Some Virgin Galactic Customers Demand Money Back 165
schwit1 (797399) writes News reports suggest that — following last week's SpaceShipTwo crash — more than thirty of the seven hundred people who placed deposits with Virgin Galactic to fly on SpaceshipTwo have pulled out, demanding their money back. "In response to the claim that more than 30 customers are considering their position in the aftermath of the crash, a spokesperson for Virgin Galactic admitted a number of people have asked for their money back. 'We can confirm that less than three per cent of people have requested refunds,' the spokesman said." This is not a surprise, nor should it be. A company can only survive a crisis like this by responding honestly, quickly, and directly. If Virgin Galactic does this, finding the cause of the crash and fixing it, they will likely hold onto most of their customers. If they don't, those remaining customers will leave. This week's cancellations are the first immediate response to the crash. The future of the company, however, will be determined by what happens in the next six months.
If the cause of the crash... (Score:2)
armchair engineers (Score:4, Insightful)
a) I'm impressed that you've reached a conclusion ahead of the NTSB. I'm sure they'll be glad for your help
b) Every interlock is a potential point of failure. If the interlock fails in a way that prevents the tail from deploying, everyone on board will die. Deciding to put the interlock there is not as obvious as a decision as the pundits seem to think.
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Newer Airbuses limit rudder range at speed. The A300 could lose its tail if the pilot did something stupid, as happened with American Airlines 587. People seem to be happy enough to deal with the interlock.
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Similar things was a big problem with a lot of aircraft the same age as the A300 design - Boeing 737s from that period had issues with rudder reversals for instance.
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That is exactly what I wanted to say. Most modern fly by wire aircraft take the control inputs as "suggestions" and adapt them into actual control responses. The important thing is that the response properly evaluates the constraints.
Re:armchair engineers (Score:4, Insightful)
Most modern fly by wire aircraft take the control inputs as "suggestions" and adapt them into actual control responses.
Yes, but they still have manual reversion mode, where it becomes direct control inputs, "just in case".
At least the Boeing planes do.
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Newer Airbuses limit rudder range at speed. The A300 could lose its tail if the pilot did something stupid, as happened with American Airlines 587. People seem to be happy enough to deal with the interlock.
And thank goodness that there's been a meaningful poll asking all of the passengers how happy they are with the interlock, not to mention informing them of it...otherwise you'd not have been able to make this assertion!
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His post doesn't sound like he's reached any conclusion.
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a) I'm impressed that you've reached a conclusion ahead of the NTSB. I'm sure they'll be glad for your help
Me too. It's aliens that don't want would be space tourists up there to witness the aliens flying around. It's hard enough to keep the lid on trained personnel and it already cost too much on cloaking devices and traffic control. Raising the ship tail in advance is nothing for them.
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Maybe you should invest in a dictionary.
Start with the word "if". Amazingly it has a meaning.
a post by Dennis Wingo (Score:2)
"The new national sport of space geeks, unbridled speculation based upon the flimsiest of information.
We saw how that worked out for the engine hysteria didn't we . . ."
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What about stuff that can't be controlled by the human? Some modern aircraft only fly because they have a computer doing most of the hard math for keeping the craft stable. The human's input is more or less a 'guide' to follow but a lot of the actuators are in the end controlled by some closed loop controller.
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The F-117 would be a good example of this... without all the computers working, it would just fall out of the sky...
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That's exactly the machine I was thinking about. Before I signed up for the Mars trip I would want a dozen cargo ships safely leaving and arriving before I put humans there.
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Before I signed up for the Mars trip I would want a dozen cargo ships safely leaving and arriving before I put humans there.
While I understand the feeling, I don't think Christopher Columbus had that sort of assurance when sailing to the new world.
More recently, Robert Falcon Scott and his 4 companions all died in 1912 going to the South Pole.
Life isn't safe, our attempts to make it safe will be the end of us if we're not careful.
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That is quite true, if the Americas wasn't here and he had to sail across all that ocean, you're right, they would have run out of supplies. The Earth is larger than they thought it was back then.
Re:If the cause of the crash... (Score:4, Interesting)
Larger than Columbus thought. The consensus among the experts, going back to Eratosthenes, was pretty much right on the money. Columbus was the only one who thought it was smaller (much smaller, by 2/3), which is why he was rejected by the Portuguese king. I don't know how he managed to convince the Spanish monarchs to fund his expedition, but if he hadn't gotten very lucky, he would indeed have killed his crew.
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He had no idea how far the trip would be, there was no resupply missions sent ahead to make sure food and shelter would be there, and he didn't know what native people might be there when he arrived.
