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Author Topic: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed  (Read 5025 times)

Offline Brian Massey

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Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« on: October 31, 2014, 04:04:13 PM »
It just happened, and they have only said; "SpaceShip Two has experienced an in-flight anomaly. Additional info and statement forthcoming." http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/10/31/virgin-galactic-spaceship-encounters-inflight-anomaly-during-test-flight/

The pilot ejected but still suffered serious injuries. The co-pilot died, but it's not clear if he had also ejected. Really to bad, it is cutting edge stuff. But one report says they were flying with an "untested" rocket motor.

I'm wondering how many of the 800 people who have paid deposits, will want refunds now.

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Offline Tim Wescott

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #1 on: October 31, 2014, 04:37:46 PM »
It's not been a good week for private space travel.
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Offline Randy Powell

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #2 on: October 31, 2014, 05:44:34 PM »
Stuff happens. Untested? Depends on how you look at it, I guess.
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Offline Tim Wescott

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #3 on: October 31, 2014, 06:38:38 PM »
Stuff happens. Untested? Depends on how you look at it, I guess.

They were doing testing, so "not fully tested" is kind of a given.  Given the players, there had to have been lots of ground testing, and they had the misfortune to uncover a problem that wasn't evident on the ground, or there was some garden-variety screwup in the engine installation or maintenance.

Hopefully the thing was instrumented well enough that the life lost and the serious injuries to the other guy weren't in vain.
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Offline Steve Fitton

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #4 on: October 31, 2014, 06:55:24 PM »
The new propellant grain they were using had been tested on the ground up through full duration firings.  The new grain was a plastic that eliminated some issues they had with the original synthetic rubber propellant.  At this point its hard to tell if the engine or oxidizer tank failed.  Either way its a sad ending to a unique plane and the loss of a good pilot.
Steve

Offline Brett Buck

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #5 on: October 31, 2014, 07:16:46 PM »
The new propellant grain they were using had been tested on the ground up through full duration firings.  The new grain was a plastic that eliminated some issues they had with the original synthetic rubber propellant.  At this point its hard to tell if the engine or oxidizer tank failed.  Either way its a sad ending to a unique plane and the loss of a good pilot.

  If you read the reports on the nitrous oxide handling from the ground test accident, the grain was not implicated, it was decomposition of the nitrous due to water-hammer. Combustion instability can be a tricky business, you can test it 200 times and it might not go unstable until 201. Of course we don't know and may not ever know what the real problem was.

  There's a reason, Burt, why NASA has hundreds of thousands of pages of rules and analysis.

    Brett

Offline mike londke

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #6 on: October 31, 2014, 08:23:49 PM »
 If you read the reports on the nitrous oxide handling from the ground test accident, the grain was not implicated, it was decomposition of the nitrous due to water-hammer. Combustion instability can be a tricky business, you can test it 200 times and it might not go unstable until 201. Of course we don't know and may not ever know what the real problem was.

  There's a reason, Burt, why NASA has hundreds of thousands of pages of rules and analysis.

    Brett
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Offline Brett Buck

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #7 on: October 31, 2014, 08:53:55 PM »
 Yeah and NASA never gets it wrong. S?P

   Pioneers often encounter issues. They (and the Russians) have put up roughly *400* flights of vastly more complexity and capability with a far lower death rate and far lower failure rate . Starting *50 years ago*, in the glare of intense public coverage and pressure, and when there was almost nothing known.

    No commercial or "alternative space" company or entity had done anything more interesting to challenging than an X-2 flight and certainly nothing at all significant in space flight. They have no excuse at all, they are not pioneers, and almost everything known about space flight engineering issues is on a NASA Tech server somewhere, all they have to do is get past their own egos.

   For the record:

     First  airplane  was dangerously unstable and out-of-control due to perfectly well understood aerodynamic effects and was retired primarily because it was uncontrollable in certain flight regimes. You can read the reason in a NASA Public Affairs document *published for the general public in the late 70's*. There is absolutely no excuse for not knowing about it and dealing with it ahead of time.

   The engine test blew up 3 people due to perfectly well understood issues with nitrous oxide decomposition due to shock/water hammer. That effect was well understood in, perhaps, the 40's. And I think one of the very first things you learn is not to test engines in a parking lot with, apparently, *40 people*, most of whom were there to rubberneck, clustered around. I think the Chinese learned things like that in about 500AD.

