Wall Street Journal Story Adds Details to Virgin Galactic’s Troubles With SpaceShipTwo
Richard Branson speaks to the press at the Mojave Air and Space Port about the crash off SpaceShipTwo. (Credit: Douglas Messier)
The Wall Street Journal has a good piece on all the problems Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic have had with SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo over the years. It pretty confirms everything I’ve been writing for the last few years, adding some interesting details but getting a few of them wrong.
There were a number of interesting elements here:
The article claims that Sierra Nevada Corporation was brought in by Scaled Composites to develop SpaceShipTwo’s engine in 2009. That’s not accurate.
Scaled Composites signed a contract for engine development work with SpaceDev in August 2008. SpaceDev had developed the original engine for SpaceShipOne, but there was a falling out between the company and Scaled Composites. (More accurately, a falling out between Scaled Composites’ Burt Rutan and SpaceDev’s Jim Benson, who once came to blows at a space conference.)
Scaled subsequently embarked on its own rubber hybrid engine program. After a fatal explosion on a test stand killed three engineers in July 2007, Scaled decided to bring SpaceDev into the program.
Sierra Nevada Corporation complete its acquisition off SpaceDev in December 2008. Sierra Nevada worked on SpaceShipTwo’s rubber hybrid motor until earlier this year when Virgin Galactic announced a change to a plastic hybrid motor.
According to the story, SpaceDev said it would take four to six years to design an engine for SpaceShipTwo. Yet, during that period, Virgin officials were constantly reassuring everyone that everything was on track with the engine. I recall doing a story about five years ago for a magazine, and the Virgin people told me all was A-OK with the engine. A short time after filing the story, I discovered it wasn’t.
Sir Richard Branson was also perpetually making optimistic projections during this period about when commercial service would begin, predictions that were significantly at odds with realities in Mojave and Poway. I’ve become very aware of that gap during the last three years that I have been living in Mojave.
The story also confirms what I reported about SNC’s rubber hybrid not being able to get SpaceShipTwo all the way to space. The plan was to reduce the passenger load to four. The article says Virgin Galactic told Sierra Nevada it couldn’t make money with that passenger load. This led to the change to the plastic motor and a parting of ways with Sierra Nevada.
What the story doesn’t say is that the addition of wing tanks for methane needed to light the plastic motor added a lot of weight to the ship. So, the passenger load appears to be stuck at four, and it’s not clear exactly how high SpaceShipTwo can fly with the new propulsion system. They’re aiming for 50 miles (the U.S. Air Force boundary of space) and hoping for 62 miles (the international definition.)
The story also slightly distorts an incident that occurred in which a plastic hybrid motor came apart on the test stand. If it’s the incident I’m thinking about, it occurred in May 2013, not earlier this year. (Unless Virgin Galactic destroyed another test stand in 2014, and I just haven’t heard about it.) In any event, I recall that it was about three weeks after the first powered flight in late April 2013.
It is true that they introduced flaws into the motor for the 2013 test. However, the subsequent explosion came as a shock to everyone because it destroyed an expensive test stand and permanently damaged a nitrous tank. Nobody sets out to do that.
67 responses to “Wall Street Journal Story Adds Details to Virgin Galactic’s Troubles With SpaceShipTwo”
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Virgin Galactic seems to be falling apart.
At least they managed to build Vagport America!
They didn’t build it. The state of New Mexico built it and paid for it. A massive government subsidy to their business model and strategy.
They could assign one of the passengers as “Team Leader” and give them the stewardess duty. Give them a special mission patch too, make them feel special.
You would select the passenger roster to include one hardy soul to act as the team leader and give them some extra training. Don’t put all old ladies on the same flight. I’ll be Leo DeCaprio would be good at this.
Leo would ace it 😉
Joke aside. The whole thing depends on sending untrained people into space as quickly as the line can form. Training a passenger to any level of ‘safety officer’ might be more than people are interested in giving. I was thinking of this back when the FAA guidelines came out.