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Columbus had an idea how far the trip would be (and was way wrong), and he did believe he knew what the native people would be like when he got there.
Columbus stupidly believed the Earth was eighteen thousand miles around (the approximately correct value had been known since the ancient Greeks), and that he would get to east Asia. He wasn't trying to find any new land, but rather trying to reach known land by a different route.
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The F-117 would be a good example of this... without all the computers working, it would just fall out of the sky...
Similarly, I believe, for the Grumman X-29 [wikipedia.org] with its forward swept wings.
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...is giving the pilot the full control of the craft (ie, the ability to deploy the tail above rated speed) then they're going to have an interesting balance to strike...
Maybe somebody here knows more about the system architecture of the "feathers" mechanism. From what I've read, the pilot only pulled the lever to unlock the surfaces, but we do not know what caused them to actually deploy. If they were computer controlled, it could be possible that a computer or sensor failure caused them to deploy early.
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Re:If the cause of the crash... (Score:4, Informative)
It's precisely NTSB that pointed out the (deceased) co-pilot pulled the feather lock lever to OFF position.
But they also pointed out this should not have deployed the feathers on its own: another level is required to rotate them in position.
This points to a mechanical failure of sort but will take months to confirm.
Because (Score:5, Funny)
I guess they think that it is marshmallows spitting out the end of those things?
Re:Because (Score:4, Interesting)
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The engine and fuel system were relatively intact, they had not exploded. It wasn't a failure of the fuel or engine system.
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Up until now, they had no idea that a rocket could like, you know, explode?
It didn't explode.
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Up until now, they had no idea that a rocket could like, you know, explode?
It didn't explode.
Allow me to correct myself.
Up until now, they hadf no idea that anything at all bad could happen, like explode, or fall apart, or fall uncontrolled back to earth,. They apparently thought that it was perfectly safe, and that none of the problems that befall high energy, high altitude, high speed space ( or near space) systems have been prey to since their first employment.
By the way - Whoosh. Exploding is just one of the things that can happen to any rocket, along with a host of other problems that wil
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The part that really gets me is the fact that this was testing the experimental design.
With a new design there is a period of getting the kinks out. Yes unfortunately this caused the life a pilot. However that is one risks that an experimental pilot takes for his job.
Now after the investigation, I would expect that there will be something that can be fixed to prevent such a problem again. You build an other better design ship you test it out, hopefully this will not cause any lives, but I expect there w
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It is not really a rocket and it didn't really explode. More sort of fall apart. A lot.
Did it use propellant mass to form a jet of reaction mass? Then it is a rocket.
Re:Because (Score:4, Informative)
Um, not exactly. Turbojet and Turbofan engines (and piston engines) all are devices that accelerate air toward the back to get forward thrust. The mass of the fuel does get included, but it's not the primary source of mass being pushed towards the rear. A rocket, accelerates the mass of the fuel and nothing else as the post you are replying to implies..
So, if you read carefully, the post you responded is indeed correct, even if (s)he didn't make the distinction of not including air.
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Turbofans and to a lesser extent turbojets use air as the reaction mass.
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Re:Because NOT (Score:2)
The NTSB says they recovered the engine and NOX tank. No evidence of explosion in those components. Now, perhaps you are thinking of a different kind of explosion, such as how BOAC flight 781, a de Havilland DH.106 Comet 1 exploded -- a fuselage failure instead of engine failure. According to forensics after the wreakage was lifted from its watery grave, inspectors concluded that the aircraft had broken up in mid-air. If SpaceShipTwo experienced a similar type of failure, it could explain how one pilot
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Or perhaps you were talking about the 2007 ground test of the rubber-fueled engine
Perhaps? Did you not notice my explicit mention of the year 2007, which itself was a hyperlink pointing to news coverage of the very incident you describe?
To compare that failure with this one just doesn't hold up -- they are two different failure modes.
That's why I'm not comparing the two failures to each other. I'm citing the 2007 incident as a counterexample to the claim that until this recent (2014) incident, "it HADN'T exploded". It had indeed exploded, and it had indeed killed people before. It was a static firing, and it was a different fuel, and it was a different engine. But it was still Scaled
Concern or convenience? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if some of these folks were already regretting their decision to tie up money in a space flight. People's finances change, life situations change, priorities change... and this is a convenient way to try to get out of the financial obligation.
No evidence on my part... just idle speculation.
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That's possible, of course, but is it really hard to believe that an explosion would have prompted people to back out?
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Well, the legal avenue would be non-delivery.
