrid rockets and have recently been working on one basically the same as yours but i couldnt think of a decent way to break the nitrous cannister so thanks for that 😅
Ha! There are way better designs that use a meltable plastic disc and seals: you screw the canister down onto a spike to puncture it and it seals until the igniter melts the disk. I didn't bother with all that but I may in a future design.
When I was in Space Camp I asked what would happen if the explosive bolts didn't fire when the SRBs were ignited. The engineer who was talking to us just shrugged and went "The boosters tear them off and you launch anyway."
I always like to ponder what’d happen if the bolts only fired on one side. Obviously, hypothetical only since there were wired up in such a way to make that basically impossible. But fair to say the result would be…..a mess.
@@Alexander-the-okit would be a mess for sure, but that's the deal with solid rocket boosters. It's why I am always hesitant when it comes to grading safety on anything that relies on them. If you encounter an issue during throttling up of a liquid engine you can shut it down. You can scrub the launch, or in the case of an in flight problem, you can fall back on any number of your other engines to pick up the slack. You can't so that with an SRB. As soon as those light up, you are going to space, no matter if you want it or not, or if it will be in one piece.
@@mobiuscoreindustries The available evidence indicates SRB ignition can result in an apogee as low as 20 km. I wouldn't call that "going to space" when weather balloons regularly exceed 30 km altitude.
@@CoastalSphinx This is a way of saying. You cannot turn off the boosters, once they are ignited you have no other choice but to launch, otherwise you will likely cause a catastrophic failure on the launch pad. The boosters alone will not carry the vehicle to orbit of course but they are responsible for a large part of the thrust. Now with a LES the crew may get out safely but its suboptimal for the infrastructure to be kinda forced to launch a rocket you know to be deffective because holding onto it would be so much worse
Part of my day job involves compiling reports with data from engineers on failure probabilities. The numbers show certain things to be highly improbably ... until they occur. When calculating how many sides on the die, there is never enough information to really nail it down. Hundreds or thousands of hours of analysis sometimes is no better than a WAG. In my world, even a tiny chance of something going wrong in a given hour gets multiplied by tens of millions of hours.
This is something I have to explain often in my job too: 'yes there's a one in a million chance, but we're going to run this 10 million times so it'll probably go wrong'. Communicating this kind of risk can be really really difficult.
@@jackee-is-silent2938 Just when you think you've got all of the failure modes covered, the real world finds more. But there is literally a practical limit to testing; our last jet engine certification cost more than two billion dollars before a single product hit the market.
@@jackee-is-silent2938 and be so ungodly expensive that you'll never sell it. good intentions never work like you want. stop living in fear of death. stop being a bubble boy.
For what its worth, Virgin fired their chief test pilot because he reported an almost fatal incident during one of their test flights to a reporter at Washington post. Essentially, acting as a whistle blower. The RH horizontal stabilizer exploded during boost. About 40 seconds in if I remember correctly. Anyways... their main oxidizer tank is growing weaker and weaker...
What a superb feature: using well-researched and referenced information to build a compelling argument. It’s quite accessible, yet detailed. You’ve found a new subscriber.
I think Alexander already gets this, but it's worth pointing out: The presence of an LES isn't important, what matters is how many failures and at what point in the mission will result in survival vs. death. If you focus more on the presence of a system than its capabilities, you can end up thinking ejection seats are a good idea in vertically-launched, vertically-landing spacecraft, for example. A proper escape system will be good, but it needs to actually be an effective design.
@@alexturnbackthearmy1907 I'd argue that they are a bad idea if it's vertically launched and vertically landing for a combination of factors 1. If it's vertically launched, astronauts will be on their backs, so they aren't going to gain altitude from ejecting. You can fix this with a big net, but it becomes more and more questionable that this is cheaper than a proper LES 2. Pressure suits don't provide protection against rocket exhaust or high-speed air. For example, the Space Shuttle is moving too fast for safe ejection after just 100 seconds 3. They add a bunch more things that can go wrong. Take that flight where the hatch blew off by accident on landing. If you need the ability to eject, the hatch needs to be fitted something like that, plus of course the rocket motors in each seat, which would have killed the other crew pretty quickly back when capsules used pure oxygen 4. Given the added weight and added complexity, I have my doubts that they are even all that much cheaper than a standard, tower-based LES, while offering much more limited capabilities and more failure points.
Great video! Have always found the Rutan/Virgin Galactic model/approach a bit sketch... Minor quibble, at 49:29, that's not Charlie Brown, that's Linus Van Pelt!
Hello, loved the vid just popping in as a colourblind person to say I can't tell the difference between the yellow and green used in the Venn diagram. I get that it fits our established associations with the colours, but adding some sort of pattern marker would be huge in the future. Horizontal, vertical, diagonal, stripes or dots or something like that.
Oh man sorry about that! I had comments on earlier videos about font color but didnt think about it for the venn diagram. I’ll follow an accessibility guideline next time.
Really enjoying these deep dives. Thank you for the work you put in on this. "I do not care if operators are sued or not, this conversation is about safety." Lordy if I didn't end up walking away from a health and safety position when I realized all I was supposed to do was minimize liability. God forbid we actually make things safe.
Thanks. Yeah…..for better or worse, financial liability can be an incentive for good safety practices. But it’s really depressing to see much of the discourse after an incident being ‘I hope X gets sued’.
This is about science not some morbid false ideology in a non existent, non proven, sky daddy. Religion and schizophrenia go hand in hand. Seek psychiatric help.
I liked my university's risk management department back when we were doing rocketry. We found a way for the liability and the safety to align, such that the university is happy, the safety people are happy, and we are safe and doing cool things. Workplace safety, though? I have to essentially remind them that this email will look really bad in a lawsuit in order to get them to reorder PPE.
At 32:15 - my guess is that passengers are referred to as “Astronauts” as part of a bid to avoid legal repercussions in case of a fatal accident á la the Oceangate titan implosion
I doubt it - I think it has more to do with ego stroking of the very wealthy who pay to ride. "Well if the company called me an astronaut, I must really be one!"
The nice thing about sub orbital for tourism is the lack of spacesuits required. Like you are only up there for a few minutes, and as long as you wake up while falling down in time to pull the chute you are perfectly fine. I never understood virgin galactic though. The whole benefit of a spaceplane and airlaunch is to allow for building up horizontal velocity to reach the 7.6km/s needed for orbital velocity, and yet it is used for sub orbital, where the most efficient way is straight up.
I work on liquid rocket motors and as i've heard a colleague of mine who worked on a previous hybrid rocket motor say- Solid rockets don't want to shut off, liquid rockets don't want to start, and solid rockets don't want to do either
@@RENO_K The third phase should be "Hybrids don't want to do either." A hybrid's solid grain is difficult to light because you have to spray oxidizer across a large area and get that area ignited, needing a large, energetic pyrotechnic- a significant solid rocket motor in itself. Then when you cut off the oxidizer (either by running out or closing the ox valve) you have a large area of hot fuel grain that continues to evolve gas for a long time. On the other hand, with a small liquid motor, I've tapped out Morse code just because I could :)
The reliance on "good pilots" as a security blanket has and will ever continue to cost lives, as has trusting the opinion of esteemed individuals such as Rutan without adequate risk assessment. Look at Apollo 1. After nearly drowning in the Liberty Bell 7 when the door inexplicably blew out on splashdown, I've read that the use of an inward-opening plug door on the Apollo capsule was one of Gus Grissom's (and other Apollo 1 astronauts') many demanded specifications for the crew module. And nobody was willing or able to convince him otherwise. It was going to be his craft to command and he was a national hero with unquestionably qualifying experience and credentials. He was truly a guy with "the right stuff" who had been there and done that in an era when almost nobody else had. But then came the plugs-out test and the fire and the door couldn't be pushed in or blown out. And Harrison Storms at North American Aviation was scapegoated for it, because who would even hint at a dead hero sharing any of the blame for his own death? Or that's how I read it. It's not like I was there. I've also read the astronauts suggested an outward opening hatch, which would conveniently absolve them of any blame, despite the inward opening hatch being included in Gemini craft. Not sure we'll ever know the truth.
Calling them Astronauts and Mission Specialists is for the same reason they were Mission Specialists on the Titan. The informed consent rules are certainly different for "Crew" compared to "Passengers". The liability laws probably parse depending on if it is a 'customer' vs 'crew'. They are not calling them that just for marketing.
Except that entire statement is nonsense. The informed consent rules in this case are literally laws and regulations enforced by the FAA. They are literally just calling them that for marketing. SpaceShip2 is certified for human flight with passengers by the FAA.
One of the primary reasons that we'll never see commercial space travel (aside from the economic absurdity of vehicles that have a single-digit percentage of their mass devoted to payload) is that space travel is inherently, unavoidably, extremely dangerous. Rockets and launch vehicles *will* fail. People *will* die. If we actually put something really huge into space, it could be one deorbit away from killing thousands upon thousands of people on the ground. And then you get into the space opera vision of travel, with relativistic ships with multi-G acceleration zooming around, and you've basically got weapons of mass destruction made of other weapons of mass destruction that are also tin cans with people in them. A ship captain does a Germanwings Flight 9525 and yeets his ship into a space station? Several thousand people die. If he yeets his ship into a city on a planet? Add some zeroes into that figure, plus radioactive fallout. Even the exhaust from an Expanse-style fusion drive could do horrendous damage to anything it is pointed at. The energies crackling around the ship would make Star Trek's explosive consoles look quaint if something goes pop. Even if we could make the energy and economics work, it would be impossible to make large-scale space travel even remotely safe. Even with the fairly modest space tech we have now, something as seemingly simple as the fuel source is incredibly deadly just to be around--we're talking about substances that set fire to most other substances on contact (including things you'd consider non-flammable or already burned up), substances that dissolve flesh, substances that are heinously toxic to every possible biological process, and worse. How could anyone, any society, no matter how advanced, handle the technology of classic sci-fi responsibly? E: the quote figure of 4 and change gigajoules is almost exactly equal to a ton of TNT, which of course doesn't include energy lost as waste heat or the like, so probably several tons of TNT. Remember how when lithium-ion batteries started going mainstream we started hearing about all these horrible fires? It was simply because the very thing that made lithium-ion batteries so attractive, energy density, makes them liable to catch fire because huge concentrations of stored chemical energy like don't like being confined like that and are always at at least some risk of sending all that energy down the gradient all sudden-like. Imagine a concentration of energy equal to a WWII bomber's entire payload. Yeah...
