Re:Titanic tourist sub goes missing sparking search
by fredoralive on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @05:15AM
(#36401514)
But Virgin Galactic isn't supposed to making an experimental craft, that was SpaceShipOne. They're supposed to be making the production version to carry passengers. You can't really have "ship blows up" levers once the public is on board.
Re:Titanic tourist sub goes missing sparking search
by gymbeaux on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @09:56AM
(#36404020)
Well they did address the “ship blows up” lever, which… it’s not fair to call it that, as though it were a self-destruct button, it’s a lever for controlling the orientation of the wings, since sometimes the ship is a glider and sometime’s it’s more like a rocket. If that lever is pulled too soon, it’s sort of like deploying extreme flaps on an airplane, it immediately and drastically changes the flight control surfaces and puts sudden force on the plane to go a different direction than it’s currently going.
It’s experimental in the same way commercial airplanes could be considered experimental until accidents went down to “basically zero”. Flying commercial was kind of risky until the ~70s.
So you have all these I assume twenty-somethings working on VMS Eve, the prototype aircraft that takes the Spaceship craft to their launching point 30,000 feet up or whatever it is... Eve is basically two airplanes riveted together by their wings, and it's been why Virgin Galactic is years behind schedule on starting commercial operations. It's still probably going to be a maintenance nightmare, and if it decides to split in-air, they're certainly going bankrupt.