I think armchair quarterbacking is reckless and inexcusable. These people has been working on airplanes and space crafts for some time now and I would trust their judgment. Especially given that they put their own lives on the line.

"These people" that designed the spaceplane didn't put their lives on the line, they put the lives of the pilots on the line. And I would trust the judgment of the engineers at Boeing, Sierra Nevada, SpaceX, Lockheed-Martin and the entire Soviet space program over theirs.

Really... You are going to trust the entire Soviet space program compared to the engineers behind this project? I really don't think they were being reckless with having pilots. Ultimately, their plan was to take other patrons up to space. You will need personal (experienced space flight attendants) while conducting the flight. This is obviously tragic and my thoughts go out to the families affected. However, when you are trying to do something as complex as space travel and leaving earth you will unfortunately have mishaps and deaths.

Please have a look here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program#Incidents....

Please read the context of the first post--I'm referring to the engineers behind the specifically mentioned Buran program, an autonomous spaceplane that launched, flew and landed with no crew.

If the Soviets deemed it too risky for human pilots and managed to automate it 25 years ago maybe that should put it into perspective just how risky and reckless what Virgin are doing is.

So the pilot died in order to make Richard Branson's space tourists have a safer and more enjoyable weekend. Cool.

The pilot died trying to make a cheap, reusable orbiter a reality. The tourists are there to help pay for it.

It's not even that; it's suborbital.

Gotta establish a suborbital trajectory to reach orbit, though.

One step at a time.

>I find it absolutely reckless and inexcusable to require live humans riding on a prototype rocket when you have all the processing power needed to automate/remote manage the vehicle literally in your pocket.

I think people should make that decision themselves.

The following is purely personal opinion. Feel free to disprove me.

I think at the moment, and into the foreseeable future, a human at the pilot seat for an experimental craft, where all sorts of unexpected scenarios could pop up, would be much better suited than an automated "test" pilot, given that sometimes you don't even necessarily have the correct parameters of your plane/rocket to program a successful autopilot.

Keep in mind that people at Virgin Galactic will have finite resources. Even if you can automate something that can access very unexpected situations and make a correct decision on what to do, the cost of doing that vs a test pilot is going to be much higher.

As far as I'm aware, aircraft autopilot systems do not perform well when unexpected mechanical failures occur and usually defer to humans by sounding alarms and such.

As for rockets, especially test ones, usually the automated system that makes a call when mechanical failures occur involves self destruct to prevent collateral damages.

It looks like this was the first time they turned on the engine with a new fuel plastic base fuel. I don't understand why they had humans strapped in when testing an experimental fuel in an experimental rocket engine.

"During the nine months since the previous rocket-powered test in January, Virgin Galactic switched SpaceShipTwo's fuel mixture from a rubber-based compound to a plastic-based mix"

They definitely tested the engines on the ground[1]. You have to give the engineers the benefit of the doubt, at the very least.

[1]: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JBrl96U...

I dream of one day becoming a test pilot. Especially in ships during their developmental stages, unaccounted for situations will come up, and a human capable of assessing and managing these situations are necessary.

For each of the technologies involved with the X-37, et al., that technology required testing with a human-in-the-loop to act as the judge for if the control output made sense. It simply isn't feasible to begin testing your robot pilot without first testing it with a pilot there in the first place.

At some point you need to put people in those ships, and at some point you need to put test people in ships you eventually want to put people into.

Where is the line?

Of course it's easy to say this in hindsight, but I might draw that line somewhere around where you're trying out a new fuel for the first time.

Yeah, well you're always trying something for the first time.

But I get what you mean. It's a tough thing to figure out, and hindsight is always going to be "well we shouldn't have done that".