Civil engineer.. Love the video. I know you're specifically talking Virgin Galactic but overall a brilliant presentation that well summarizes the state of "safety" in the billionaire unknown-tourism industry (space/ocean/etc). I hope against hope we see more change towards understanding this way of thinking without more accidents happening first.
My degree is in civil engineering too actually. My main concern is this 'free market will solve safety' ethos creeping into everyone's lives - willing participants or not.
@@Alexander-the-ok If the safety failures are fear-inducing enough, they aren't wrong -- the free market will solve safety -- just look at commercial airlines. It's hard to imagine the NTSB being formed and the FAA being held to account without the profoundly fear-inducing media coverage of airline crashes. Sure, the safety improvements rely upon unwilling participants dying but over 100 years they did seriously improve the safety record. Road traffic, on the other hand, is terrifying only if you understand statistics and safety factors. (I still get very anxious standing on street corners waiting to cross at busy intersections with vehicles traveling at 40 to 50mph, very high alert -- and predictable "accidents" every few months)
@@stephenkalatucka6213 Even from that point of view plenty of common/poor people get caught up in disasters like the Titanic. If people volunteer themselves for Darwin Awards that is definitely their freedom.
I too, have always had concerns, when I've heard the statement "it must be safe otherwise the pilot wouldn't fly in it" as history books are full of stories about dead pilots. I do, however, believe there's a 99.9999% chance the pilot will do as much as humanly possible to avoid disaster. Germanwings flight 9525 is one of the reasons it's not 100%.
If anybody ever says, “the pilot wouldn’t fly it if it wasn’t safe,” remember Eric Brown, who was a good pilot, BUT insisted on flying the ME163, despite warnings from the German ground crew.
I took the footage used in your opening. There are some gaps and anomalies in the publicly available data about the 2014 crash. It is possible that something happened before the feather mechanism was activated, something that Alsbury was responding to. Nitrous can act as a monopropellant with a very energetic decomposition. If this happened inside the fuel injector valve it would have weakened the structure in a way that is consistent with the geometry of the breakup and with long range photography of the mishap.
"informed consent", by design, requires information to make a consensual judgement. Commercial secrets kinda sort of make this a bit tricky. One would have to be a bit of a nutter to go up in the thing, hey.
My very over-simplified solution would be ‘to be covered by informed consent you are required to open-source your design’. Its problematic but a start. Companies that are allowed to operate without liability are essentially getting a free lunch.
You don’t need to be nutty, just misinformed. Most people, including me, don’t have the capability to do proper risk-analysis, let alone risk-analysis that takes to account gaps in knowledge or information. It’s also worth stopping and considering how ridiculous knowledge over wide range of fields one would need to have to give informed consent to space flight. Being able to consent without being properly informed means trusting some party based on reputation alone: and in this case the trusted party is the other side of the agreement…
@@catcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcaWhich is why it should be subject to certification process, meaning that a completely independent team of experts has assessed the risk.
Or you could all stop whining and realize that shit like this will happen when pushing boundaries in extremes. It’s absurd that you people want to grind the works to a halt over someone who chose to do a dangerous job dying. Faceless nobody blue collar workers die all of the time to keep things up and running and keep you air conditioned and comfortable. But when need to be forever bogged down in a ridiculous quagmire to try to prevent anyone from ever getting a boo boo while going to space
@@Alexander-the-ok several CPU design teams would no doubt agree and probably go up. On the other hand, several cryptography implementation teams would probably agree and still not go up in an open source space ship hehe
Perhaps the FAA has not demanded certification for Virgin Galactic nor Blue Origin because they are not in the business of *transportation*. Their sub-orbital craft are essentially glorified amusement park rides.
Right now the FAA doesn't actually have authority to crew rate space vehicles, they apply the same rules to crewed and uncrewed launch vehicles (those requirements are higher than NASA's requirements for uncrewed but lower than their crew rating). NASA and the DoD both require and perform crew rating if you're working with them, but Virgin Orbit is isolated from Virgin Galactic so that doesn't apply here. New Shepard is in a gray area since Blue Origin does do business with both, but has not flown crew for either. New Shepard is technically crew rated, having done all the tests required and meeting the requirements in principle (like having no abort black zones) but I don't think that NASA actually audited that testing because they've only shown interest in uncrewed launches for scientific instruments.
The Apollo Computer F-8 sounds like an interesting story, but what I want to hear about even more is the MR-1 launch (or just mercury-redstone in general)
The F-8 digital fly by wire is fast becoming my favourite for next video. I may do MR-1 in a ‘Christmas special’ of comical failures or something daft like that.
It was because of two cables separating in the wrong order. Because of this, significant power went through a relay which tripped a command since the control cable was supposed to separate first. The command was meant to separate the abort tower AND the booster from the capsule. To prevent the capsule from separating from an accelerating booster, the booster separation could only occur when the spacecraft was in ~0 g. Since it was on the ground, the sensors showed a booster accelerating by 1g constantly, so the abort tower was the only thing that jettisoned. That's not all, though. The recovery parachutes also activated since the capsule was detected to be under 3 kilometers and so it thought it needed to deploy the parachutes. Since the recovery system detected no load on the parachute since the capsule wasn't falling, it deployed the reserve parachute as well. The capsule was undamaged and was reused for MR-1A, and the missile was sent back to huntsville for refurbishment and a potential flight in future, but was eventually placed on display.
The amount I learned from this video about laws, planes, spacecraft, flight control systems, regulations, ethics, rocket engines, aerodynamics, systems design, automation and insomnia are exceptionally impressive. Thank you for this wonderful presentation and previous presentations on submersibles along with the associated sources, plenty of things to dig into. I really look forward to future videos.
Ah, well, I saw the same error committed on an old "Time Team" episode just the other day. Yes, it's tiny, but the editor in me squirmed. Is it perhaps an Americanism to use "die" as the singular for "dice"?
Yep it’s rare to say ‘die’ in Britain. I thought about it in the script since the majority of my audience are American but it just felt really weird to say out loud.
@@Alexander-the-ok I went to the sacred texts, those being the leaves of the OED. Apparently "dice" and the singular "die" go back to the 14th Century. But if I read it correctly, "die" died out in the UK, but lives on in the New World.
I appreciate your professional approach to presentation of content - specifically, clear LIMITATIONS and disambiguization of "conflict of interest or endorsement" Your structure adds to ease of understanding concepts. Keep up the great work!!
You don’t have a ton of subscribers yet. But your content reminds me of Perun, the defense economics RUclipsr who blew up since the full scale invasion of Ukraine. I’m looking forward to when you do your 100k subs video and I can say I was there before 10k ❤
I literally had the thought watching perun of “damn this is good, but I wish I could get this for non defense engineering”, found your channel the same day. (:
"This video is not a billionaire showdown" thank you so much for this haha it's getting really tiring to always hear about the billionaires who own the company when people report on space news
The most glaring mistake here is that it's not Charlie Brown who is "secure with fly-by-wire", it's Linus Van Pelt. He carries a security blanket with him always, but the joke is that he now leaves it lying on the right side foreground... something about the irony of that going over the presenters head is just *chef kiss
It is only a matter of time until there is a space tourism accident on par with what happened with the OceanGate Titan, and then people will start asking questions about the safety standards or lack thereof in the growing private space industry.
From calculations and engineering done later, I think that the space shuttle having about 65 sides is optimistic, as many avenues of failure did not result in disaster due to a massive amount of luck.
The early space shuttle missions were later estimated to be between 1 in 9 to 1 in 25, but later missions with safety improvements put that up towards 1 in 100. The NASA commercial crew program aims for a minimum failure rate of 1 in 300. That might be good enough for 4 flights per year to the ISS, one disaster in a lifetime, but I don't think that's what we are wanting if we are talking about space tourism. And I think Virgin might be around 1 in 20 right now, maybe 1 in 100.
The problem is that NASA failure estimates had absolutely no scientific validity. The numbers were just pulled out of their asses. That's why the program was ended. It was a boondoggle from the beginning, with no conception of how it was ever going to meet its stated objectives.@@phillyphakename1255
The aircraft at 18:25 and 18:35 are the XCOR EZ-Rocket and X-racer respectively and were technically rocket planes but not suborbital because their thrust was less than their lift during the powered portions of the flights. I was in the right seat for the first four flights and two later flights of the X-Racer. We did a total of 66 flights with no fatalities but one major incident (loss of control and stall with recovery) and two "safe" failures (an engine hard start in flight with minor damage, and an engine stuck on that needed an emergency shutdown).
Wow thanks for the summary. I had to crowbar the EZ rocket into this video somewhere. I remember following it on various forums as a teenager and thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Hi Doug! I just wanted to let you know your work XCOR was an inspiration for me as a high school student to pursue a career in engineering! I'm sorry to see the creator of this video speaking poorly of the Lynx and XCOR in his replies to some of his comments. I was quite enamored with the Lynx design as a "minimum viable spaceship". I'm sorry we never got to see it fly and learn more about its design decisions.
43:00 If the aircraft is actively nosing up to bleed velocity and extend range, that isnt a ballistic reentry. Ballistic is a reference to the parabolic path of travel (though, this of course is shortened by the atmosphere as seen with true ballistic reentries with Soyuz craft). If I'm not mistaken, the Apollo capsules technically weren't ballistic entries either due to the heat shield acting as a lifting body due to the angle of attack. Great video, though!