2 passengers make that big a difference? That would only be around 300-350 pounds…
Maybe they could strap on a couple of JATOs.
welcome to the logarithmic rocket equation
Great pick-up line 😉
JATOs are you suggesting big solid rockets or liquid bottles?
How would that be different from tuning the Hybrid main engine?
the solid rocket JATOS that Air Force used to use for overladen transport aircraft. They burn for like 10 seconds and then jettisoned after they’re spent.
They wont really be allowed to unbuckle (for the same reason). The passengers will remain tethered to their seats (I assume this tether has a rewind system so they can be pulled back into their seats automatically). However, there are plenty of other situations where you would like calm and well trained assistance. If FAA legislative authority over this type of operation, and it looks like it, I believe they will insist on some form of cabin crew.
The most revealing part of the article is the part about how vibration made the instruments difficult to read. I have never found it credible that someone like Mike Alsbury would unlock the feather mechanism unless he thought it was the right time to do so. Perhaps Mach 1.04 can look like 1.4 on a readout if you are being shaken about violently enough.
if a dial is hard to read, an audio tone, or a digital readout is indicated
Or if something so critical is difficult for a human pilot to perform reliably under those conditions, perhaps it should be automated.
I posted this to an earlier article, but it looks relevant here as well:
Like many former Virgin Galactic Employees, I have chosen to remain subject to specific perpetual NDA clauses. (Out of VG: More than six months; Area of expertise: rocket propulsion avionics unrelated to those recently flown on SS2; Currently working: in a completely different industry.) However, I can still have, and occasionally choose to express, my personal opinions based on publicly available information:
I think Mike Alsbury’s actions unlocking the feather system at about Mach 1.0 may have been standard, but possibly undocumented, procedure. While not ideal, it is very common in intense development environments for both procedures and assemblies to evolve beyond official documentation. Public video of prior flights seems to me to support the idea that unlocking the feather system immediately upon attaining Mach 1.0 was de facto standard procedure.
NTSB representatives publicly stated that unlocking the feather system alone should have been insufficient to activate the feather system and, in their review of the data so far, they have observed no other actions on the chain of events required to activate the feather system. To me that means that, regardless of current general media assumptions about causal procedural error, there must have been some sort of as yet un-publicized failure.
In speculating about that as yet un-publicized failure, I think potential failure causes might include:
(1) A simple, but unfortunate, pre-flight or pre-release procedural error where the feather actuation lever may have been pre-set to “actuate” rather than “not actuated”. (While the NTSB public statements did say they observed no movement of that lever during the flight, the NTSB has not stated whether that lever was already in the “actuate” position or already in the “not actuated” position.)
(2) An error in how the feather actuation system was assembled so that it resulted in an “actuate” command when the lever was in the “not actuated” position or regardless of position. (I have seen no NTSB comments directly pertaining to this idea, though I believe they have spoken a bit about aerodynamic forces potentially prematurely activating an unlocked feather system.)
(3) A propulsion system event of some sort that damaged the feather system resulting in uncommanded actuation or disintegration of the feather system. (The NTSB has stated that the tanks and the engine were found, intact. This still leaves plenty of (highly speculative) room for plumbing between the tanks and engine to fail in myriad ways that might over pressure the part of the spacecraft containing the engine and result in that compartment and/or the feather system experiencing un-planned disassembly. Has anyone seen post-crash images of this plumbing in the publicly available media?)
Just like my three numbered thoughts, above, ideas about potential causes of the crash of the VSS Enterprise, without additional concrete data, are pure speculation. I think such speculation is a valuable learning thought process for our collective aerospace engineering community but is unlikely to be considered helpful by VG’s best-in-the-world PR team. Technical candor just isn’t the corporate way, for almost any company, especially if the entire business is at stake. That’s why we have the NTSB and others like them.
‘Just saw Kenneth Brown’s pics at Aviation Week:
http://aviationweek.com/com…
I’m sorry, but a tight zoom on VSS Enterprise in the photo just before the climb angle increases and before the feather system moved seems, to me, to clearly show an anomalous propulsion system event.
