#SpaceShipTwo has experienced an in-flight anomaly. rumor parachutes seen, Confirmed Loss of vehicle

a reply to: Quantum_Squirrel

My personal thoughts on this lead me to the suspicion that there may be a conspiracy here, as it was only Wednesday just passed that the Nasa spaceship exploded after launch as well. What gets me is we have the technology to get into space with out using rockets. But we still use them, why ? The think I hate the most about this planet is the suppression of technology for the masses so powerful forces can make a hefty profit on out of date, unconventional, unpractical, unsafe, unreliable technology and religious BullS*** to keep you in tack and preventing you of reaching true spiritual freedom so you can be controlled like a good little puppet. Seriously sometimes I wish some advance alien race from some other planet would come and abduct me, my wife an dog and get me off this planet and it's poor excuse of a civilization and take us somewhere were we can reach our full potential on a harmonic planet of equalness, fairness and happyness and true enlightenment.

I'm feeling this was sabotage to prevent civilians from going out into space, as TPTB know what we will find up there, it wont be a secret anymore

originally posted by: HomerinNC
I'm feeling this was sabotage to prevent civilians from going out into space, as TPTB know what we will find up there, it wont be a secret anymore

But civilians have been to space many times, as part of the Soyuz/Shuttle/ISS missions.

But it does begin to look like space travel should be left to the professional agencies.

Jeepers. I was watching a Bill Gates expose in which he reduced us to a carbon bomb, emitting X amount of tons of CO2
annually. I am like….where the eff do you get off??? Oh yeah, world's richest man contest includes political fiat currency.

Then I caught Mister Off the Grid's little act as he begs any question of AGW by starting a thread ranting about how all the candidates are climate change deniers.

Sheesh. Yeah man, you're really out there. Such a rebel. I'll be back for more really quick!

Now I see this mess, and the one a few days ago that exploded basically on the launch pad…and I have to wonder…exactly how many human-year-CO2 tons/heat causing equivalence was dumped in a single launch? I suspect it doesn't matter whether the rocket explodes or performs flawlessly, or whether Fukushima smolders uncontrollably for a few centuries, or supplies Cheap. Clean. Safe power.…carbon is carbon, right?

If not carbon, well, heat is heat, kilocals are kilocals…and they intend to punish us down to the exhaling of our very breath during exercise. Riding bikes. Registering our bicycles!!! For each appliance and lightbulb harnessing resistance…we will be personally taxed. It's certainly no wonder why Branson wants to get the hell out of Dodge. The planet probably looks like a video game, from a console in space.

The crashed craft looks remarkably well preserved.

I know the big G lies about what they do in space. I know little of Mr Branson except that he is wealthy and that he is on board with the climate change scam, which IMO is well stated in someone's signature here as 'the biggest scam in history and a hi-jacking of politics'.

I must ponder what portion of his personal fortune this whole project is costing him…? Who is financing it? Who are the risk takers and so on.

Condolences to the spacemen.

# 309

a reply to: Abavs

Why would it need to be a conspiracy? Stuff like this happens when you essentially have a large amount of explosives going off in a barely controlled manner. There have been many, many failed launches over the years even from Government agencies that are the best equipped and experienced.

It's worth noting this was the first flight to use a new fuel mixture (they had previously done a ground test burn for 60 seconds, but at altitude perhaps something occurred in the engine or with the fuel to cause the explosion, or perhaps it is simply an engine defect.

It's time for the world to rely on Russia for space travel. They do all the good stuff in space plus don't have these glitches

If you look at the SPACE>COM video at 0:13... you see the blue ID number backwards and it says...SSGEEN or SS GEEN, Geen means "to go" in Crimean Gothic!! I guess the blue bloods can't "go" away ;D
HAppY HaLloWEEN *Bwuahahaha!*

Crimean Gothic[edit]
Etymology[edit]
From Proto-Germanic *gāną.

Verb[edit]
geen
to go

a reply to: ufoorbhunter

lol, Russia doesn't have glitches? I beg to differ...

Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 killed cosmonauts and there is a plethora of unmanned rocket failures involving the Proton-M and Dnepr rockets just to name a few.