"I wish her and the other passengers the best of luck, though I do not know how much they will need." Absolutely excellent closing statement! Really drives home how little is disclosed by the company regarding safety systems.
I had to really resist mentioning that since this was intended to be a video about risk and not about ‘how to burn $400000 in a few minutes’. I’d hands down rather fly in the Mig - its just way cooler.
@@LiamHemmings-f2w It's 60k ft for the Mig (not meters). Just making clear I'd still far rather fly the Mig though even though it's service ceiling is nowhere near 'space'.
22:20 that's not how that works. You spook customers by not disclosing it. What you do is you make an incident report, draft up recommendations for remedial action and then implement them. That shows that you learned from your mistakes and take safety seriously. Anybody makes mistakes, it's what comes next that decides your public image.
Exactly. Though that can be open to abuse too. In the helicopter example at the end, we all received a remedial actions report, posted to us personally by special delivery. In retrospect, all it served to achieve was to obscure the fact that the gearboxes should have been replaced entirely.
Mike Adam's accident was due to him experiencing vertigo and positioning the aircraft essentially perpendicular to its flight path while at high altitude... Hard to picture! Shortly after, while re-entering the denser atmosphere, the aircraft entered a spin as a consequence. The initial trigger was, as far as I remember, some kind of electrical failure that distracted him. But vertigo was the overriding factor. It was learnt after the accident that he had been prone to it during his initial flight on the X15.
I disagree. I led development on SS1 hybrid motor. Just from watching videos on RUclips I believe it suffered some sort of valve anomaly. I had seen that type of anomaly phenomena before. Failure modes can vary. The end result is clearly much lower thrust. It’s clear to me that the video shows ignition was normal. Black smoke as the solid rocket motor starts the hybrid looks ok. The initial start looks normal. What follows is more serious. Videos make it clear that the rocket was never shut off successfully. I wish I could see the motor chamber pressure when Mike Asbury unlocked the pneumatic feather booms. The feather mode has saved the spaceship a few times at much slower speeds. It’s possible the crew saw increased nitrous pressure in the tank due to a valve fire. If Teflon seals were used, anything is possible depending on the design. From the video, it looks like the Nitrous is decomposing and burning something other than HTPB. Just a guess. I think the answer lies in the fluid flow system and the motor chamber pressure when the boom was unlocked as a way to slow the vehicle down and start dumping the nitrous. The vehicle was not designed to land with the full tank of nitrous. On SS1, I required the nitrous dump valve requirement to empty the tank in an emergency is under 2 minutes. The nitrous load full was 3000 lbs. Note: I was not an employee of Scaled after SS1 went to Smithsoneon.
I am so glad I’ve found this channel, I watched some videos more than once. Please if you feel like it, could you do a series about how the iss and how it got there, and how the expansions are added? Cheers and much love from holland
Hybrid motors have a horrible tendency to spall off chunks of fuel that can get wedged in the nozzle causing a massive thrust asymmetry or worse over-pressure of the motor casing.
Just because Branson flew in Spaceship 2 doesn't mean Virgin Galactic has done adequate safety assessments internally. Rush chose to dive his Titan under similar conditions, and died in it. It should also be noted that Starship doesn't currently have a planned crew escape system in its design, though that might change in the future.
Starship does not have a planned Launch Escape System but they also don’t plan to fly any humans on it before the number of uncrewed flights has reached into the hundreds. This buys down a lot of the risk.
@@TheMcspreader Starship could escape SuperHeavy only in very specific scenarios where they can throttle down most of SH’s engines. Otherwise it’s thrust to weight ratio is far far too low to out accelerate SuperHeavy. Also it can’t escape from itself and it’s far more dangerous itself than a capsule that only has a minimal number of engines.
@@Borodalf Correct. Starship's thrust-to-weight would have to astronomically improve to, say, escape a Challenger-type scenario. Being on the front of Super Heavy instead of hanging off the side isn't enough. Perhaps some extra internal SRBs on crew-rated Starships? Maybe even an ejectable crew section. Unfortunately, in the current design I don't see anyway not to at least take the header tanks with the crew section...
49:36 yeah no. The 737 max might have been a failure in design and certification, but it was also a failure of the fly by wire system. The Challenger blew up because of management AND an O-ring. It is notable that that is one of the few instances of fatal crashes involving FBW but it is still a crash caused by FBW
The 737 max didn’t have fly by wire. If it did, it wouldn’t need MCAS in the first place. As for challenger, it’s an incredibly complex subject. I’m working on a video that goes into detail on that, should be released towards the end of May.
@@Alexander-the-ok thank you for the response. I was under the (mistaken) impression that the latest and greatest 737 would have had FBW controls. Looking forward to your Challenger video.
"If it wasn't safe the pilots wouldn't fly it" (a) how would they know? The lack of transparency here is remeniscent of Boeing's lack of transparency over the 737 MAX. How were the pilots supposed to know about flaws in the system when they didn't even know the system existed? Pilots are not psychic. (b) supersonic test pilots have a very different attitude to risk than the average person.
Amazing video. I have always been mystified by the lack of good info on these crafts, but just wrote it up to me not being too much of a space or aviation nerd to know where to look. But this explains so much.
Excellent presentation! With how few incidents there have been there's not much info or discussion of safety in space tourism. I think there will need to be more refinement of designs and procedures as it gets more mainstream with a larger customer base. Unlike air travel or extreme tourism "experiences" though it presents many unique challenges and may never reach the same level of safety.
That’s what drove me to making this video. There is virtually no critical analysis of VG. Almost everything I can find is blind optimism, nonsense about their stock price or advertising.
In some sense, in specific areas of life, participation in democratic governance is the only form of agency individuals could ever have. Private companies are at the mercy of each other, as the competition might reward strategies majority of the individuals would prefer not to use: such as cutting corners in safety, or using child labour. And ultimately the world is too complex for any individual to make even very basic informed decisions, without reliance on others. Democracy and state is ultimately how the rules and conventions of that relationship is set. Trading information, such as paying for a consult, depends on the state to enforce honesty. And for those reasons, I sincerity think denying an industry regulation by state harms it overall. Usually doing so only benefits the already existing entities in that field. Without regulation, the commercial space industry can not form a honest market, and in some areas can’t have beneficial competition that drives innovation. It will remain highly risky, insurance companies won’t facilitate lowering the risks per-launch, and so few applications can make use of the services the industry can provide. Sure the companies can create more products more easily, but the products are much weaker without the structure state and regulations provide. It’s very shortsighted to point at the cheaper development costs, if they severe the value of the end-products by causing huge insurance costs and lower demand overall.
This is such a great argument against the common and incredibly simplistic view of ‘but the free market will fix it’. Without at least a third party arbitrator (which may be enforced through government) you can’t even have a free market.
Lol wtf are you talking about? Regulation only ever leads to regulatory capture and then no competition happens because the big players just pull the strings to regulate any would be competitors out of the market. Also, informed consent doesn’t have to mean “you know all of the details”, part of your informed consent can always come with the “bad shit we haven’t anticipated yet might happen, wanna go anyways?” You explicitly give consent to take unknown risks all of the time. It’s part of life.
@@banksuvladimir i like how your argument against regulation treats corruption of the regulatory body as just a natural, unavoidable part of the process. And if the big players are corrupting legislators then they should not be rewarded by not being subject to regulation. Also i'm wondering if you saw the same video as i did, the entire point is that known (to virgin galactic) information being kept from those who have to give informed consent precludes assessment of KNOWN risks. If nobody certified that the structure can handle the expected forces, and they won't tell me any details like material used and dimensions, then how can i give informed consent to the risk of a structural failure? For perspective, this isn't nitpicking about potentially unknown mechanics causing something unforeseen, it's about a company that skipped unmanned testing and is doing a bunch of non-industry standard things while struggling to beat the odds of russian roulette while being extremely tight-lipped on information required for a risk assessment of known risks (just trust me bro we value safety bro)
1. They *have* a real VP of Safety? 2. Based on my private sector experience, no way in hell would I want to be responsible for safety at a private space company. The profit lust compromises everything, the need to please investors leads to pressure to overpromise and then cut corners trying to fulfill those overpromises.
Presumably you start in the job because it's a noble thing to try and keep the profit chasers in check. Then once you find out they can't be held back, you feel you daren't leave because of what you fear they might do if you weren't there.
Most crashes involving fly-by-wire systems were a combination of pilot error and issues with sensors (the Rockwell X-31 and B-2 crashes come to mind, both caused by humidity in sensors/pitot tubes). It would be shocking if that F-35 crashed due to a fault with the flight control computer itself
this is… a great video. Its entirely unbiased and doesn’t use subjective language. Thank you for somehow opening my eyes to the dangers of commerical subortial spaceflight while not making me hate it. Nice work!
Thanks. I actually consider this to be my 'worst' video since my channel took off because I think it's too opinionated (also I had a new mic and you can hear all my gross mouth sounds that I didn't know how to edit out back then).
13:25 - There has been one (or two) more suborbital crewed space flight not in your list. Notably, it was an *attempt* at orbital space flight, though. Soyuz 18a had an in-flight launch anomaly that caused the flight to be aborted (the third rocket stage lit its engines while still being attached to the second stage, so the Soyuz capsule engines fired to pull it away from way-off-target launch vehicle.) This capsule reached a height of nearly 200 km, more than high enough to be “a space flight.” Although if we’re counting Virgin Galactic, then another in-flight-abort should be counted, too. Soyuz MS-10 experienced a similar launch booster failure, which caused it to separate. It reached 92 km of altitude, high enough for the 80km definition. There was a third Soyuz crewed abort, but it was on the pad, so reached nowhere near space.