It turns out that SpaceShipTwo is the only one and now that it's gone, well, they have to rebuild it again and go through all the testing again, which means delays. At the very least, rebuilding SpaceShipTwo would take months (if not a year), which would push out the date by a year. Depending on how things go, that could easily mean you went from
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They bought their tickets. (Score:3)
They knew what they were getting into.
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I suspect that a lot of them were just vacuous celebrities whose publicists arranged to get them a ticket at a discount, as a PR stunt. They probably have about as much of an understanding of what these flights actually are as they have an understanding of the socio-economic issues confronting Prussia going into World War One.
"Paris, what do you think of this historic spaceflight?"
"I just got a new purse. It's pink."
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I suspect that a lot of them were just vacuous celebrities whose publicists arranged to get them a ticket at a discount, as a PR stunt.
Oh come now! No need to be so harsh. JUSTIN BIEBER is on that list!
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JUSTIN BIEBER is on that list!
Leaving the planet is the only way to get away from all the haters.
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I suspect that a lot of them were just vacuous celebrities whose publicists arranged to get them a ticket at a discount, as a PR stunt.
Oh come now! No need to be so harsh. JUSTIN BIEBER is on that list!
Somebody should have let him sit in on the most recent test flight.
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They knew what they were getting into.
Given that Virgin Galactic has yet to fly a single commercial flight, then these customers did not know what they were getting into.
What they paid for was a pure marketing promise, which may or may not match the real world experience if/when Virgin Galactic actually starts commercial operation.
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Took long enough.
Discount? (Score:2)
Please offer discounted tickets...
Clearly they're going to find and repair any deficiencies, that is why they do these tests in the first place. Off'ing a ship full of paying passengers would be very bad for business. I'd sign up if I could afford to.
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StubHub should do a promotion where everyone here can list their ticket and everyone else can bid on them.
Space flight failure rate is around 5% (Score:4, Interesting)
http://marginalrevolution.com/... [marginalrevolution.com]
I could accept a 5% risk of death if I was doing something worthwhile: contributing to science or the colonization of Mars. But for a joy ride? Even if it's an order of magnitude better, a 5 in 1000 chance in death is still pretty high. That's a couple of orders of magnitude riskier than skydiving (0.0007%) or driving 10,000 miles. (0.0167%)
Climbing Everest is around 2% (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone has different risk tolerances.
And they change (Score:2)
And those risk tolerances change over time. It's been 10 years since SpaceShipOne won the X-Prize, and Virgin Galactic started taking reservations not too long after that. Someone could have gotten married and had multiple kids since then. What was an acceptable risk to them as a bachelor, may not be an acceptable risk as a parent. I wouldn't be surprised if this has been a latent concern for some time, but one could be ignored for the meanwhile since it was still a ways off. Heck if the schedule kept slipp
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True, and that's something nobody has debated.
What the OP is doing is what few people really are - placing the risk of the flying on SS2 in context. Given an equal level of risk (say, the Shuttle's demonstrated roughly 2%), I'd fly on the Shuttle to the Station any day - there's real (if unsexy) work being done there. You couldn't pay me enough to fly SS2 on a thrill ride. (OK, you probably could, every person has their price... but it wouldn't be cheap.) It's wor
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Skydiving is not a risky thing to do. You should be comparing it to actual risky things people do for a thrill, like extreme motocross or Nascar. Hell the odds of dying just from riding a motorcycle are roughly 1 in 800. http://www.medhelp.org/general... [medhelp.org]
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That is the worst citation I have ever seen. The odds of dying just from riding on a motorcycle cannot possibly be 1 in 800. I think what those odds mean is the odds of the cause of death being particular sources, conditional on someone being known to have died. There are about 10 million motorcycles in the US, and if each one is ridden, say, only once per week, then if there is a 1 in 800 chance of dying by riding a motorcycle then there would be on average 650,000 motorcycle deaths in the US each year (65
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That's not what the parent said, and that's not what the link says. The parent says:
the odds of dying just from riding a motorcycle are roughly 1 in 800
It doesn't say anything about "riding a motorcycle for a year," it just says "riding a motorcycle." I was just pointing out the absurdity of that statement, in case anybody thought that it was correct.
Furthermore, if you look at the underlying link, it says the odds of dying from heart disease are 1 in 6, and from cancer are 1 in 7. If those are annual mortality rates, just those 2 alone would imply that 30% of the US popu
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I would risk a 25% chance as long as i get to experience going out into space.
It's only fun if it's not safe.
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It gets rid of a handful of psychopaths.
Who pays for TSB investigation (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who pays for TSB investigation (Score:5, Insightful)
While I am all for commercial space programs, I am a bit confused why NTSB is involved at this point.
