Breaking: Virgin Galactic's Spaceship Two Crashes

Early reports are saying that a new type of plastic based fuel is responsible for the mid air explosion. They recently changed fuels. My thoughts go out to fellow pilots. Blue skies guys You were a brave man indeed.

In other news: The Chinese have successfully landed a probe in the Mongolian desert that has just returned from a trip around the moon.

originally posted by: Bluesma
Oh god, Ed Dames was already going nuts about the sun spot recently, here he will go again......

yeah, I think he was quoted as saying something about a shuttle being forced back to earth would be a precursor to the next BIG event.

Text "...If there was a huge explosion, I didn't see it," Witt said.

That is not a reassuring quote.

Funny how this article came out yesterday.. space tourism safe

a reply to: Light soul

Hopefully its not some unfriendly country testing its space based particle beam weapon . Kind of disturbing that this happens twice in one week.


But....its probably a mechanical failure in both cases. I think I heard on CNN they were testing a new fuel on the flight today, maybe the combustion chamber blew and compromised the airframe. Hopefully the pilot that survived will pull through and they can figure out what happened. In all probability, it wont be the end of Virgin Galactic, because they will learn a lot from this accident and the result will be a considerably safer space plane. Not totally safe, but safer than the version that crashed today.

Hopefully tomorrow the Air force wont say it wasnt a space ship, it was a weather balloon.

Virgin Sacrifice on Halloween. That is what I see. Extremely dark ritualists run the world.

They're testing their new technology so accidents are a must in this case. This is completely unrelated to another accident. Unless they made a bad fuel mix in both cases. After all, rocket launch is just a series of controlled explosions; a little difference in a fuel mix and it blows up with greater power than it should

a reply to: Light soul

Space travel for the wealthy, good for them.

How does insurance cover that?

a reply to: Aleister

I was also surprised how cavalier the announcer was about the whole thing, if I saw that I'd be going "HOLY SMOKES BATMAN!"..

a reply to: TheLaughingGod

The people that do that job are trained to stay calm no matter what. Look at the Challenger accident. He was the height of professional.

a reply to: Zaphod58

I see, makes sense then.

By the way, I wasn't insinuating anything sinister, just sayin'.

a reply to: TheLaughingGod

Oh no, I got it. My first reaction would be to say something that shouldn't be said on the air.

originally posted by: intrptr
Oh nooo, not more anomalies…

Just so nobody is confused, this is not the video of the Virgin Galactic crash. This video is from 1997.

a reply to: DantesPeak

Just so nobody is confused, this is not the video of the Virgin Galactic crash. This video is from 1997.

I wasn't portraying it as such. I brought it for the , "We have had an anomaly" part of the video. Her voice in that is priceless.

I didn't realize how much of set back this is at first but Richard Branson says this might be the end of space tourism. The one and only shuttle was destroyed. Damn! I didn't realize they only had one. This really sucks. Not only that but for the first time space exploration is being handed over to the private sector and after these two explosions in a week, it's a set back for the entire dream. There is going to be heavy scrutiny on private companies and they're going to need to restore faith before space tourism ever becomes a reality.

Sir Richard Branson acknowledged on Saturday that his dream of commercial space tourism may have ended in the explosion that consumed Virgin Galactic’s test craft SpaceShipTwo in the skies above California’s Mojave desert.

www.theguardian.com...

a reply to: intrptr

eh... let them... as far as I'm aware launch vehicles are dangerous things... Civilian aircraft and automobiles are mature technologies, (relatively mature). Once we start getting "luxury" ssto's then we can start getting worried about safety.

we're in the "canvas and string on a frame"-stage still (to borrow an analogy from aviation)

a reply to: FlySolo

Without some kind of backing this is a major setback. It will take a year minimum to build a new ship and complete preliminary testing before they can even be close to powered flight.

a reply to: Zaphod58
A year?
How long did it take after the Challenger?

I think Virgin's space tourism efforts are done.

a reply to: Phage

I said minimum to build a new ship, not to return to flight.