When people use the "pilots do it" argument, they miss a very important point, those pilots are not average people they are test pilots, with who knows how many hours of experience and a death wish. Let's differentiate that any risk has two independent factors, the inherent risk and the "if you stupid" risk. There are many people doing dangerous work, but as long as you stick to the rules you're very likely will be fine, but than again, there are special cases when you have both inherent and stupidity risk and need the truly unhinged who would happily sacrifice their own life just to help humanity progress a little bit. Those scientist come to mind, who designed the ejection seat, and tested the human tolerance for G force. Hats off to people like that.
35:14 nonsense. A person, like myself, can ABSOLUTELY give informed consent to ride on SpaceShipTwo. The risk is this thing can go wrong many ways, aerodynamically, pilot error, explosion, decompression, etc. all resulting in my death. What more can a person need to know, before accepting the risk? Columbus knew the risk that he might fail to sail around the world and die. I know that every time I fly my airplane, something could go wrong and I die. I know that the most dangerous thing I do on a regular basis is drive my car down the road. But I still do it.
Yeah, Alexander really shows off his paternalism in this video. He doesn't say it but it's easy to tell that he's the kind of person who doesn't like seeing people do anything he doesn't personally approve of. I bet if it was up to him, no one would be allowed to operate SS2. I think the average person has more than enough information as things stand to decide whether or not such a flight is appealing to them or not and if they want to participate. At the end of the day this is a matter of personal perspective and there will be plenty of people out there who would be more than willing to take the risks in stride for the experience.
The lack of regulation that allows Virgin Galactic to thrive is starting to creep into everyone’s lives: web privacy, pedestrian safety and data consent laws are a few examples. I will do more videos on the matter in the future.
@@Alexander-the-ok Yep. The motto of move fast break things, pay regulatory fines later; Is a dangerous precedent to set in the transportation of people. At least digital tech generally doesn't kill innocent bystanders. Great Video so far
@okalex4687 Why not regulate those things and not hyperregulate people who want to explore, do research, or who simply find joy in riding to space? Everything has been so overregulated that we created a generation of people with diabetes, not much inclination to do much of anything in exploration, scientific research, etc. least they face fines, arrest, etc. It's incredibly sad and breaks my heart. Overregulated people are slaves.
@CarolReidCA If Virgin Galactic truly wanted to explore and do research, they'd have made their designs and findings public. Open source engineering data would be a good alternative to a third party (ie regulators) stepping in and pointing out that they may be deceiving their customers about how safe their system is.
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
Some corrections:
Thanks to @slome815 for pointing out there was one other launch system with no escape provision: Voskhod. I completely forgot about that one.
I said FBW was ‘the norm’ in 1968. That’s not correct. Irreversible controls were but fbw was in its infancy. There is a correction to kind of address it at 49 minutes and I’ll be doing an entire video about it in a few weeks. Thanks @SoloRenegade
For those unaware, Voskhod was the Soviet Union's second manned spacecraft. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voskhod_(spacecraft)
A future system also lacking a LES is the SpaceX Starship, though that project has such an array of fundamental issues facing It that I doubt that it will even fly freight to orbit.
@@Miata822 I've made the decision to only do videos on things that already exist (ie not CGI renders or half baked tests). If Spacex put humans in anything that even remotely resembles their starship proposals, I'll go there.
Gemini also didn't really have an escape system. Sure, they nominally had ejection seats, but a) Those would only be good for the first 40 seconds of launch, after that the spacecraft would be going too fast for the ejection seats that were fitted to be reliable, and b) I really do not like the prospects of firing an ejection seat charge inside a spacecraft that is pressurised to 1 atm with pure oxygen and has been soaking in that pure oxygen for over an hour prior to launch.
@@zuthalsoraniz6764 That's part of the design. The flash fire in the cabin as ejection motors fire helps precondition the astronauts and seats for the presumptive fireball they are ejecting into. /jk
Just remember, the Karmen line is not fixed and arbitrary, but the Kerman line is unambiguously fixed and easily tracked by when the music changes.
Don't forget the Kerbal line also... 🤔
Ha! Ha! I LIKE K.S.P. TOO ! ! !😃😃😃😃😃😃😃
damn it jeb.
Ah yes, the Incompetech boundary.
Once you hear the "BWAH! (do do do do do do)", you've made it
Alexander: Every time you get in a vehicle you are, in effect, rolling a dice.
Oceangate: *flips coin*
The coin would have to be weighted for this to be an accurate analogy.
@@adriatic.vineyardsor the one-sided dice
A "die". Dice is plural
Dammit, I was gonna say the coin thing!
One of the Mercury/Redstone engineers is still with us. He is 92 years old and comes to our shop for little machining jobs he can’t do in his home shop. Talked to him about meeting Wehrner Von Braun down in Alabama. He described the man as a skilled publicist and salesman as much as he was a scientist and engineer. Old Lyle is living history. Every time I see him is a bonus.
Absolutely fantastic. I'd be completely starstruck in the presence of him!
A Nazi is a Nazi but Von Braun was exceptional. He killed more people assembling his V-2 than did the business end of it. By the gods that is what it is about wasn't it, the eradication of the Jews. How soon we forget what the man did just so we could get to space. NEVER FORGET!
It is another sin this country has to endure that we didn't punish him and his countrymen, the greedy lot we are.
That's so freaking cool.
I was volunteering at a space museum this weekend alongside a 96 year old data reduction specialist who worked on the Snark program. He did a bit of work with computers to extract data for Von Braun when he was having trouble getting data in a timely fashion at Cape Canaveral, but only with the consent of Jack Northrop since that's who he really worked for (!). Fascinating, fascinating guy, really glad I got to spend some time with him this weekend.
My Uncle used to be one of Werner Von Braun's pilots when he was based in Alabama. (IOW, he flew one of the planes that Von Braun used to get around the country)
In the wake of Ocean Gate, any argument about a CEO's personal faith in product safety should ring especially hollow.
Actually, ocean gate has nothing to do with it one way or another. It’s one guy and one company.
Years of testing separate Virgin Galactic from Oceangate. If Titan tested as hard as Spaceship Two it would have imploded years before it started carrying passengers
There is one major difference: One of them knew what he was doing despite taking very weird and somewhat unsafe approach. Other was a rich idiot. One is alive, other is red mush.
@@theussmirage How has Musk tested his 'star ship'?
@@banksuvladimirit's one guy and one company, but one exception is enough to disprove the rule of "but the pilots wouldn't be in it if it weren't safe"
With respect to the "pilots wouldn't do it if it wasn't safe":
I know one of the astronauts who was on the return to flight mission after the Columbia shuttle disaster. He told me that the pilots and most of the astronauts (at least) would have gone up in a shuttle the next day if they had been allowed to.
They are probably more capable of understanding the risks of spaceflight than most people. They would have been willing to take the flight before anyone really even understood what happened. I would be willing to count that as "informed consent" but it had nothing to do with whether they believed it was safe (to the extent that spaceflight can be safe.) They understood the risks as well as anyone and decided it was worth it.
Many people would do these things despite them being unsafe, and that's fine, but for a layman to have informed consent, the risk needs to be appropriately characterized.
True.
To make a car compassion. I don't think any enthusiast wouldn't want to drive a F1 cat.
Problem is 95% wouldn't even be able to press the brake pedal hard enough to stop fast enough when actually going fast.
I’ve worked with many test pilots and a few astronauts and agree completely.
@@MyILoveMinecraft
The fastest I've gone on a highway is 152mph. If I could have gone faster I would have.
@@jackalopewright5343 They are just build different. Ready to push the limits whenever they allowed and approved.
@@Istandby666 Is your life worth that?
"I had been conditioned to believe that there is nothing more dangerous than the arrogance of ignorance; now I would learn that it does not compare with the arrogance of knowledge, knowledge that is often confused with wisdom." -John Piña Craven, 1959, on being appointed Chief Scientist of the US Navy.
That's why this channel has a silly name: to remind everyone that I'm just 'some dude' and I'm not particularly wise.
@@Alexander-the-ok😂
That's the same period of time that John Clark (author of _Ignition!_ (1972), a great technical autobiography of rocket fuel development) was running the rocket fuel lab at the US Naval Air Rocket Test Station (NARTS) for 17 years while avoiding any time-lost accidents. From some of the stories he tells, it was by careful understanding and caution when pushing near any sort of limit, whether knowledge or operation.
@@Alexander-the-okTotally love this idea! Though I'd still envy your reasoning & knowledge ;)
It's so true though. That's why they say "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." What you think you know can get you killed.
Military systems engineer here. "Procedure" is *literally* the second to last choice for risk mitigation (the last choice being a placard, i.e., "YOLO - here's a sign to tell you to watch out for that!").
Same for any safety critical process in industry.
Depends on kind of person you're designing it for. I remember seeing something to the effect of "don't weld with ammunition present" on an ammo box on a US WW2 era warship.
@@ellhask This is what makes safety engineering in military systems so interesting to me as a civilian layperson. You can do all the traditional risk mitigation that you want, but to have an effective military you absolutely will need to put people with a wide range of backgrounds, education, and life experience directly in the path of some pretty dangerous situations even in peacetime. Finding where to draw the "we've done all that we can" line under such circumstances must be quite challenging, with some serious repercussions if you get it wrong.
I think you are forgetting PPE.
Elimination
Substitution
Engineering
Administrative
PPE
@@sketchyAnalogies I've always wondered about this hierarchy. Whether administrative or PPE are less effective controls depends a lot on context.
For instance, shoes are a form of PPE, but they're a much more effective control against foot cuts than a sign saying "sweep up all sharp objects". But administrative controls are definitely more effective in high risk cases. For instance, arc flash suits and ejection seats are absolutely the last line of defense.
The mirage III had hydraulic controls, but the stick was linked to mini-control surfaces in the middle of the delta wing giving back-force to the pilot
Oooh that’s cool, never heard of that before!
The parts manual for a 60-year-old jet that I deal with is approximately 16" thick. The maintenance manual is closer to 2 foot.
What's the jet? Just curious.