In another photo on the same page, the clean removal of the cabin and the engine compartment looks, to me, to be consistent with an over pressure event in the (largely still intact) space between the engine and the cabin.
Of course, my thoughts here are speculative. I hope for the best possible ultimate outcome for VG/TSC/Scaled and for the New Space industry in general.
Have they altered the pictures on display? When you refer to ‘the photo just before the climb angle increases’ you seem to be describing the first image, but that looks normal.
The third photo in the article body. Photo by Kenneth Brown titled ‘…before the climb angle increases…’ Download the jpeg and zoom in. ‘Not much detail, but enough.
Thanks, I see now, there was a problem with my browser before and I didn’t get the images and text correctly displayed. I think it would be hard to deny there are two hotspots visible in the image that can be seen without sophisticated image processing and simple zooming. Applying some image adjustments seems to show smaller hotspots more clearly as well. I think you are right, there is an anomaly there.
http://spaceinfo.s3.amazona…
Image sequence as in the above linked article. Second (right) image titled ‘before the climb angle increases’
Note that the manipulation of image values has caused the image on the left to look ‘cool’ when the exhaust is brightly lit in the original color image. This means the bright spots in the right image show a noticeable increased temperature over the temperature of the exhaust on the left picture.
That is very interesting, but we need the exact time at which the the right picture was taken. Are the visible flame the cause or the result of the break-up? Did the start of the break-up began just before flame arise or the flame at first? Can we preclude that the right photo does not show already the disintegration by aerodynamic forces?
Good point, The exif data contains the image shoot times, Left 10:07:32 Right 10:07:33. However we don’t know how those times relate to the other observations, or if we can rely on the cameras clock. Only the photographer will know how accurately it was sync’d up. However I would suggest that if the rocket engine was recovered intact as has been reported that it is less likely that this anomaly was caused by the movement of the feathering mechanism. In the right image the spacecraft looks fairly normal apart from the exhaust anomaly and the attitude/orientation. Did the movement of the feather cause an engine anomaly, or did an engine anomaly create a violent vibration which caused the feather to move.
I am asking myself, why we do not see in the photo the normal very hot rocket propulsion plume/flame similar to the appearance of the so called hot spot. Did the engine already shut down in the moment in which the photo was taken?
Be careful how you interpret my processed image, the hot exhaust is hidden on the left. What I did was process the right image to show just the hot spots, then applied the same processing to the left which caused the left image to look cold, it isn’t. Check out the original images on the link above if you want to see.
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Thank you for this considered reply. My thoughts are a response to what I think is a currently unfounded view in the press that Mike Alsbury’s actions were causal in the accident. NTSB has not said that, but the press, whether guided or not to this unfounded conclusion has in a number of places suggested it or would lead the reader to conclude it. There are many past incidents where human factors or more baldly what the press calls ‘pilot error’ (which is potentially quite a different thing) turned out to be a smokescreen until a true technical problem was later revealed.
I’ve long thought that normal people, no matter how ego expanded they are, will find a flight on a rocket ship completely terrifying, especially if they know they are on board one with a history of crashing.
I once went on a scuba diving course. One of the other students was a guy who seemed like the profile of the VG customers, 50’s, great physical condition, wife 20 years younger, medical career, very well off, much given to physical pursuits like rock climbing etc. I thought he’d walk the intro scuba course. But on day 3 when they put us in a sea with a 1 meter swell, he freaked and gave up the course. I was amazed, but it goes to show, until you are in the water, you just can’t tell.
I think you are right about the ‘ride of terror’. People are sold the serene view of Mother Earth in all her majestic splendor, but not a real word about the controlled explosion that will get you there. Once the word gets out you those casually interested will drop out.
I wouldn’t go up in SS2 for a million dollars.
You could well be right, it might have been felt to be a safer operational option than taking the risk of hitting a high altitude and not being able to unlock them.