     The second airplane appears to have blown up in flight, there aren't a lot of ways that a hybrid fails, and ALL OF THEM are well-known. And can't be "tested out" no matter how many tests they run, you need to do analysis. They aren't used much in professional space applications because the performance is so low as to be nearly useless. Only a very simple low-performance mission is suitable.

     I can understand that flight-test accidents can happen. Not knowing about, or ignoring and not dealing with the extreme dihedral effects of highly-swept wings/lifting bodies is irresponsible. Blowing up an engine in a parking lot due to *very well understood* nitrous oxide handling procedures and basic safety precautions being ignored and killing 3 people in the process is inexcusable.

    They appear not only not to have learned anything from NASA's mistake, they seem to be on a mission to violate some of the basic lessons learned because they think they are *way smarter*. They aren't, and they seem to spend more time making smart-ass comments about NASA and getting thunderous applause from fanbois than doing sound engineering.

      But that's just me, of course.

    Brett

Offline Glenn (Gravitywell) Reach

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #8 on: October 31, 2014, 10:10:00 PM »
Well said Brett.
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Offline Andrew Tinsley

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #9 on: November 01, 2014, 06:48:37 AM »
Agreed, this is one area where private "for profit" companies lose out. They seem to ignore basics and go for gold.

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Offline Gus Urtubey

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #10 on: November 01, 2014, 09:53:44 AM »
They had completed a very successful ground test firings with the new polyamide fuel.
Yesterday was the fiirst attempt to use the new polyamide fueled engine in a powered flight.
We dont know what went wrong , it could be a valve, a seal, anything.
My understanding is that Burt is retired from Scale, why to blame him when we dont know his involvment in the fuel thing.

Offline GGeezer

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #11 on: November 01, 2014, 01:59:21 PM »
This was an unfortunate event but also a rather interesting coincidence for me.
On a Yahoo Group Site called the "Guillow's Challenge" a group of free flighters, me included, build Guillows stick & tissue planes of a designated series and enter them in a yearly on-line contest. Guillows supplies prizes to the winners of the Appearance and Flight-Time categories. this year's competition was for the simple build-by-numbers 600 series.
The contest ended on Oct. 31/14, the same day this tragedy happened.

Hunting for something unique, I cobbled together two Lancer kits to produce a facsimile of this thread's subject... weird or what!

Orv.

Offline Steve Fitton

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #12 on: November 01, 2014, 05:03:23 PM »
Brett I would like to know how you got your hands on the 2007 accident report. My understanding was that Scaled kept a really tight lid on that.
Steve

Offline Mike Callas

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #13 on: November 01, 2014, 05:26:46 PM »
 

    No commercial or "alternative space" company or entity had done anything more interesting to challenging than an X-2 flight and certainly nothing at all significant in space flight. They have no excuse at all, they are not pioneers, and almost everything known about space flight engineering issues is on a NASA Tech server somewhere, all they have to do is get past their own egos.

        But that's just me, of course.

    Brett

I guess you must not have heard of SpaceX.
SpaceX is launching satellites into geo synchronous orbit, delivering groceries to the ISS and bringing back the trash.
As far as interesting, SpaceX is developing a 1st stage that flies back to earth for reuse.
And it is all (mostly) fabricated and assembled in Hawthorne Calif.


Offline Douglas Ames

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #14 on: November 01, 2014, 05:48:47 PM »
 <snip>
  The engine test blew up 3 people due to perfectly well understood issues with nitrous oxide decomposition due to shock/water hammer. That effect was well understood in, perhaps, the 40's. And I think one of the very first things you learn is not to test engines in a parking lot with, apparently, *40 people*, most of whom were there to rubberneck, clustered around. I think the Chinese learned things like that in about 500AD. <snip>

    Brett

In Drag Racing it is common to "purge" (of gaseous N2O) the Nitrous line prior to actuation of the valve at launch. The purpose is to get pure liquid Nitrous at the point of injection.
I think you've nailed it Brett.
Shoot, the Germans had it figured out by 1945.
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Offline John Stiles

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #15 on: November 01, 2014, 06:35:53 PM »

We dont know what went wrong , it could be a valve, a seal, anything.

