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DisappointmentThat was disappointing. They lost 3 in 2007, when an oxidizer tank exploded. Like last time, they'll never release the cause of the accident. This was probably another oxidizer tank failure. The pilots would have been ejected by the blast. The guy in the left seat would have been the unlucky one, knocked by just the right piece of carbon fiber to knock him out. There comes a point in a space program when enough people have been lost by the same cause that there is a definite safety issue in the management or the system. Hybrid rocket engines just may not be safe enough because they require too much gas under too much pressure for current materials. People have struggled with carbon fiber tanks for decades. They haven't been consistently able to contain a rated pressure. It's hard to believe they'll be able to make another vehicle without any money coming in from customers. The plan was always to mass produce them, but only after the money was coming in from the 1st one. Dick Branson had slowed funding to a crawl. It's hard to slow it any further without stopping it. It's yet another story of another guy giving his life in the quest to reach space. As long as space is just 62 miles away, they'll keep reaching for it & some won't come back. Maybe we'll lose 1 per decade. No-one died in the 1990's, when the number of people going up was at its peak. There hasn't been enough money since then. The 2010's are still benign compared to the 2000's. Virgin Galactic/Scaled was the last to continue the legend of people coming to the high desert of Calif* to ride a vehicle into space, test pilots whose names no-one knew, who rode horses & drank at a run down bar. The legend is really over. Kazakstan ended up being the place for going into space. The new space cowboys drink Vodka & drive trucks with dashcams on the wrong side of the road. |
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