It would be nice if they did. That would be a lot easier to deal with than their real problem, which is propulsion.
As Jeff explains, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about the nature of spaceflight regulation in the US, both here and across the pond. As I noted on Twitter:
Let's be very clear: The FAA has NO STATUTORY BASIS 2 withhold a license from VG with regard to passenger safety. No test flights required.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) January 26, 2014
The purpose of VG's test flights is to satisfy THEMSELVES that the vehicle is safe for their customers. The FAA DOES NOT care, legally.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) January 26, 2014
To emphasize, you could have 1% chance of survival, and the FAA will STILL ISSUE THE LICENSE, as long as you've been made aware of that.
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) January 26, 2014
This, from Jeff’s article, is a good summation of the license situation, despite the recent misleading stories about it:
The emphasis on a lack of a commercial launch license, then, is something of a red herring. Virgin doesn’t need a launch license now to continue its testing regime, isn’t late now in receiving one, and given current law, there’s no reason to believe the Virgin won’t receive one before it plans to begin commercial flights, so long as as it can demonstrate the vehicle’s safety to the uninvolved public.
Yes.
[Afternoon update]
Jeff Foust also has a summary of the London Times article that’s behind their paywall, with some corrections.
[Update a couple minutes later]
If the reporting is true, and they really are finally running away from the hybrid, and particularly the rubber hybrid, as fast as possible, I wonder what the implications of this are for Sierra Nevada? Will they continue to promote hybrids, and will they still use one in Dream Chaser assuming it flies in three years? I’d bail on it myself and just buy something from XCOR, but they have a lot of PR invested in the technology, thanks to Jim Benson.
I’m not sure I completely agree with your statement. The FAA does have statutory basis to issue licenses. Much of that licensing deals with the operation of the launch and recovery facility. However, the flight itself does only require the passengers be informed and consent to the risk.
There are required tests to be performed in the operation of the facility. I wonder it that is where VG may have compliance issues. I’d be surprised if they do, since I thought both Mojave and Las Cruces were licensed. The latter was just recertified earlier this year. Perhaps that’s what the biographer was referring, but if so, he’s a bit of an idiot to put in paper, when the relicensing wasn’t in doubt. As for the Chinese nationals; that is simply ITAR, which is State Department and not DOT/FAA.
To summarize, I don’t believe the biographer, but I do think your statement is a bit too simplistic to be accurate. It’s twitter, so accuracy is tough with just so many letters.
I didn’t say they don’t have statutory authority to issue licenses. I said they don’t have the statutory authority to deny them on the basis of passenger safety.
I’m somewhat curious what kind of mass penalty you’d pay if you replaced a single hybrid with a cluster of ten hybrids that were a tenth as large, fed from a common oxidizer tank but with separate fuel valves. I would expect higher reliability and a smoother ride, along with lower development costs.
It’s basically geometry.
Circumference is 2*pi*r, then divide by 10, and recalculate.
It’s also engineering. The volume to weight ratio of a pressure vessel for pressure P is independent of its size, so I don’t think there would be a big hit to performance as long as the fuel grain geometry was similar. It would also make it easier to get a high length/diameter ratio, which improves combustion efficiency in a hybrid. For some reason nobody seems to have done it, though, and I’m wondering why.
Unfortunately, under the pressure of the Ansari X-Prize, they had no choice but to go with the hybrid and to skip a normal flight test program. Now they are really paying the price.
As I noted before. The Ansari X-Prize didn’t advance commercial suborbital space systems, but actually set such systems back by forcing firms like Scaled Composite into making technology decisions prematurely, focusing them on the wrong markets and creating a hype that caused Sir Richard Branson to buy into, a hype that is not difficult to escape.
But that is what happens when you replace markets with prizes. Prizes may work well in socialist economies but are no substitute for the wisdom of markets. XCOR ignored the Ansari X-Prize which is why they are really the ones to beat. Virgin Galactic by deciding to ride on the hype of the Ansari X-Prize lost years because of selecting the Ansari X-Prize winner instead of selecting a spacecraft with the same care they would use to select a commercial airliner. So may we all agree now that the Ansari X-Prize was a failure? That it was nothing but a poorly structured PR stunt?