From the NTSB website [ntsb.gov]:
The National Transportation Safety Board is an independent Federal agency charged by Congress with investigating every civil aviation accident the United States and significant accidents in other modes of transportation – railroad, highway, marine and pipeline.
So if you have a beef with that mandate then fortuitously today is a day in the US where you can act on your beliefs.
You did/will vote today?
Re:Who pays for TSB investigation (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the NTSB is involved, there will be less scope for a company initiated cover up, findings being withheld and important information not being passed to everyone in the industry.
Look at the de Havilland Comet pressurisation issues in the early 1950s - no one knew what was going on, it took a full test with a new fuselage immersed in water and then run through hundreds of pressurisation cycles to determine that metal fatigue was to blame. The findings from that investigation was made available to everyone in the aviation industry in the 1950s, not just to the internal de Havilland design team, so Boeing, Douglas, Hawker, Lockheed et al didn't have to go through their own investigations of their own crashes to come to the same conclusions.
It also opened up a whole new area of science in metals.
Open investigations make sense, because they produce open results, which benefits you and I as the people who may one day travel on a craft which might have potentially been susceptible to the same issues.
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The problem is that SS2 is just a playtoy for the rich. Should we also fund investigations into deaths caused by America's Cup boats?
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SS2 is a craft designed to carry passengers, paying passengers - that puts it under the purview of the NTSB front and centre.
When Americas Cup boats start carrying passengers rather than crew, then they fall under the same purview.
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The problem is that SS2 is just a playtoy for the rich. Should we also fund investigations into deaths caused by America's Cup boats?
So, the SF Police and the Coast Guard weren't involved in the investigation of the America's Cup sailor who was killed while practicing in 2013?
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So if for example Boeing crashed an experimental prototype business jet, NTSB wouldn't need to be involved since Boeing is a for profit company and only rich people and companies would eventually buy the plane? Is that what you are saying?
Since FAA issued a license for the plane in question NTSB has to investigate the accident, and if the NTSB finds that the plane is unsafe they can recommend the FAA to rescind the license. Thats why NTSB is involved, it has nothing to do with "rich peoples hobbies".
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Well, I don't disagree with your complaint, but let me try and explain why the NTSB gets involved here.
Virgin is trying to do COMMERCIAL flights, not just experimental flights. They are going to take paying passengers. This means that the FAA must certify the craft as airworthy and approve the operation's safety. Being commercial, the safety standard is *really* high. They will be shooting for something on par with your average commercial air carrier.
So why the NTSB? Because of the "Safety" word in i
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This is not about the NTSB being taxpayer funded (it simply has to be), Your argument is about class envy and not really who's paying the NTSB.
If you want to argue that the tax system in the USA is unfair, I'm not going to argue that much with you, the system is broken. Personally I think it is WAY too complex and that leads to perceived unfairness. But the fact remains, the top 1% of tax payers in the country pay 50% of the taxes. If anybody has a gripe, it's them, because the bottom 10% don't pay a di
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But your numbers are just plain false. 1) The top 1% of EARNERS pay a bit less than 1/3 of the taxes, not 50%. However, that same top 1% income own more than 50% of the assets. In other words, the people that own half the wealth in this country pay less than one third of the taxes.
2) The bottom % that don't pay a dime in income tax? Some of them are wealthy - they just don't have a job. They sit at home, collecting tax free bond income, and carefully manage their ca
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I'm sorry.. I misquoted my source... It's the top 10% of tax payers pay half of the taxes.... http://taxfoundation.org/blog/... [taxfoundation.org] And the Bottom 1% usually pay negative taxes (they get refunds for money they didn't put in).
On the "framing of the question" idea, I've made some suggestions about how to make the tax system more fair, but I'm open to discussing the real impacts on people. I would argue that taxing WEALTH is not a good idea, nor is taxing capital gains. I'm not sure how you would even determin
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Your argument is about class envy
It's about the wealthy getting disproportional benefits and services from a government they've co-opted for their own benefit.
SS2 is just a toy for the rich who want to play with hopping around the planet. Virgin is shifting part of its R&D costs to taxpayers who will never be able to use it by making bogus claims about pioneering a new field in commercial aviation. If there were a real market for mass high speed travel we would have a profitable successor to the Concorde.
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Your argument is about class envy
It's about the wealthy getting disproportional benefits and services from a government they've co-opted for their own benefit.
You didn't address my argument, yet insist on reiterating yours. I don't agree with you. The "rich" pay more in taxes than the "poor" and in many cases the "poor" actually pay negative taxes (They get a check for a "refund" which is bigger than what they paid in deductions).
