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Virgin Galactic, Branson's space venture


PB666

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1 hour ago, benzman said:

I hadn't read about this in depth before. This sounds like an average Kerbal flight:

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Shortly after ignition, at about 60,000 feet (18 km), the craft unexpectedly rolled 90 degrees to the left, due to wind shear. When the pilot attempted to correct it, it rolled 90 degrees to the right. The pilot levelled the craft out, and proceeded with the climb. The correction of the roll excursion, using full trim, caused a pitch trim tab to run up against a stop. This caused the trim actuator, as designed, to stop operating for a 3 s timeout. Not realising what had happened, the pilot and controllers interpreted this as failure of the trim actuator, and they switched to a backup system. Spacecraft attitude was problematic during the entire climb, and not corrected until the start of re-entry.

During the burn, a new aerodynamic fairing installed around the rocket nozzle overheated, became too soft, and crumpled inwards. This caused a loud bang, which the pilot reported, but did not cause a flight problem.

And...

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The planned apogee altitude was 360,000 feet (110 km), but due to the attitude problem encountered during the climb the craft actually attained only 328,491 feet (100,124 m)

Just barely made it into space!

 

 

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15 hours ago, wumpus said:

"first ever commercial space pilots and will be receiving their space wings": where does Mike Melvill [pilot for Spaceship 1] fit in this?

ERM... I have an explanation (sorry Mike), I have been reading lots of factually incorrect webpages and just took it as true, until everyone here started correcting me!

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15 hours ago, YNM said:

Oh, yeah, that slips off my focus !

Well, they ain't sending men to orbit on those wing-mounted missile-on-steroids... (unless someone orders a launch, packs themselves in, then slips on probably !)

That thing’s tiny.

We’re talking Project Adam tiny.

egress.png

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3 minutes ago, MinimumSky5 said:

I'm sorry, but what has happened to that guys legs? Artists, take note, plan your drawings before committing to them! 

Something like this:

simons.png

Because Project Adam was about reusing baloon pod designs for a proto-Mercury.

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  • 1 month later...

Virgin working with UnderArmour for their gear (who cares).

Branson going up himself this year (makes sense for sales, if nothing else).

Moving operations to here in NM (good, since my taxes subsidized his spaceport).

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  • 4 weeks later...
15 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

90% of the way to actual space... I wonder if they can get 10% more power out of it.

The 100km line is in fact as arbitrary as 50 nm is. There's some reasonable work about where the von Karman line should in fact be (he set it below 100km, himself, after all).

https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.07894

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3 hours ago, tater said:

The 100km line is in fact as arbitrary as 50 nm is. There's some reasonable work about where the von Karman line should in fact be (he set it below 100km, himself, after all).

https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.07894

Yeah, and the Russian media just ran a clickbait storm about SOHO data suggesting Earth's atmosphere extends beyond the Moon ;) 

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