For all the bigger jets back in the day the AMM/IPC was all on microfiche for that reason; I've seen a full 747 AMM and it was something like I think 12 or 13 binders, each SUPER thick, like 6" thick. Literally 2 binders just for all the wiring diagrams
An Abrams tank is 4 dictionary sized books. And that's a ground pounder.
Just check out the binders that come with the manual for the IBM 5150
6:40 “Once you’re up there you get a few minutes of weightlessness”
I fear statements like this unintentionally lead to even more confusion about space. There’s nothing about being high enough or ‘out of the atmosphere’ that makes you weightless - you being weightless is entirely a function of your rate of descent…as in…if you descend from *any* altitude at a rate that sufficiently counteracts Earth’s gravity, you will be weightless, no matter what height you start from. You do *not* have to go 80km up to experience it. You can experience it briefly on roller coasters…if you were in a phone booth and someone pushed you off the Grand Canyon, you’d be weightless for a few seconds…
(The beauty of being in orbit is that your lateral velocity is high enough that you keep falling but don’t hit anything, making your weightlessness virtually perpetual)
21:50 “Virgin Galactic hired a retired Boeing executive to conduct a safety review” Well that aged like sour milk 😂
My trust of transport platforms is now is based on the probability of an incident being followed up with the global engineering community collectively asking "well what did they expect?"
Yes, the CAA's AAIB (Air Accident Investigation Board) monthly bulletins made for some fascinating, funny and absolutely frightening reading.
If I’m fated to die in a transit accident, I aspire to at least avoid being a punch line.
When you mentioned Virgin hiring a frmr. Boeing exec I let out one horrified laugh knowing how buried important safety info would promptly become.
Same.
Yes if the media says Boeing is bad it MUST be true.
Alaska Airlines was warned about the door issue yet they are never mentioned. it's politics.
@@ExploringCabinsandMines That door was still attached when the comments you were replying to were written.
@@Neuttah oh really, I predicted the future? interesting....
@@Neuttah interesting...
As someone with a passion for engineering this is the kind of content i crave. its a refreshing break from alot of the content out there that basically just reads off the wikipedia page.
also as a sidenote, ive also designed my own hybrid rockets and have recently been working on one basically the same as yours but i couldnt think of a decent way to break the nitrous cannister so thanks for that 😅
Ha! There are way better designs that use a meltable plastic disc and seals: you screw the canister down onto a spike to puncture it and it seals until the igniter melts the disk. I didn't bother with all that but I may in a future design.
When I was in Space Camp I asked what would happen if the explosive bolts didn't fire when the SRBs were ignited. The engineer who was talking to us just shrugged and went "The boosters tear them off and you launch anyway."
I always like to ponder what’d happen if the bolts only fired on one side. Obviously, hypothetical only since there were wired up in such a way to make that basically impossible. But fair to say the result would be…..a mess.
@@Alexander-the-okit would be a mess for sure, but that's the deal with solid rocket boosters. It's why I am always hesitant when it comes to grading safety on anything that relies on them.
If you encounter an issue during throttling up of a liquid engine you can shut it down. You can scrub the launch, or in the case of an in flight problem, you can fall back on any number of your other engines to pick up the slack.
You can't so that with an SRB. As soon as those light up, you are going to space, no matter if you want it or not, or if it will be in one piece.
@@mobiuscoreindustries The available evidence indicates SRB ignition can result in an apogee as low as 20 km. I wouldn't call that "going to space" when weather balloons regularly exceed 30 km altitude.
@@CoastalSphinx This is a way of saying. You cannot turn off the boosters, once they are ignited you have no other choice but to launch, otherwise you will likely cause a catastrophic failure on the launch pad. The boosters alone will not carry the vehicle to orbit of course but they are responsible for a large part of the thrust.
Now with a LES the crew may get out safely but its suboptimal for the infrastructure to be kinda forced to launch a rocket you know to be deffective because holding onto it would be so much worse
This is the type of content I can’t believe I get for free. Absolute class
Part of my day job involves compiling reports with data from engineers on failure probabilities. The numbers show certain things to be highly improbably ... until they occur. When calculating how many sides on the die, there is never enough information to really nail it down. Hundreds or thousands of hours of analysis sometimes is no better than a WAG.
In my world, even a tiny chance of something going wrong in a given hour gets multiplied by tens of millions of hours.
This is something I have to explain often in my job too: 'yes there's a one in a million chance, but we're going to run this 10 million times so it'll probably go wrong'.
Communicating this kind of risk can be really really difficult.
I think there's more need to test components to destruction in several different failure modes to have even a good WAG.
@@jackee-is-silent2938 Just when you think you've got all of the failure modes covered, the real world finds more. But there is literally a practical limit to testing; our last jet engine certification cost more than two billion dollars before a single product hit the market.
@@jackee-is-silent2938 and be so ungodly expensive that you'll never sell it. good intentions never work like you want. stop living in fear of death. stop being a bubble boy.
Yes. With enough opportunities, small probabilities become practical certainties.
Top notch content.
Understandable, Clearly and completely explained without dumbing it down.
Thank you.
Get ready to be summoned by Congress in 10 years to testify on Informed Consent. Great work 👏
For what its worth, Virgin fired their chief test pilot because he reported an almost fatal incident during one of their test flights to a reporter at Washington post. Essentially, acting as a whistle blower. The RH horizontal stabilizer exploded during boost. About 40 seconds in if I remember correctly.
Anyways... their main oxidizer tank is growing weaker and weaker...
This is so much more elaborate than news outlets saying "oh it crashed😢", we need more of this type of content!
To not have a fly by wire system with hydrologics or electric actuators is crazy at Mach speeds, just insane
😅
Thanks
What a superb feature: using well-researched and referenced information to build a compelling argument. It’s quite accessible, yet detailed. You’ve found a new subscriber.
Thanks very much - more on the way soon!
I think Alexander already gets this, but it's worth pointing out: The presence of an LES isn't important, what matters is how many failures and at what point in the mission will result in survival vs. death. If you focus more on the presence of a system than its capabilities, you can end up thinking ejection seats are a good idea in vertically-launched, vertically-landing spacecraft, for example. A proper escape system will be good, but it needs to actually be an effective design.
Absolutely a LES, or any other safety provision, is not a silver bullet.
Ejection seat can work in that system as well. And they are not a bad idea as 2-3 line of defence.
@@alexturnbackthearmy1907 I'd argue that they are a bad idea if it's vertically launched and vertically landing for a combination of factors
1. If it's vertically launched, astronauts will be on their backs, so they aren't going to gain altitude from ejecting. You can fix this with a big net, but it becomes more and more questionable that this is cheaper than a proper LES
2. Pressure suits don't provide protection against rocket exhaust or high-speed air. For example, the Space Shuttle is moving too fast for safe ejection after just 100 seconds
3. They add a bunch more things that can go wrong. Take that flight where the hatch blew off by accident on landing. If you need the ability to eject, the hatch needs to be fitted something like that, plus of course the rocket motors in each seat, which would have killed the other crew pretty quickly back when capsules used pure oxygen
4. Given the added weight and added complexity, I have my doubts that they are even all that much cheaper than a standard, tower-based LES, while offering much more limited capabilities and more failure points.
I'm glad you framed it in terms of informed consent rather than risk-taking per se.
Great video! Have always found the Rutan/Virgin Galactic model/approach a bit sketch... Minor quibble, at 49:29, that's not Charlie Brown, that's Linus Van Pelt!
Best of luck with your growing channel. You put a lot of work into this.
Thanks. Yep, read 3 books and a month of research, writing and editing for this one! Quality research takes precedence over upload schedule.
Hello, loved the vid just popping in as a colourblind person to say I can't tell the difference between the yellow and green used in the Venn diagram. I get that it fits our established associations with the colours, but adding some sort of pattern marker would be huge in the future. Horizontal, vertical, diagonal, stripes or dots or something like that.
Oh man sorry about that! I had comments on earlier videos about font color but didnt think about it for the venn diagram. I’ll follow an accessibility guideline next time.
Am glad there are others. Red Green. -Clay
Yeah it's 2024 now. Just saying, if it's Boeing, I ain't going.
Absolutely brilliant content, like all your videos. Meticulous research and clear delivery. We appreciate this isn't a 2 minute job 👏🏼
Excellent presentation! This thing is even more Kerbal than I originally thought. "Failure isn't an option, it's standard equipment" :D
Really enjoying these deep dives. Thank you for the work you put in on this. "I do not care if operators are sued or not, this conversation is about safety." Lordy if I didn't end up walking away from a health and safety position when I realized all I was supposed to do was minimize liability. God forbid we actually make things safe.
Thanks. Yeah…..for better or worse, financial liability can be an incentive for good safety practices. But it’s really depressing to see much of the discourse after an incident being ‘I hope X gets sued’.
This is about science not some morbid false ideology in a non existent, non proven, sky daddy.
Religion and schizophrenia go hand in hand. Seek psychiatric help.
I liked my university's risk management department back when we were doing rocketry. We found a way for the liability and the safety to align, such that the university is happy, the safety people are happy, and we are safe and doing cool things.
Workplace safety, though? I have to essentially remind them that this email will look really bad in a lawsuit in order to get them to reorder PPE.
At 32:15 - my guess is that passengers are referred to as “Astronauts” as part of a bid to avoid legal repercussions in case of a fatal accident á la the Oceangate titan implosion
I doubt it - I think it has more to do with ego stroking of the very wealthy who pay to ride. "Well if the company called me an astronaut, I must really be one!"
The nice thing about sub orbital for tourism is the lack of spacesuits required. Like you are only up there for a few minutes, and as long as you wake up while falling down in time to pull the chute you are perfectly fine. I never understood virgin galactic though. The whole benefit of a spaceplane and airlaunch is to allow for building up horizontal velocity to reach the 7.6km/s needed for orbital velocity, and yet it is used for sub orbital, where the most efficient way is straight up.
