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Comment by chdir | Hacker News Reader

Crash investigation (Source - NTSB : http://www.ntsb.gov/news/2014/141112.html)

According to the pilot, he was unaware that the feather system had been unlocked early by the copilot. His description of the vehicle motion was consistent with other data sources in the investigation. He stated that he was extracted from the vehicle as a result of the break-up sequence and unbuckled from his seat at some point before the parachute deployed automatically. Recorded information from telemetry, non-volatile memory, and videos are being processed and validated to assist the investigative groups.

... The investigation is ongoing. Any future updates will be issued as events warrant.

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Yes, that's actually the only source of new info.

I was also interested in the fast that they weren't in pressure suits. Apparently the ingress/egress hatch is so small as to preclude them wearing basic safety equipment. I'm becoming less and less sympathetic to Virgin Galactic the more I hear.

Cut the company some slack. Space flight is hard. There are physical constraints imposed by the laws of Nature that have to be carefully weighed. It is easy to forget this fact when all you ever do is software design or whatever.

Not too much slack. It's true that space flight is hard. But it's also true that Virgin Galactic is a company based entirely around sub-orbital space tourism. The level of risk we should consider acceptable for what's essentially an ultra-high-priced amusement park ride is rather lower than the level of risk we should consider acceptable for space exploration.

People who pay to go can make their own decision if the risk is acceptable to them or not. It's not anyone else's business to decide what the acceptable level of risk is.

>People who pay to go can make their own decision if the risk is acceptable to them or not. It's not anyone else's business to decide what the acceptable level of risk is.

until they are a MIT trained airspace engineers, i doubt they are able to estimate the risk and thus to make a fully informed decision on their own. This is why it is official government agencies' business to at least establish minimum acceptable risk baselines.

And that's how you end up in a society where all risk-taking is banned to the fringes. No thanks, I'd much rather sign the "waiver from hell". High-risk activities CAN be self-regulated by industry, i.e. skydiving.

I wouldn't say this parallels with skydiving as it's something new. If I choose to go skydiving I can easily get a grasp on how dangerous it is by looking up statistics and choosing a reputable company with a good track record. If I choose to take a Virgin Galactic trip then unless I possess very specialist knowledge I just have to take their word that it's "safe".

I'm no expert on this subject, but a small amount of Googling suggests that rumors of skydiving's lack of regulation in the US have been greatly exaggerated. For example, you can't just pack your own chute - there's a special FAA certification you have to get before you're allowed to do that.

The rules I'm seeing seem more like the ones that govern recreational sailing, which is a topic I'm more familiar with: If you're just doing it on your own, sailing is fairly lightly regulated. Your boat needs to meet some minimum requirements for safety equipment and the like, but for the most part all the rules for recreational sailing are voluntary and self-imposed by the community.

But all that goes out the window once you start doing it commercially. If you want to take tourists out on a day sail, you need to be a licensed captain and there's a whole host of federally-imposed rules about how you operate your boat that come into play.

Virgin Galactic isn't analogous to some guy day-sailing in his own boat. SpaceShipOne would have been, but SpaceShipTwo is much more analogous to commercial sailing, which is comprehensively regulated for the sake of consumer protection.

>Space flight is hard.

this is why lessons of previous attempts in the industry should be rolled into the next ones. Pressure suits on launch is standard long established practice in space flight industry since the dawn of times, and so far there is no evidence that it should be changed.

Out of curiosity how many people have pressure suits saved?

There's slack, and then there's there's unnecessary risk. If you can't fit a basic piece of safety equipment on your test pilot then you need to rethink your strategy.

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