Tragedy struck Friday for Virgin Galactic's commercial space tourism program when a prototype of SpaceShipTwo crashed into California's Mojave Desert. Now investigators have a preliminary answer as to why: the tail section of the vehicle deployed too early.
That resulted in the ship breaking up in mid-flight, but there still remains a question about how the incident happened. The crash resulted in the death of one pilot, Michael Alsbury, while severely injuring the other pilot onboard, Pete Siebold
The procedure for deployment of the tail section of the craft requires two steps and is only supposed to occur at Mach 1.4. First a pilot must unlock the system. After that, a pilot moves a lever into the "feather" position. In this incident, Alsbury unlocked the tale earlier than normal, when the craft reached Mach 1, but video of the cockpit showed that neither pilot touched the feathering lever. This suggests that something with the tail's deployment system is faulty.
However, this is just preliminary information and doesn't explain exactly why the tail malfunctioned. Investigators expect that it will take months to figure out just what happened, as well as understand why Alsbury unlocked the tail early. Initially, investigators thought that a new kind of rocket fuel the craft used was at fault, specifically since it hadn't been flight-tested before, but that has now been factored out as cause for the crash.
The crash is sure to raise concerns about commercial space exploration, particularly after Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket crashed last week, which is also still under investigation. That rocket was taking a supply module, Cygnus, to the International Space Station, and exploded shortly after launch.
SpaceShipTwo is part of Richard Branson's dream of commercial flights to space. Already, over 800 people have bought rides to fly about 62 miles above Earth on the finished spaceship at $250,000 per ticket. Branson states that his company will do all they can to determine what caused the prototype ship's crash. He remains confident, however, in his company's mission.
"We've always known that the road to space is extremely difficult, and that every new transportation system has to deal with bad days early in their history," says Branson. "Space is hard, but worth it. We will persevere and move forward together."
Although Branson initially hoped that commercial flights would begin next year, he called the incident a "massive setback" for the company.
[Photo Credit: Jeff Foust, Wiki Commons]