But I ask you the *real* question here. Do we have private property in this country or not? Is the government's job to act like Robin Hood and take more from the rich to give to the poor or is it to stimulate economic growth and the
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Interesting that you refer to taxes...and then claim that not everybody pays a certain tax. There are other taxes than income taxes, and some of them are seriously regressive.
The fact is that most people who make a lot more money than I do pay proportionately less taxes than I do.
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You want to go to Total Tax paid as a basis of comparison of who pays what? You do realize that this is a double edged knife and it cuts both ways.
Yes, I was limiting my discussion to "Income taxes" but as you point out there is a LOT more to this story. Your average guy off the street doesn't think about corporate taxes, inventory taxes, property taxes and sales taxes. Most people don't even know the difference between Federal Income Tax, Medicare and Social Security or even why they are on the pay stub
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FWIW, the NTSB is involved in quite a bit more than just "commercial travel for the masses". You're probably just used to only/almost exclusively seeing them associated with commercial airliner crashes because they make the national (and international) news, while probably most of what the NTSB investigates doesn't. Take
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How much money did NTSB spend on the investigation of the Payne Stewart's Learjet accident or Steve Fossett's accident?
As other have noted, Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composites/The Spaceship Company are seeking FAA certification for SpaceShipTwo, so, of course, the NTSB would be involved in the investigation of the crash.
The purest of speculation... (Score:2)
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Sure, a significantly higher chance of an accident and death is a normally expected cost of space travel. But a ride on SpaceShipTwo is no more on par with what we'd normally consider space travel than tourist cruise to Antarctica is on par with the voyage of the the Endurance. It's a Disneyland ride, not exploration.
Better check that math again (Score:3)
30/700 = 4% even if you round it to the more than 700 as 800 you get 3.75% which is more than 3%, not less.
Better check those tolerances again.
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You're comparing two numbers from different sources. The "more than 30" source is "news reports suggest". The "less than 3%" source is Virgin Galactic. It's not that Virgin Galactic can't add up, it's that they have more accurate numbers than suggestions from news reports.
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Fair enough. I would not be surprised to see a news source inflate numbers. Though it is also just as likely that VG is trying to downplay the numbers.
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A fair response. VG is probably reporting based on formal requests while the article is probably based on polling.
Idiots (Score:2, Flamebait)
In response to the claim that more than 30 customers are considering their position in the aftermath of the crash, a spokesperson for Virgin Galactic admitted a number of people have asked for their money back.
So they are cowards who were dumb enough to think this wasn't genuinely dangerous?
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So they are cowards who were dumb enough to think this wasn't genuinely dangerous?
You have a very strange definition of 'coward.' I'm guessing they're more concerned with the delays this will pile onto the already delayed commercial flights.
Compare to the world's own "rich endeavours" (Score:2)
Mt. Everest.. Mt Blanc.. a large part of the 'club' is being someone who can afford - and otherwise thinks themselves above the likelihood, of cheating the statistics. There is a certain lackluster cheating death and being above the rest arrogance that goes with these types of adventures, and there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that. There is also a lot of jealousy and resentment amongst the crowd who sits in their chairs at home criticising those who choose to try something different - without that
Safest time to fly? (Score:2)
Rich people's problems (Score:2)
It's hard to know what to do when you have more money than you can possibly spend. What a dilemma! ... not much excitement in that.
Let's see... 10 minutes of fear, joy, excitement?
Or... give some money to "poor people"?
I just don't have a frame of reference for the dilemma these people face.
3% is actually quite impressive (Score:2)
3% cancellations after a crash of a brand new, unproven edge technology? Malaysia Airlines cancellations peaked at 20% after its two recent accidents involving well-tested conventional technology:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... [bloomberg.com]
Moral: people who panic and fly off the handle in response to technological problems don't become the one percenters who can afford a tourist space flight.
Pretty good record... (Score:2)
Virgin Galactic's 55 successful flights is damn good.
Well, 54... Still those are good odds.
Better than most people play in the lotto.
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It's not really that much more empty than your parents' basement.
our "brave pioneers" (Score:2)
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I vote guillotine, but I'm a traditionalist.
Leave it to the French to make sure somebody looses their head....
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I'll agree with "quickly" for sure.
What PR departments do is to spin things into the best light they can for the company that pays them. In order to control the spin, you must be quick. Being honest and direct can sometimes fall to secondary status (i.e. get ignored altogether) depending on the moral and ethical stance of the company and people involved. When lots of dollars are involved, sometimes folks think that the short term gain from a quick lie is worth the long term damage it may cause so you will