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Offline Brett Buck

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #16 on: November 01, 2014, 07:12:57 PM »
In Drag Racing it is common to "purge" (of gaseous N2O) the Nitrous line prior to actuation of the valve at launch. The purpose is to get pure liquid Nitrous at the point of injection.
I think you've nailed it Brett.
Shoot, the Germans had it figured out by 1945.

      Not really, and the Germans never did anything much like this, although they probably had enough information to figure it out if they had experimented. I think these guys are using hybrids because they are seen to be "simple*.

   The problem in the 2007 case was nailed (and predicted) in 2005 by someone else. But I now hear that they are in fact considering *combustion instability* as I speculated above, caused by the new fuel grain. This is a *very tricky* problem to solve, and in reality, no one has come up with an acceptable analytical means of predicting it and dealing with it.  The Germans did find this, but in 1963, not 1945, and the found it out the hard way. There's a lot of cut and try, and interesting testing you can do. For the F1 engine on the saturn 5, for instance, they would tape bombs to the inside of the combustion chamber. When the bomb goes off, it perturbs the combustion, and then you can watch the pressure, etc, and see whether it recovers and how long it takes, which is interpreted as a measure of the stability

    The problem with this on a NO hybrid is that nitrous oxide can decompose spontaneously due to pressure spikes in the liquid system. This was the cause of the 2007 accident as well. If combustion goes unstable, say, from the natural frequency of the (very large) combustion chamber happens to line up with the natural frequency of the fuel grain - which is rubbery/plastic substance, not rigid  - can cause the normal operation of the engine to cause it to go into resonance and become unstable. The effect can be something like runs, stops, runs, stops, runs  chuff-chuff-chuff. But at very high frequency, hundreds or thousands of hertz, with the pressure spike at each start getting larger and larger. This will send pressure spikes up the oxidizer line, and cause high or low local pressures, and in the right conditions, the oxidizer explosively decomposes and blows up the entire system. Alternately, the combustion chamber itself can fail from pressure and fatigue, same result, or burn through from high local temperatures. Thats what we think happened when one of our bi-propellant engines was starved of oxidizer.

      These are all fairly-well-recognized failure modes, and hybrids are particularly prone to it because the combustion chamber is very large since it contains the entire fuel grain, so the natural frequencies are low which means it takes less energy to get going. That's why they suddenly ran into it when they tried to scale up small engines to the F1, and why the model-sized engines are casually tossed together with fairly reliable results. You can test and test and not get it, then the next test, it blows.

    This is all still speculation, of course.  One person died yesterday, and another is in the hospital with serious injuries, and no one wishes to pile on. But it is extremely frustrating to be able to see and predict the problems, have people point them out and then have some of the principals go around bragging about how they never waste any time on "endless analysis" and how all their predecessors are stupid or hidebound, and how "we will just fly it and see" because we are way smarter and in a big hurry. It doesn't cost much time at all to download a report and read it.

    People have been warning about this sort of approach for years, now there have been three separate dangerous problems, two of which resulted in deaths that appear to have been completely unnecessary. That's what is frustrating.

      Brett

Offline mike londke

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #17 on: November 01, 2014, 09:05:32 PM »
And NASA will lose more people and equipment in the future too.  No matter how much testing and wringing out of a design, there will always be failures. PERIOD!  Nothing is 100% guaranteed to leave earth and return in one piece, no matter who makes it. Not rockets, not jet liners, and not even toy airplanes. Just because there are some new players in the game there is no reason to beat up on them and say they don't know what they are doing. The old guard will always be jealous of anyone who comes along and challenges the work that preceded them. What are we supposed to do? Leave all space exploration to the government? They can't find their ass with both hands. I tip my hat to any private parties willing to pony up their own money to find a better, more economical way for space travel. And I hope they make a bunch of money off it. We still have Capitalism here right? Guys can take an idea, put money in it and develop it with emerging technology to find a better way and make a profit off it. Hell they are probably doing more to add to technology right now than anyone. I am pretty sure NASA has not hired EVERY smart guy on the planet. There are tons left that are smarter and decided to work in the private sector. I wish them all the best.
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Offline Brett Buck

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #18 on: November 01, 2014, 10:44:44 PM »
The old guard will always be jealous of anyone who comes along and challenges the work that preceded them. What are we supposed to do? Leave all space exploration to the government? They can't find their ass with both hands.