I just flipped on KFI and heard the news. Very sad.

I attended all of the initial test launches. The first lauch was shaky, but the next two went well.

Space Ship One

Space Ship One X

Space Ship One X 2

a reply to: ufoorbhunter

I wouldn't say the Russians do 'all the good stuff' in space. There isn't a Gamow Space Telescope, after all.

It's also not exactly accurate to say that they don't have glitches...or did you miss the string of Proton failures over the last two years? If I wanted to be really snarky, I could even point out that the Antares rockets (like the one that failed Friday) are powered by AJ-26 engines, which are Russian NK-33s with new wiring and fuel systems.

Nationalistic sniping aside, we have two incidents here that aren't related by much more than being space flights. The Antares failure didn't surprise me too much...40 year old engines are, at the end of the day, 40 year old pieces of very complex, close-tolerance machinery. They *will* have problems. Being a member of the Commemorative Air Force, I know this first and second hand. (Admittedly, the CAF's 'old engines' are a lot older than the NK-33, but the truism stands *grin*).

The Virgin Galactic crash doesn't require any conspiracies...commercial passenger space flight in 2014 is about where commercial aviation was in the early 1920s. It's seen as an expensive, dangerous stunt, and in many ways, it is just that...but it has the potential to grow into something huge. As others have noted, they'd just changed fuel mixtures in the engine, so that's a good place to start looking into this.

I also don't think the Virgin Galactic and Antares failures are connected. They use different engines, different *types* of engines, completely different methods of launch, and follow completely different mission profiles. They don't compete for the same market (ruling out 'industrial sabotage'), and don't even compete against the government's launch program (do we even have one?).

I think this is nothing more than a Very Bad Week for space flights. It's a dangerous business, and failures happen. That doesn't mean we stop going. Ad astra per aspera.

originally posted by: stumason
a reply to: ufoorbhunter

lol, Russia doesn't have glitches? I beg to differ...

Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 killed cosmonauts and there is a plethora of unmanned rocket failures involving the Proton-M and Dnepr rockets just to name a few.

Everyone involved with launching things into space eventually has a failure.

No one is immune.

East or West doesn't matter.

Private or public doesn't matter.

Big nation or small nation doesn't matter.

Space is hard.

There's a reason why people involved in it study for years and get paid big money. When it comes off it looks simple to the average person but the fact is every successful mission has plenty of unsung heros (who most people just called geeks) who make it happen.

Space is hard.

I said that again so it could sink in. There's a reason why people say "it's not rocket science" when talking about something being simple. It's because rocket science and its associated disciplines ARE VERY difficult.

There's a reason the mission control room went nuts when Curiosity (and other missions) safely touched down on Mars.

Because space is hard.

Just when we all get into thinking access to space is mundane (see both Shuttle disasters) we get a wake up call that we still have much to learn before it is as mundane and routine as an airplane flight.

America received a double reminder of that this week.

My thoughts are with the families of the two pilots.

a reply to: JadeStar
Exactly

To put it more bluntly space is hard and # happens.

Nearly every manned vessel has had fatalities at some point before being refined and revised. The Soyuz hasnt always been the reliable taxi and the Apollo program didn't get off to a good start either.

People die in space.

a reply to: ufoorbhunter

It's time for the world to rely on Russia for space travel. They do all the good stuff in space plus don't have these glitches

Either that or Russia doesn't waste their money on image stabilized supers that can record the liftoff with with that much nearby background noise.

a reply to: JadeStar

Yep, I know that - I even said as much earlier - I was just countering the other posters claim that Russia has some magical ability to avoid faults, crashes and other such things. Preaching to the choir, matey.

One pilot was killed in the crash and his body was found in the wreckage, while the second pilot, who ejected and parachuted to the ground, survived with serious injuries, Youngblood said. The survivor was found more than a mile from the main wreckage, he said.

Both crew members were test pilots for Scaled Composites, the Northrop Grumman Corp subsidiary that designed and built the spacecraft for Virgin and lost three other employees in a July 2007 ground test accident.

