Another question looms: How far will the accident push back the day when paying customers can routinely rocket dozens of miles into the sky for a fleeting feel of weightlessness and a breathtaking view?
A team from the National Transportation Safety Board kept working Monday at the Mojave Desert crash site where Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo fell to the ground. The accident killed the co-pilot and badly injured the pilot, who parachuted out of the ship Friday.
Late Sunday, acting NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart said cockpit video showed that the co-pilot unlocked SpaceShipTwo’s unique “feathering” system earlier than planned. The system works somewhat like the wing flaps that airplanes use to slow for landing — except that SpaceShipTwo’s twin tails rotate up at a far more extreme angle, to a position that creates strong resistance and slows the descent.
Although the co-pilot unlocked the system before planned, that action alone should not have been enough to change the craft’s configuration. Activating the feathering system requires the pulling of a lever, not unlike a gun fires only when the trigger is pulled, not just because the safety has been disengaged.
Questions abound: Why did the co-pilot unlock the feathering system at that moment? Why did the tails begin to rotate without the co-pilot starting that process?
NTSB spokesman Peter Knudson said Monday that investigators believe once the feathers were unlocked, “aerodynamic forces” buffeting the craft as it hurtled along at about 760 mph caused the feathers to start rotating. Within two seconds, the craft began to disintegrate, investigators determined.
SpaceShipTwo is carried aloft on the underside of a jet-powered mother ship. It then drops from that ship and fires its own rocket to head higher. The feathers are not supposed to engage until the craft reaches a speed of Mach 1.4, or more than 1,000 mph, Hart said.
Knudson stressed that a final cause will take months to determine, and that investigators were looking into other factors, including pilot training, mechanical failure and design flaws.
Passenger jets typically fly about seven miles high. Virgin Galactic envisions flights with six passengers climbing to more than 62 miles above Earth. Seats sell for $250,000.
The ultimate goal of Virgin Galactic co-owner Richard Branson is to create an industry that can move people around the globe in a fraction of the current time it takes passenger jets, by rocketing them into space and back down.
But the company now lacks not only a craft to fly, but also an understanding of what caused the crash.
Though rival companies also are pushing ahead, the dawn of space tourism seems to have been pushed beyond the horizon yet again.
SpaceShipTwo has been under development for years, and Branson originally predicted passengers would be enjoying the wonders of flight by now. In the weeks before the crash, he said he hoped to fly in 2015.
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