I work on liquid rocket motors and as i've heard a colleague of mine who worked on a previous hybrid rocket motor say- Solid rockets don't want to shut off, liquid rockets don't want to start, and solid rockets don't want to do either
Huh?
@@RENO_K The third phase should be "Hybrids don't want to do either." A hybrid's solid grain is difficult to light because you have to spray oxidizer across a large area and get that area ignited, needing a large, energetic pyrotechnic- a significant solid rocket motor in itself. Then when you cut off the oxidizer (either by running out or closing the ox valve) you have a large area of hot fuel grain that continues to evolve gas for a long time.
On the other hand, with a small liquid motor, I've tapped out Morse code just because I could :)
The reliance on "good pilots" as a security blanket has and will ever continue to cost lives, as has trusting the opinion of esteemed individuals such as Rutan without adequate risk assessment. Look at Apollo 1. After nearly drowning in the Liberty Bell 7 when the door inexplicably blew out on splashdown, I've read that the use of an inward-opening plug door on the Apollo capsule was one of Gus Grissom's (and other Apollo 1 astronauts') many demanded specifications for the crew module. And nobody was willing or able to convince him otherwise. It was going to be his craft to command and he was a national hero with unquestionably qualifying experience and credentials. He was truly a guy with "the right stuff" who had been there and done that in an era when almost nobody else had. But then came the plugs-out test and the fire and the door couldn't be pushed in or blown out. And Harrison Storms at North American Aviation was scapegoated for it, because who would even hint at a dead hero sharing any of the blame for his own death? Or that's how I read it. It's not like I was there. I've also read the astronauts suggested an outward opening hatch, which would conveniently absolve them of any blame, despite the inward opening hatch being included in Gemini craft. Not sure we'll ever know the truth.
Calling them Astronauts and Mission Specialists is for the same reason they were Mission Specialists on the Titan. The informed consent rules are certainly different for "Crew" compared to "Passengers". The liability laws probably parse depending on if it is a 'customer' vs 'crew'. They are not calling them that just for marketing.
Except that entire statement is nonsense. The informed consent rules in this case are literally laws and regulations enforced by the FAA. They are literally just calling them that for marketing. SpaceShip2 is certified for human flight with passengers by the FAA.
One of the primary reasons that we'll never see commercial space travel (aside from the economic absurdity of vehicles that have a single-digit percentage of their mass devoted to payload) is that space travel is inherently, unavoidably, extremely dangerous. Rockets and launch vehicles *will* fail. People *will* die. If we actually put something really huge into space, it could be one deorbit away from killing thousands upon thousands of people on the ground. And then you get into the space opera vision of travel, with relativistic ships with multi-G acceleration zooming around, and you've basically got weapons of mass destruction made of other weapons of mass destruction that are also tin cans with people in them. A ship captain does a Germanwings Flight 9525 and yeets his ship into a space station? Several thousand people die. If he yeets his ship into a city on a planet? Add some zeroes into that figure, plus radioactive fallout. Even the exhaust from an Expanse-style fusion drive could do horrendous damage to anything it is pointed at. The energies crackling around the ship would make Star Trek's explosive consoles look quaint if something goes pop. Even if we could make the energy and economics work, it would be impossible to make large-scale space travel even remotely safe. Even with the fairly modest space tech we have now, something as seemingly simple as the fuel source is incredibly deadly just to be around--we're talking about substances that set fire to most other substances on contact (including things you'd consider non-flammable or already burned up), substances that dissolve flesh, substances that are heinously toxic to every possible biological process, and worse. How could anyone, any society, no matter how advanced, handle the technology of classic sci-fi responsibly?
E: the quote figure of 4 and change gigajoules is almost exactly equal to a ton of TNT, which of course doesn't include energy lost as waste heat or the like, so probably several tons of TNT. Remember how when lithium-ion batteries started going mainstream we started hearing about all these horrible fires? It was simply because the very thing that made lithium-ion batteries so attractive, energy density, makes them liable to catch fire because huge concentrations of stored chemical energy like don't like being confined like that and are always at at least some risk of sending all that energy down the gradient all sudden-like. Imagine a concentration of energy equal to a WWII bomber's entire payload. Yeah...
Civil engineer.. Love the video. I know you're specifically talking Virgin Galactic but overall a brilliant presentation that well summarizes the state of "safety" in the billionaire unknown-tourism industry (space/ocean/etc). I hope against hope we see more change towards understanding this way of thinking without more accidents happening first.
My degree is in civil engineering too actually. My main concern is this 'free market will solve safety' ethos creeping into everyone's lives - willing participants or not.
@@Alexander-the-ok If the safety failures are fear-inducing enough, they aren't wrong -- the free market will solve safety -- just look at commercial airlines. It's hard to imagine the NTSB being formed and the FAA being held to account without the profoundly fear-inducing media coverage of airline crashes. Sure, the safety improvements rely upon unwilling participants dying but over 100 years they did seriously improve the safety record.
Road traffic, on the other hand, is terrifying only if you understand statistics and safety factors. (I still get very anxious standing on street corners waiting to cross at busy intersections with vehicles traveling at 40 to 50mph, very high alert -- and predictable "accidents" every few months)
Does anyone care if billionaires ker-splat themselves seeking thrills or bragging rights?
@@stephenkalatucka6213 Even from that point of view plenty of common/poor people get caught up in disasters like the Titanic. If people volunteer themselves for Darwin Awards that is definitely their freedom.
I too, have always had concerns, when I've heard the statement "it must be safe otherwise the pilot wouldn't fly in it" as history books are full of stories about dead pilots. I do, however, believe there's a 99.9999% chance the pilot will do as much as humanly possible to avoid disaster. Germanwings flight 9525 is one of the reasons it's not 100%.
If anybody ever says, “the pilot wouldn’t fly it if it wasn’t safe,” remember Eric Brown, who was a good pilot, BUT insisted on flying the ME163, despite warnings from the German ground crew.
I signed up, ready To Go!!!
Can't wait to see the Titanic in person!
Haha. This is the kind of quality I look for in the first comment on the video.
I took the footage used in your opening. There are some gaps and anomalies in the publicly available data about the 2014 crash. It is possible that something happened before the feather mechanism was activated, something that Alsbury was responding to. Nitrous can act as a monopropellant with a very energetic decomposition. If this happened inside the fuel injector valve it would have weakened the structure in a way that is consistent with the geometry of the breakup and with long range photography of the mishap.
"informed consent", by design, requires information to make a consensual judgement. Commercial secrets kinda sort of make this a bit tricky. One would have to be a bit of a nutter to go up in the thing, hey.
My very over-simplified solution would be ‘to be covered by informed consent you are required to open-source your design’.
Its problematic but a start. Companies that are allowed to operate without liability are essentially getting a free lunch.
You don’t need to be nutty, just misinformed. Most people, including me, don’t have the capability to do proper risk-analysis, let alone risk-analysis that takes to account gaps in knowledge or information.
It’s also worth stopping and considering how ridiculous knowledge over wide range of fields one would need to have to give informed consent to space flight.
Being able to consent without being properly informed means trusting some party based on reputation alone: and in this case the trusted party is the other side of the agreement…
@@catcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcaWhich is why it should be subject to certification process, meaning that a completely independent team of experts has assessed the risk.
Or you could all stop whining and realize that shit like this will happen when pushing boundaries in extremes. It’s absurd that you people want to grind the works to a halt over someone who chose to do a dangerous job dying. Faceless nobody blue collar workers die all of the time to keep things up and running and keep you air conditioned and comfortable. But when need to be forever bogged down in a ridiculous quagmire to try to prevent anyone from ever getting a boo boo while going to space
@@Alexander-the-ok several CPU design teams would no doubt agree and probably go up. On the other hand, several cryptography implementation teams would probably agree and still not go up in an open source space ship hehe
Okay now I would love a video on the Eurocopter EC225 accidents
Why would you call your customers astronauts when space tourist sounds so much cooler given what it is
GOOD video. I've been waiting for someone to do a deep-dive like this for a long time, and got super excited when I saw your poll.
Perhaps the FAA has not demanded certification for Virgin Galactic nor Blue Origin because they are not in the business of *transportation*. Their sub-orbital craft are essentially glorified amusement park rides.
I mean, the FAA grounded all B-17’s over airworthiness, and 15 minute joy rides fall into the same category of “amusement park rides.”
Right now the FAA doesn't actually have authority to crew rate space vehicles, they apply the same rules to crewed and uncrewed launch vehicles (those requirements are higher than NASA's requirements for uncrewed but lower than their crew rating). NASA and the DoD both require and perform crew rating if you're working with them, but Virgin Orbit is isolated from Virgin Galactic so that doesn't apply here.
New Shepard is in a gray area since Blue Origin does do business with both, but has not flown crew for either. New Shepard is technically crew rated, having done all the tests required and meeting the requirements in principle (like having no abort black zones) but I don't think that NASA actually audited that testing because they've only shown interest in uncrewed launches for scientific instruments.
Very interesting as always, hope you keep making these videos
The Apollo Computer F-8 sounds like an interesting story, but what I want to hear about even more is the MR-1 launch (or just mercury-redstone in general)
The F-8 digital fly by wire is fast becoming my favourite for next video.
I may do MR-1 in a ‘Christmas special’ of comical failures or something daft like that.
It was because of two cables separating in the wrong order. Because of this, significant power went through a relay which tripped a command since the control cable was supposed to separate first. The command was meant to separate the abort tower AND the booster from the capsule. To prevent the capsule from separating from an accelerating booster, the booster separation could only occur when the spacecraft was in ~0 g. Since it was on the ground, the sensors showed a booster accelerating by 1g constantly, so the abort tower was the only thing that jettisoned.
That's not all, though. The recovery parachutes also activated since the capsule was detected to be under 3 kilometers and so it thought it needed to deploy the parachutes. Since the recovery system detected no load on the parachute since the capsule wasn't falling, it deployed the reserve parachute as well. The capsule was undamaged and was reused for MR-1A, and the missile was sent back to huntsville for refurbishment and a potential flight in future, but was eventually placed on display.