Link

Just got back to my computer,

The crash site is at 35º20'28.25 N 117º55'11.73 W

And there are cops all over the place.

As soon as NTSB clears the site i will be out there with my metal detector.

originally posted by: crazyewok
a reply to: JadeStar
Exactly

To put it more bluntly space is hard and # happens.

Nearly every manned vessel has had fatalities at some point before being refined and revised. The Soyuz hasnt always been the reliable taxi and the Apollo program didn't get off to a good start either.

People die in space.

Exactly.

And people die on Earth in vehicle accidents every day. Most will never know their names.

As space tourism gets off the ground there are bound to be other accidents. But we'll keep going just as we did at the dawn of air travel which at the time it began in the early 1900s was also very hard.

YouTube is crawling with videos of course...

The first video is launch and separation footage from it's 3rd flight back in January.

The 2nd video is the from the 2nd powered flight in September of 2013.

Sad stuff, RIP pilot. But in a way - better that it happens now, at such an early stage. A bit like general aviation - things improve after a bad accident. If this fault hadn't shown itself yesterday, it could've occurred at a much later stage when there were passengers on board. Sad as it is, and despite the peddling of "people with tickets will be thinking twice" - if you take the way aviation industry learns from accidents then this is likely actually going to make this endeavour stronger and safer in the long-run. The companies that don't/haven't encountered this kind of problem will still be sitting on it at launch day, at least Virgin space won't.... It's no secret about the amount of failures in the early Apollo missions that killed astronauts in the process. This is a natural part of space pioneering, sad as it is - as one of the video guests said - the people involved are well aware of the risks.

originally posted by: Abavs
a reply to: Quantum_Squirrel

My personal thoughts on this lead me to the suspicion that there may be a conspiracy here, as it was only Wednesday just passed that the Nasa spaceship exploded after launch as well. What gets me is we have the technology to get into space with out using rockets. But we still use them, why ? The think I hate the most about this planet is the suppression of technology for the masses so powerful forces can make a hefty profit on out of date, unconventional, unpractical, unsafe, unreliable technology and religious BullS*** to keep you in tack and preventing you of reaching true spiritual freedom so you can be controlled like a good little puppet. Seriously sometimes I wish some advance alien race from some other planet would come and abduct me, my wife an dog and get me off this planet and it's poor excuse of a civilization and take us somewhere were we can reach our full potential on a harmonic planet of equalness, fairness and happyness and true enlightenment.

I don't want to believe there could be a conspiracy here.

However, this has been an odd week for private space travel and it started BEFORE the failure of the Anteres Rocket. and is also evident in the anti-private space program spin that Main Stream Media has attached to the two latest disasters.

After a few months of very positive articles on the private space industry, I noticed about a week ago that the contrary view started to pop up out of no where. Concerns about safety, before these to "accidents". Concerns about the ability to actually provide astronauts with enough supplies for a mission to Mars. Concerns about Cosmic Radiation and it's effects on long term missions. Most strangely, there was even an article that tried to say that we may be entering a decades long period of low solar cycle activity that could allow cosmic radiation more penetration into our solar system and maybe make manned travel to mars "impossible" for 60-80 years.

Then we got the one-two of Anteres and Virgin, both accompanied by tons of negative spin that would have us believe that the U.S. space program has never had a failed launch and would have us forget the catastrophic loss of two fully crewed space shuttles. As opposed to Private Space Programs, were now we are supposed to believe that anything short of perfection spells the end of private space travel for at least several decades.

Someone is trying very hard to walk us back from the impending era of cheap, private space travel. It's not hard to imagine many reasons why, most of which boil down to keeping expertise, knowledge, technology and capabilities related to space firmly under the thumb of TPTB.

If it hadn't been for the new anti-private space program propaganda push before, during and in the wake of these two failures, I would have said "coincidences do happen" when looking at the close timing of these two events. Given the propaganda wind up and shared anti-private space program talking points shared by all the major US media outlets, I'm much more willing to consider sabotage, at the direction of the Elite, as foundation for further efforts to hinder the private space industry and keep non-initiates of the power elite from having access to space and what they might see or experience there.