Virgin Galactic Flight

Eagle's Eye Photo · Jul 11, 2021

Live Stream here

Virgin Galactic Flight

mshmovie · Jul 11, 2021

Eagle's Eye Video said:
Live Stream here

Virgin Galactic Flight

Was pretty cool. I love seeing innovative approaches to get common people (with lots of money ? $250k per ride - I'll spend mine here on earth) to the start of space. Was odd to hear that the spaceship is manually controlled in 2021; that it's analog. There's a decent short read here: How Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo Passenger Space Plane Works (Infographic)

UasDriver · Jul 11, 2021

mshmovie said:
that it's analog

LOL, Analog done right beats 1's N 0's

mshmovie · Jul 11, 2021

UasDriver said:
LOL, Analog done right beats 1's N 0's

I'll say that depends, I'd hate to have the pilot sneeze while feathering. I suppose that's why they have two pilots (carbon based failsafe).

I'm a big fan of 1's and 0's and manipulate billions of them all the time; even as I'm typing this there's code I and my team wrote making 1's 0's and 0's 1's with a purpose on over 150 servers with two 10Gbps pipes connected to them.

In either case, analog and digital can both be catastrophic, in this case the use of the analog controls failed (and just like in the digital world Virgin Galactic Pressed on):

The VSS Enterprise crash occurred on October 31, 2014, when the VSS Enterprise, a SpaceShipTwo experimental spaceflight test vehicle operated by Virgin Galactic, suffered a catastrophic in-flight breakup during a test flight and crashed in the Mojave Desert near Cantil, California.[1][2] Co-pilot Michael Alsbury was killed and pilot Peter Siebold was seriously injured.

The National Transportation Safety Board later concluded that the breakup was caused by Alsbury's premature unlocking of the air brake device used for atmospheric re-entry. The NTSB said other important factors in the accident were inadequate design safeguards, poor pilot training and lack of rigorous oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).[3]

Excerpt from: VSS Enterprise crash - Wikipedia

Digital example of failure in flight:

The Mars Climate Orbiter (formerly the Mars Surveyor '98 Orbiter) was a 638-kilogram (1,407 lb)[1] robotic space probe launched by NASA on December 11, 1998 to study the Martian climate, Martian atmosphere, and surface changes and to act as the communications relay in the Mars Surveyor '98 program for Mars Polar Lander. However, on September 23, 1999, communication with the spacecraft was permanently lost as it went into orbital insertion. The spacecraft encountered Mars on a trajectory that brought it too close to the planet, and it was either destroyed in the atmosphere or escaped the planet's vicinity and entered an orbit around the Sun.[2] An investigation attributed the failure to a measurement mismatch between two software systems: metric units by NASA and non-metric (imperial or "English") units by spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin.[3]

Excerpt from: Mars Climate Orbiter - Wikipedia

The internet is handy.

Regardless of the chosen approach, keeping it smart and not more complex than necessary usually wins the day. Sometime not more complex than necessary is extremely complex and has to be.