MR-1 was about as close to disaster as that vehicle could get without exploding.
Great video. You did a good job of presenting facts in a non biased way. I agree with your concerns and cautionary assessments.
The amount I learned from this video about laws, planes, spacecraft, flight control systems, regulations, ethics, rocket engines, aerodynamics, systems design, automation and insomnia are exceptionally impressive.
Thank you for this wonderful presentation and previous presentations on submersibles along with the associated sources, plenty of things to dig into. I really look forward to future videos.
Thanks very much. There will be more on the way soon!
This channel went from interesting to my absolute most favourite channel on youtube.
1:45 correction: dice is plural, the singular of dice is "die"
Ah, well, I saw the same error committed on an old "Time Team" episode just the other day. Yes, it's tiny, but the editor in me squirmed. Is it perhaps an Americanism to use "die" as the singular for "dice"?
Yep it’s rare to say ‘die’ in Britain. I thought about it in the script since the majority of my audience are American but it just felt really weird to say out loud.
@@Alexander-the-ok I went to the sacred texts, those being the leaves of the OED. Apparently "dice" and the singular "die" go back to the 14th Century. But if I read it correctly, "die" died out in the UK, but lives on in the New World.
I appreciate your professional approach to presentation of content - specifically, clear LIMITATIONS and disambiguization of "conflict of interest or endorsement"
Your structure adds to ease of understanding concepts. Keep up the great work!!
You don’t have a ton of subscribers yet. But your content reminds me of Perun, the defense economics RUclipsr who blew up since the full scale invasion of Ukraine. I’m looking forward to when you do your 100k subs video and I can say I was there before 10k ❤
Perun is one of the main inspirations for my format. To be honest I'm amazed how many people already want to listen to me.
I literally had the thought watching perun of “damn this is good, but I wish I could get this for non defense engineering”, found your channel the same day. (:
@@Alexander-the-okyou're doing good work! If you keep putting out good stuff, people will want to watch it!
You are so underrated and deserve more attention. I love space and technology and hope to see more content soon
Thanks. This video is getting a kind of ‘spiritual successor’ in a few weeks actually
"This video is not a billionaire showdown" thank you so much for this haha it's getting really tiring to always hear about the billionaires who own the company when people report on space news
59:20 pretty sure voskhod 1 and 2 didn't have anything.
Great video,not sure why I clicked on this but I learned alot,love the Mercury Redstone 1 failure
Thanks. Yep I’m gonna have to talk about that more in a future video
The most glaring mistake here is that it's not Charlie Brown who is "secure with fly-by-wire", it's Linus Van Pelt.
He carries a security blanket with him always, but the joke is that he now leaves it lying on the right side foreground... something about the irony of that going over the presenters head is just *chef kiss
It is only a matter of time until there is a space tourism accident on par with what happened with the OceanGate Titan, and then people will start asking questions about the safety standards or lack thereof in the growing private space industry.
This channel is about to take off I hope. Incredible video. Love these long form projects
Thanks! By my definition it already has taken off. I had about 200 subscribers 4 months ago.
From calculations and engineering done later, I think that the space shuttle having about 65 sides is optimistic, as many avenues of failure did not result in disaster due to a massive amount of luck.
Yeah I agree. Just going for 'nearest order of magnitude'!
The early space shuttle missions were later estimated to be between 1 in 9 to 1 in 25, but later missions with safety improvements put that up towards 1 in 100.
The NASA commercial crew program aims for a minimum failure rate of 1 in 300. That might be good enough for 4 flights per year to the ISS, one disaster in a lifetime, but I don't think that's what we are wanting if we are talking about space tourism. And I think Virgin might be around 1 in 20 right now, maybe 1 in 100.
The problem is that NASA failure estimates had absolutely no scientific validity. The numbers were just pulled out of their asses. That's why the program was ended. It was a boondoggle from the beginning, with no conception of how it was ever going to meet its stated objectives.@@phillyphakename1255
@@phillyphakename1255Your numbers don't correspond to real statistics
@@appa609 please elaborate
The aircraft at 18:25 and 18:35 are the XCOR EZ-Rocket and X-racer respectively and were technically rocket planes but not suborbital because their thrust was less than their lift during the powered portions of the flights. I was in the right seat for the first four flights and two later flights of the X-Racer. We did a total of 66 flights with no fatalities but one major incident (loss of control and stall with recovery) and two "safe" failures (an engine hard start in flight with minor damage, and an engine stuck on that needed an emergency shutdown).
Wow thanks for the summary. I had to crowbar the EZ rocket into this video somewhere. I remember following it on various forums as a teenager and thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Hi Doug! I just wanted to let you know your work XCOR was an inspiration for me as a high school student to pursue a career in engineering! I'm sorry to see the creator of this video speaking poorly of the Lynx and XCOR in his replies to some of his comments.
I was quite enamored with the Lynx design as a "minimum viable spaceship". I'm sorry we never got to see it fly and learn more about its design decisions.
43:00 If the aircraft is actively nosing up to bleed velocity and extend range, that isnt a ballistic reentry. Ballistic is a reference to the parabolic path of travel (though, this of course is shortened by the atmosphere as seen with true ballistic reentries with Soyuz craft). If I'm not mistaken, the Apollo capsules technically weren't ballistic entries either due to the heat shield acting as a lifting body due to the angle of attack. Great video, though!
Yeah you’re right there, its only a ballistic arc until it hits the atmosphere again
"I wish her and the other passengers the best of luck, though I do not know how much they will need."
Absolutely excellent closing statement! Really drives home how little is disclosed by the company regarding safety systems.
I would not mind this “spaceship’ only gets to a height slightly above what you can see from paying 8000 Euro to fly in a mig 29.
I had to really resist mentioning that since this was intended to be a video about risk and not about ‘how to burn $400000 in a few minutes’.
I’d hands down rather fly in the Mig - its just way cooler.
@@Alexander-the-ok the MIG is a work of art with real historical meaning too. I assume it does not get the trophy points that the facile rich need.
@@LiamHemmings-f2w It's 60k ft for the Mig (not meters). Just making clear I'd still far rather fly the Mig though even though it's service ceiling is nowhere near 'space'.
22:20 that's not how that works. You spook customers by not disclosing it. What you do is you make an incident report, draft up recommendations for remedial action and then implement them. That shows that you learned from your mistakes and take safety seriously. Anybody makes mistakes, it's what comes next that decides your public image.
Exactly. Though that can be open to abuse too. In the helicopter example at the end, we all received a remedial actions report, posted to us personally by special delivery. In retrospect, all it served to achieve was to obscure the fact that the gearboxes should have been replaced entirely.
Another excellent video...I can really see this channel going places!
49:26 Probably late, but that's Linus Van Pelt, not Charlie Brown. ♥
Mike Adam's accident was due to him experiencing vertigo and positioning the aircraft essentially perpendicular to its flight path while at high altitude... Hard to picture! Shortly after, while re-entering the denser atmosphere, the aircraft entered a spin as a consequence. The initial trigger was, as far as I remember, some kind of electrical failure that distracted him. But vertigo was the overriding factor. It was learnt after the accident that he had been prone to it during his initial flight on the X15.
I disagree. I led development on SS1 hybrid motor. Just from watching videos on RUclips I believe it suffered some sort of valve anomaly. I had seen that type of anomaly phenomena before. Failure modes can vary. The end result is clearly much lower thrust. It’s clear to me that the video shows ignition was normal. Black smoke as the solid rocket motor starts the hybrid looks ok. The initial start looks normal. What follows is more serious. Videos make it clear that the rocket was never shut off successfully. I wish I could see the motor chamber pressure when Mike Asbury unlocked the pneumatic feather booms. The feather mode has saved the spaceship a few times at much slower speeds. It’s possible the crew saw increased nitrous pressure in the tank due to a valve fire. If Teflon seals were used, anything is possible depending on the design. From the video, it looks like the Nitrous is decomposing and burning something other than HTPB. Just a guess. I think the answer lies in the fluid flow system and the motor chamber pressure when the boom was unlocked as a way to slow the vehicle down and start dumping the nitrous. The vehicle was not designed to land with the full tank of nitrous. On SS1, I required the nitrous dump valve requirement to empty the tank in an emergency is under 2 minutes. The nitrous load full was 3000 lbs.
Note: I was not an employee of Scaled after SS1 went to Smithsoneon.
I am so glad I’ve found this channel, I watched some videos more than once. Please if you feel like it, could you do a series about how the iss and how it got there, and how the expansions are added? Cheers and much love from holland
Hybrid motors have a horrible tendency to spall off chunks of fuel that can get wedged in the nozzle causing a massive thrust asymmetry or worse over-pressure of the motor casing.
I'm really enjoying your videos. They are well researched and presented.
Just because Branson flew in Spaceship 2 doesn't mean Virgin Galactic has done adequate safety assessments internally. Rush chose to dive his Titan under similar conditions, and died in it.
It should also be noted that Starship doesn't currently have a planned crew escape system in its design, though that might change in the future.
Starship does not have a planned Launch Escape System but they also don’t plan to fly any humans on it before the number of uncrewed flights has reached into the hundreds. This buys down a lot of the risk.
@@TheMcspreader Starship could escape SuperHeavy only in very specific scenarios where they can throttle down most of SH’s engines. Otherwise it’s thrust to weight ratio is far far too low to out accelerate SuperHeavy. Also it can’t escape from itself and it’s far more dangerous itself than a capsule that only has a minimal number of engines.
@@Borodalf Correct. Starship's thrust-to-weight would have to astronomically improve to, say, escape a Challenger-type scenario. Being on the front of Super Heavy instead of hanging off the side isn't enough. Perhaps some extra internal SRBs on crew-rated Starships? Maybe even an ejectable crew section. Unfortunately, in the current design I don't see anyway not to at least take the header tanks with the crew section...
