I have been reading lately that there has been serious concern about the liquid-solid hybrid engine used in Spaceship 2. In 2007 there was a nitrous oxide explosion that killed three people.

parabolicarc.com is a pretty good source of information on New Space. Here are some tweets:

I am a huge supporter of commercial space, most especially Space X. But I think that accidents like this give the whole sector a bad name. Virgin Galactic/SC have been building this ship for 10 years, and they still don't have a viable engine. That is not a good sign.

Contrast that with Space X, which in about the same amount of time has built the Falcon 9, which has a string of 13 straight successes (touch wood). It seems to me that not all space companies are created equal.

My guess is that it was a turbo-pump that failed. Those are a part of this Soviet engine, and were also likely made in the 1960's.

Elon Musk called it two years ago in this interview.

Almost all the US space program is ALREADY private. The dominant US launch platform is United Launch Alliance, which was created by a merger of Lockheed Martin and Boeing when the US tried to bring in competitive bidding for Air Force launches. Their merger allowed them to become the sole bidder on most launches, allowing them to continue to receive their cushy "cost plus" bids. These "cost plus" bids allow them to pretty much charge whatever they want for costs, and then receive on top a guaranteed profit margin. There is no incentive for efficiency. In fact, ULA has almost no international customers because their costs are more than double their competitor's prices. They grow fat at the teet of the US Air Force.

Space X is a relative newcomer, but since its first generation rocket (Falcon 1) had three failures, the last of which was caused by a timing error in stage separation, it has had a nearly perfect launch record. The Falcon 9 rocket has never had a significant failure (ie. one that prevented orbit of the primary payload). Touch wood. Their rockets have been designed in house with the eventual goal of re-use. Their rocket engines are designed to be simple and failure resistant. And their rockets have nine engines, so that even if one fails the flight can continue. I wouldn't write off competition yet.

It was a test vehicle that self-destructed, and not a full rocket. The test vehicle did not have all of the redundancies of the production rocket. A single sensor failure stopped the rocket. In the real rocket, there are multiple redundant sensors from which the control systems constantly poll...if one goes, the computer ignores it in favor of the other working sensors.

From Socrates, The Apology (399 B.C. or so)

Everything old is new again.

Are you sure about that?

There was a video on the NYTimes site, but it was really short. And I just realized that the New York Times has one of the most irritating video players I have ever used.

Von Braun risked his life to even think about using his rockets for space travel while working under the nazis. He almost single-handedly dragged the Americans into the space age. He is not perfect. But he did change our world in a positive way.

This article argues that Elon Musk is in many ways like Werner Von Braun or the Soviet scientist Sergei Korolev (who pushed the Soviets into space). One thing I got from this article was that the original and primary motivation for building rockets was to make weapons. Von Braun and Kovolev almost singlehandedly pushed their own countries into building rockets to put people into space. Without them, we might not have had satellites as quickly or at all. Placing satellites into orbit and putting humans into orbit was once considered crazy. American government officials considered Von Braun to be eccentric, but they didn't care as long as he gave them better ICBM's. Now our entire civilization is built around satellite technology, and our moon shots have brought us technology advances such as the microchip.

When we talk about putting more humans it can sound a little crazy. However I don't think it is any more crazy than having people climb Mt. Everest, having bases in Antarctica, or sending three small ships westward into the unknown ocean to find a new world. We humans have an inbuilt desire to explore. To ignore that is to go against our fundamental nature.

I can speculate that it is a matter of size...too large and radiofrequency penetration will not work. But if the plasma body is small enough, they can get sufficient penetration.

Agreed. Thus my signature. Sometimes I feel like slashdot is like this:

Oh puleeaze. This is Skunkworks. Thomas McGuire did his PhD thesis on fusors at MIT. This isn't just some investment scam. Do some research.

Yeah. I'm somewhat disappointed that shallow dismissive/mocking comments seem to outnumber more engaged comments by three to one. We are supposed to be geeks. How many of us have heard about this reactor? It was announced many months ago. How many of us have searched the term "high beta reactor"? This development is potentially world-changing. It would solve the world's energy problems. It would make human deep space travel feasible. And the announcement is coming from a credible scientist from a credible laboratory.

I am beginning to suspect that slashdot is getting spammed by agenda driven posters.

Yes, but this is Lockheed Martin. And we live in the age of computer aided design, where we can simulate much of an object before building this. In addition, I'm fairly sure that they have built smaller versions of this as proofs of concept. And now they have Thomas McGuire making the announcements, who is the lead scientist on the project, instead of the project manager doing presentations. He wrote his PhD thesis at MIT on fusors.

I am inclined to believe that this is the real thing. My main question is this: They use radio frequency radiation to heat the plasma; how have they overcome the rf shielding effect caused by hot plasma?