‘We owe it to our test pilots to find out exactly what went wrong,” Sir Richard Branson says at the Mojave Air and Space Port
Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, and Burt Rutan, then chief executive of Scaled Composites, unveil designs for SpaceshipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo in January 2008
SpaceShipTwo glides toward Earth on its first test flight in October 2010
SpaceShipTwo completes its successful first glide flight at Mojave in California in October 2010
Sir Richard Branson with his Virgin Galactic spacecraft at the Farnborough International Airshow in the UK in July 2012
Pilots of WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo, Clint Nichols, Mike Alsbury, Brian Maisler, Mark Stuckey and Dave McKay, in April 2013. Mike Alsbury was reportedly killed in the Virgin SpaceShipTwo crash
Moments away from disaster, SpaceShipTwo flies above the Mojave Desert after launching from the carrier aircraft on October 31
The Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo rocket explodes in mid-air
Rescue crew rushes a person to a helicopter near the crash scene. Image taken from video footage by KABC-TV Los Angeles
Debris of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo
George Whitesides, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, speaks at a news conference after the crash
Members of the National Transportation Safety Board arrive at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, California on November 1
Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, tells reporters investigators were entering unknown territory
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The head of Virgin Galactic, whose test spacecraft suffered a
fatal crash on Friday, has rejected accusations that the group ignored warnings about its novel rocket propulsion system and said that it could have a new spacecraft ready to fly next year.
George Whitesides, who was speaking in an interview in New Mexico late on Saturday, said that periodic claims from others in the space industry that Sir Richard Branson’s space tourism company was running high risks marked a difference of professional opinion rather than valid warnings.
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“In the space community you will be able to find people who have favourite technologies of different types. One group will say their type of technology is better than another,” he said. “We pay a lot of attention to the several hundred engineers that we have on staff, and other expert consultants we’ve talked with about our technologies.”
However, it also emerged on Saturday evening that the Virgin Galactic spacecraft that broke apart in the sky above the Mojave desert on Friday, killing one pilot and severely injuring the other, was using a new method of propulsion that was more complex than had been widely believed, and which had only been fully tested a handful of times on the ground.
The National Transportation Protection Board, which began an investigation at the site early in the day, said by the evening that it had recovered three different types of fuel tank from wreckage strewn over five and a half miles of desert floor.
The presence of three types of fuel, which were mixed in the vehicle’s engine before being ignited, showed that the propulsion method was much more complex than an earlier one Virgin Galactic abandoned several months ago after years of experimentation, according to two rocket experts, one of whom works for a company using a different type of technology. The switch was made to try to push the spacecraft closer to the 100km altitude that is widely considered to represent the edge of space.
Groups that have warned publicly about Virgin Galactic’s propulsion systems over the years include IAASS, an organisation representing a number of space safety experts. Mr Whitesides said he was not aware of any formal warnings that the organisation had made to the company.
Friday’s flight was the first to use the new fuel system, which the Virgin Galactic chief executive acknowledged had been put through a full test cycle on the ground only a handful of times. However, he said: “We fired the motor many more times than that, but we have put that motor through a rigorous ground development programme. The results of those tests were positive.”
US government investigators said late on Saturday that it was too early to reach any conclusions about
the cause of the crash or how long the Virgin Galactic programme would be closed down. A full report could take a year, said Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the NTSB.
Even if it ultimately clears Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo of any major flaws, the length of the NTSB investigation looks set to complicate further Sir Richard’s hopes of getting back to development of the project, which is already years behind schedule.
A second spacecraft under construction for the last three years in New Mexico is “65 per cent complete”, Mr Whitesides said, adding that it could be ready to fly next year, once the cause of last week’s accident has been resolved. “The second spaceship is getting close to readiness,” he said.