       If these failures were the result of new developments or first-time experiments, you would have a good point. At least the first two incidents were the results of perfectly well known issues that could have been discovered in a few hours of research. It's costs almost nothing in terms of time or money to do your basic homework.

         Brett

Offline Gus Urtubey

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #19 on: November 02, 2014, 06:41:32 PM »
Perfectly known issues came up many time  to the big guys building planes out of Seattle and Toulouse.
Some issues ended up in crashes , some didnt.

Offline Gus Urtubey

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #20 on: November 02, 2014, 06:44:38 PM »
.
« Last Edit: November 02, 2014, 07:01:26 PM by Gustavo Urtubey »

Offline Air Ministry .

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #21 on: November 02, 2014, 07:18:50 PM »
Looks like my trip to Mars might be off , for the moment . then .

Offline Dennis Moritz

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #22 on: November 03, 2014, 02:23:26 AM »
"The investigators recovered the spaceship's fuel tanks and engine intact, indicating there was no explosion, acting NTSB chairman Christopher Hart said at a press conference in Mojave, California, near the site of the crash. (Reporting by Irene Klotz; Editing by Nick Macfie)" That's off Huff Post. Guess it's a cover up.

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« Last Edit: November 03, 2014, 02:55:23 AM by Dennis Moritz »

Offline John Stiles

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #23 on: November 03, 2014, 03:28:05 AM »
Breaking news this morning: Pilot error releasing brakes too soon.
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Offline Steve Fitton

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #24 on: November 03, 2014, 05:33:57 AM »
NTSB commented that the feather control lever was unlocked and in the "feather" position.  Whether the crew commanded that before or after the breakup is not known yet.  The boldface procedure for loss of control may be to deploy the feather, so I would wait a bit before pinning the accident on the crew.
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Offline mike londke

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #25 on: November 03, 2014, 04:57:45 PM »
So I guess all the talk in this thread of engine and fuel malfunctions was a bit premature.
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Offline Steve Fitton

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #26 on: November 03, 2014, 06:13:43 PM »
So I guess all the talk in this thread of engine and fuel malfunctions was a bit premature.

Maybe, maybe not.  The engine could have chuffed so hard the lever was knocked into the feather configuration without anyone touching it.  I remember reading accounts by Mike Mellville, pilot of Spaceship one, of combustion roughness so bad he actually thought the tail had been blown off, and that was a successful flight.

My interest today is in a photo I saw that looks very much like the nozzle assembly lying by itself on the desert floor.  I wonder if it fell off during breakup, or was blown off during a chuff.  If the motor chuffed during the burn and blew the nozzle the engine would have most likely flamed out but the jolt might have been enough to either destroy the vehicle or perhaps deploy the feather mechanism.
Steve

Offline mike londke

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #27 on: November 03, 2014, 06:32:54 PM »
I wonder when will will get to see the actual video of the flight. They have cameras on both vehicles that may show us what went on. I am sure the guys at Virgin have been reviewing them since the accident. No doubt, the NTSB  has copies too.
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Offline Chris McMillin

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #28 on: November 04, 2014, 02:15:12 AM »
Hi Brett,
It's been a long time since I heard the story, and I am just a button pushing monkey, but didn't some brilliant engineers put 7psi on top of surface atmospheric on Gus and the crew during the ground test of Apollo 1?
Also, 125 or so flights on the Shuttle and no "pre-flight" inspections before re-entry? I went to Pylon Racing school with Hoot Gibson and was privvy to a little talk he had about the subject when innocently I brought it up asking about procedures for space flight I didn't know about and wondered how they were done, he said you fly the way they like you to fly, or you don't fly. Remember Wally Schirra? Hoot had the same thing happen and they flew it in a slip on re-entry, wondered why the other guys didn't do the same. Free thinking in NASA space flight is a sure way to never fly again. But then, on some flights it worked that way for the spectacularly wrong reason.
I'm sure you're right about the screw ups at VG and Scaled Composites, but NASA has blood on their hands as well.
Chris...

Offline John Stiles

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Re: Virgin Galactic Spaceship One Crashed
« Reply #29 on: November 04, 2014, 04:42:02 AM »
..... so I would wait a bit before pinning the accident on the crew......
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