21:50 Virgin Galactic consulted a Boeing executive for a safety review? Well, we know now that this would not have been productive.
The purpose of commercial spaceflight is not to benefit humanity. It is to generate profits for as little operating cost as possible. Nothing else.
49:36 yeah no. The 737 max might have been a failure in design and certification, but it was also a failure of the fly by wire system. The Challenger blew up because of management AND an O-ring.
It is notable that that is one of the few instances of fatal crashes involving FBW but it is still a crash caused by FBW
The 737 max didn’t have fly by wire. If it did, it wouldn’t need MCAS in the first place.
As for challenger, it’s an incredibly complex subject. I’m working on a video that goes into detail on that, should be released towards the end of May.
@@Alexander-the-ok thank you for the response. I was under the (mistaken) impression that the latest and greatest 737 would have had FBW controls.
Looking forward to your Challenger video.
This has been extremely enlightening. I'm really enjoying your work, keep it up!
oh hey it's dat plane boi
@@calebharris292 hi
"If it wasn't safe the pilots wouldn't fly it"
(a) how would they know? The lack of transparency here is remeniscent of Boeing's lack of transparency over the 737 MAX. How were the pilots supposed to know about flaws in the system when they didn't even know the system existed? Pilots are not psychic.
(b) supersonic test pilots have a very different attitude to risk than the average person.
Exactly. It’s a ridiculous argument.
I hope potential passengers see this video.
Amazing video. I have always been mystified by the lack of good info on these crafts, but just wrote it up to me not being too much of a space or aviation nerd to know where to look. But this explains so much.
Excellent presentation! With how few incidents there have been there's not much info or discussion of safety in space tourism. I think there will need to be more refinement of designs and procedures as it gets more mainstream with a larger customer base. Unlike air travel or extreme tourism "experiences" though it presents many unique challenges and may never reach the same level of safety.
That’s what drove me to making this video. There is virtually no critical analysis of VG. Almost everything I can find is blind optimism, nonsense about their stock price or advertising.
28:30 so that FAA certification is the same level as what was given to SpaceX's Starship experimental Starship launch ..
Yes, both have (or had) an FAA Commercial launch License. Neither have FAA certification though.
In some sense, in specific areas of life, participation in democratic governance is the only form of agency individuals could ever have.
Private companies are at the mercy of each other, as the competition might reward strategies majority of the individuals would prefer not to use: such as cutting corners in safety, or using child labour.
And ultimately the world is too complex for any individual to make even very basic informed decisions, without reliance on others. Democracy and state is ultimately how the rules and conventions of that relationship is set. Trading information, such as paying for a consult, depends on the state to enforce honesty.
And for those reasons, I sincerity think denying an industry regulation by state harms it overall. Usually doing so only benefits the already existing entities in that field.
Without regulation, the commercial space industry can not form a honest market, and in some areas can’t have beneficial competition that drives innovation. It will remain highly risky, insurance companies won’t facilitate lowering the risks per-launch, and so few applications can make use of the services the industry can provide.
Sure the companies can create more products more easily, but the products are much weaker without the structure state and regulations provide. It’s very shortsighted to point at the cheaper development costs, if they severe the value of the end-products by causing huge insurance costs and lower demand overall.
This is such a great argument against the common and incredibly simplistic view of ‘but the free market will fix it’. Without at least a third party arbitrator (which may be enforced through government) you can’t even have a free market.
Lol wtf are you talking about? Regulation only ever leads to regulatory capture and then no competition happens because the big players just pull the strings to regulate any would be competitors out of the market.
Also, informed consent doesn’t have to mean “you know all of the details”, part of your informed consent can always come with the “bad shit we haven’t anticipated yet might happen, wanna go anyways?” You explicitly give consent to take unknown risks all of the time. It’s part of life.
@@banksuvladimir i like how your argument against regulation treats corruption of the regulatory body as just a natural, unavoidable part of the process. And if the big players are corrupting legislators then they should not be rewarded by not being subject to regulation.
Also i'm wondering if you saw the same video as i did, the entire point is that known (to virgin galactic) information being kept from those who have to give informed consent precludes assessment of KNOWN risks.
If nobody certified that the structure can handle the expected forces, and they won't tell me any details like material used and dimensions, then how can i give informed consent to the risk of a structural failure?
For perspective, this isn't nitpicking about potentially unknown mechanics causing something unforeseen, it's about a company that skipped unmanned testing and is doing a bunch of non-industry standard things while struggling to beat the odds of russian roulette while being extremely tight-lipped on information required for a risk assessment of known risks (just trust me bro we value safety bro)
This is so informative! Great job, fantastic reporting!🌻🌼🐝 Keep it up 🙌
1. They *have* a real VP of Safety?
2. Based on my private sector experience, no way in hell would I want to be responsible for safety at a private space company. The profit lust compromises everything, the need to please investors leads to pressure to overpromise and then cut corners trying to fulfill those overpromises.
Presumably you start in the job because it's a noble thing to try and keep the profit chasers in check. Then once you find out they can't be held back, you feel you daren't leave because of what you fear they might do if you weren't there.
Great video, but I would have liked to see small clips of all of these crashes/launch failures spliced in as you talked about them.
I would have liked that too. Unfortunately no (public) footage exists of most of them. I didn’t feel it appropriate to show the 2014 incident
On FBW systems: just a couple of years ago (2020) an F-35 crashed at Eglin AFB due to pilot error and some interesting fly-by-wire system behavior
Oh yeah, it happens. I’ll do a follow up about FBW in the future. Thing is, without FBW, the F-35 wouldnt be able to fly at all.
Most crashes involving fly-by-wire systems were a combination of pilot error and issues with sensors (the Rockwell X-31 and B-2 crashes come to mind, both caused by humidity in sensors/pitot tubes). It would be shocking if that F-35 crashed due to a fault with the flight control computer itself
alex the GOAT what u mean. stellar work on this one, and series so far as well
As a gay man, I find Blue Origins design to be... Delightfully erousing
You dont need to be gay to be turned on by that hydrogen/lox open cycle engine design.
@@Alexander-the-ok 😉
this is… a great video. Its entirely unbiased and doesn’t use subjective language. Thank you for somehow opening my eyes to the dangers of commerical subortial spaceflight while not making me hate it.
Nice work!
Thanks. I actually consider this to be my 'worst' video since my channel took off because I think it's too opinionated (also I had a new mic and you can hear all my gross mouth sounds that I didn't know how to edit out back then).
13:25 - There has been one (or two) more suborbital crewed space flight not in your list. Notably, it was an *attempt* at orbital space flight, though. Soyuz 18a had an in-flight launch anomaly that caused the flight to be aborted (the third rocket stage lit its engines while still being attached to the second stage, so the Soyuz capsule engines fired to pull it away from way-off-target launch vehicle.) This capsule reached a height of nearly 200 km, more than high enough to be “a space flight.”
Although if we’re counting Virgin Galactic, then another in-flight-abort should be counted, too. Soyuz MS-10 experienced a similar launch booster failure, which caused it to separate. It reached 92 km of altitude, high enough for the 80km definition.
There was a third Soyuz crewed abort, but it was on the pad, so reached nowhere near space.
Intro music song tune sad violin/cello is the same once used in Bojack series on ending of episode "ShowStopper"
When people use the "pilots do it" argument, they miss a very important point, those pilots are not average people they are test pilots, with who knows how many hours of experience and a death wish.
Let's differentiate that any risk has two independent factors, the inherent risk and the "if you stupid" risk. There are many people doing dangerous work, but as long as you stick to the rules you're very likely will be fine, but than again, there are special cases when you have both inherent and stupidity risk and need the truly unhinged who would happily sacrifice their own life just to help humanity progress a little bit.
Those scientist come to mind, who designed the ejection seat, and tested the human tolerance for G force.
Hats off to people like that.
35:14 nonsense. A person, like myself, can ABSOLUTELY give informed consent to ride on SpaceShipTwo. The risk is this thing can go wrong many ways, aerodynamically, pilot error, explosion, decompression, etc. all resulting in my death. What more can a person need to know, before accepting the risk?
Columbus knew the risk that he might fail to sail around the world and die.
I know that every time I fly my airplane, something could go wrong and I die.
I know that the most dangerous thing I do on a regular basis is drive my car down the road. But I still do it.
Yeah, Alexander really shows off his paternalism in this video.
He doesn't say it but it's easy to tell that he's the kind of person who doesn't like seeing people do anything he doesn't personally approve of. I bet if it was up to him, no one would be allowed to operate SS2.
I think the average person has more than enough information as things stand to decide whether or not such a flight is appealing to them or not and if they want to participate.
At the end of the day this is a matter of personal perspective and there will be plenty of people out there who would be more than willing to take the risks in stride for the experience.
Rich folks doing dumb FOMO adventures and dying in accidents..Meh don't care.
The lack of regulation that allows Virgin Galactic to thrive is starting to creep into everyone’s lives: web privacy, pedestrian safety and data consent laws are a few examples. I will do more videos on the matter in the future.
@@Alexander-the-ok Yep. The motto of move fast break things, pay regulatory fines later; Is a dangerous precedent to set in the transportation of people. At least digital tech generally doesn't kill innocent bystanders. Great Video so far
@okalex4687 Why not regulate those things and not hyperregulate people who want to explore, do research, or who simply find joy in riding to space?
Everything has been so overregulated that we created a generation of people with diabetes, not much inclination to do much of anything in exploration, scientific research, etc. least they face fines, arrest, etc.
It's incredibly sad and breaks my heart.
Overregulated people are slaves.
@CarolReidCA If Virgin Galactic truly wanted to explore and do research, they'd have made their designs and findings public. Open source engineering data would be a good alternative to a third party (ie regulators) stepping in and pointing out that they may be deceiving their customers about how safe their system is.
I’d agree, except that they keep taking perfectly good pilots and experts down with them.
Excellent video as always - I’m by no means an engineer so I always learn a LOT from your videos 👍🏻