Yes, Tom, we all agree that aviation prizes ruined the airline industry, which never developed the way spaceflight has. Just like computers, biotech, the entertainment industry — all destroyed by prizes.
If only the Bush administration hadn’t wasted billions of dollars on technology prizes, but poured the money into an expensive program to return NASA astronauts to the Moon, as you called for. Surely, we would be mining the Moon today!
Don’t you ever get tired of trolling?
Darn it Ed, I was holding back on that one because he said:
I was thinking of framing that one and mailing it to him as some kind of diploma. 🙂
George,
I have been against government subsidies for New Space from the start, which is basically what COTS and Commercial Crew are. And calling the X-Prize a failure for as long. Folks like Edward have been in favor of such socialist models for as long.
You are not going to get viable commercial systems by either prizes or government subsidies as I posted before. At best you might get technical advances from government contracts, for example the engines developed for bombers used for commercial transports. But historically bombers made poor commercial transports and commercial transports made poor bombers (i.e. the B-18, The Lincoln, etc…).
“I have been against government subsidies for New Space from the start, which is basically what COTS and Commercial Crew are.”
I think we’ll have to wait a decade or two before we can conclusively say whether the X-Prize was a failure–even if VG aren’t flying, that doesn’t mean it didn’t make people take commercial manned spaceflight more seriously–but I’ve never understood this claim. How is the government buying launch services from a private company a ‘subsidy’, unless they’re ignoring better alternatives in order to do so?
You can certainly argue that ISS is a white elephant that should never have been built and should be left to burn up over the ocean, but, if it’s going to continue operating, someone has to launch cargo and crew. Assuming their choice of launcher makes financial sense, that’s no more a subsidy than a government department buying an airline ticket or sending a Fedex package.
Well, since we’re on this digression, most of the bomber engines were commercial, but of course the commerce included big military contracts for engines meeting certain criteria for power to weight ratio, horsepower, etc. A good engine is a good engine.
As far as I know, none of the bomber conversions worked out for civilian transport because bombers just aren’t built right. A few tries were made with B-17’s and the like but it’s still just putting chairs in a bomber that’s overbuilt and laid out wrong.
Furthering this digression from the main topic, there were some direct attempts to convert bombers into airliners, such as the Avro Lancastrian. After WWII, quite a few medium bombers like the A-26 were converted to executive transports by companies like On Mark.
Much more successful as an airliner was the Boeing Stratocruiser which was a derivative of the C-97 which was a derivative of the B-29. Perhaps second order derivatives of bombers make more successful airliners, although the Tu-114 derivative of the Tu-95 Bear bomber was apparently successful.
Edward,
Evidence? Let’s strip the myths and legends away about aviation prizes.
The Orteig Prize was won by a modified Ryan Mail plane, a model which was already in commercial mail service. The one custom built for the Orteig Prize simply had all the weight stripped out and was stuffed with fuel tanks. It wasn’t a technical advance or breakthrough, merely a PR stunt.
Actual commercial service with aircraft across the Atlantic started first with seaplanes a decade later, then with modified transports that had a technical heritage from large transports and bombers from the 1930’s and WW II and was driven by market forces.
The plane that won the Dole Prize was a Travel Air 500, already in commercial service, simply modified to carry extra fuel. Again, just a PR stunt, with no relation to market forces. It wasn’t even a first, an army Fokker Transport had made the flight weeks before.
FYI It looks like Space Tourism is still considered a joke in by The Republic in Arizona, but then it is The Republic so I guess it should be expected 🙂
http://www.azcentral.com/news/politics/articles/20140125rep-orr-space-travel-companies.html?nclick_check=1
Political Insider: Rep. Orr looks out for space-travel companies
The Republic | azcentral.com
Sat Jan 25, 2014 8:21 PM
[[[Rep. Ethan Orr, R-Tucson, has introduced a bill that would assure a company is not legally liable for any injuries, emotional distress or death a space-flight participant may incur if the participant signed a liability release.
Next up, proposed regulations for teleporting.
Beam me up, Scotty.]]]
So much for getting the message out…