I have read that more than once. VG does not The tether might not be very long. I’m envisioning something just long enough to allow the passengers an experience of weightlessness. Either that of no ‘egress’ at all.
http://www.spacesafetymagaz…
VG is selling trips as a ‘shirtsleeve environment’, but you are right, flying to 360.000ft with no more protection than a bottle fed pressure cabin is asking for trouble.
MAC, Yes it is a recipe for disaster and I will be am amazed if any of the regulatory bodies will allow it to continue.
We may very well see it become mandatory for the flight crew to wear full pressure suits.
The use of pressure suits in of themselves could/would force a redesign of the cockpit, seats, controls, knobs and add additional weight of life support systems to an already overweight design.
Reading the NTSB comments it seems the cockpit layout was designed for suits. They said, or maybe someone reporting said, the unlock lever was big and central so it could be operated with heavy gloves. I’m just guessing here.
I don’t follow the sub orbital stuff very very closely, but I did assume the pilots were at least wearing pressure suits and I was VERY surprised to hear that they were not.
I don’t know what the planned burn or apogee was for that particular flight, but I would think they were looking at least 60K-70K AGL.
At those altitudes there is just no room for error regarding cabin atmospherics if you have no pressure suit whether they are breathing oxygen or not. Most people think that you will be OK breathing oxygen at those altitudes, but the fact is the body is incapable of absorbing oxygen under those kinds of partial pressure.
If they were to redesign SpaceShipTwo for pressure suits, they would end up with serious expenses and changes. Major changes would be required to the ship, additional weight added…the list goes on.
Jeff Feige at Orbital Outfitters — which is providing pressure suits for XCOR — says that pressure suits are something you have consider at the beginning of designing a vehicle. They’re not something you can easily retrofit into a ship later on.
I agree Doug, that was my point in an earlier post.
So do we know definitively if SS2 was or was not designed for crew pressure suits?
What regulatory body? Right now it is essentially unregulated, and I don’t see that this crash necessarily will change that.
Umm? How about The Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space
Transportation and NTSB?
Both have been largely hands off, but now a fatal accident there will be a bit more oversight.
I thought NTSB was not actually regulatory, and the FAA was under a moratorium preventing them from imposing much of any regulations. This accident *might* change that, but I don’t see that it necessarily *will* – is there any public outcry to push them in that direction?
You are correct the NTSB is not a regulatory body but they will provide feed back on the accident to the FAA. The FAA is a regulatory body but does not always make accident recommendation’s into an (AD) Airworthiness Directive.
I will research more into the certification process as I have some questions on the process of who is watching over the development if anybody.
Knowing a something about aviation regulation, be that US or otherwise, I’m pretty sure you are right.
Part of the Aabar deal was to operate from Dubai sometime in the future…
Supposedly only with the approval of New Mexico and the Spaceport Authority. Although, we have continually heard from Sweden that Sweden is also exempt on the Spaceport limitation without approval deal.
Steve Landeene went from Executive Director of SPA to building a Spaceport in Abu Dhabi in about one month’s time.
Doug: Thanks for linking to this article. It certainly confirms and reinforces what you have been saying for some time now: this enterprise has become very shoddy and risky with Sir Richards time pressures added to the mix. I will be very interested in what the NTSB has to say down the road. I am not denigrating the pilots, scientists or engineers involved with it rather the fairly toxic culture that hangs over it all.
Yes, it is a good article.
I think the problem is fundamentally the same one that resulted in the Challenger and Columbia accidents, namely a huge over confidence based on past good luck in earlier incidents with first SpaceShipOne.
Paul Allen really did make a good call retiring it after the Ansari X-Prize. Unfortunately the downside is that it gave a false sense of confidence in the design that probably, like the Space Shuttle, led them to underestimate the risks from difference failure modes in the system.
The relationship between Scaled and Virgin is very bad. Mr. Branson is not well liked over at Scaled.
Not surprising given their radically different cultures and approaches. I also suspect that in the past Burt Rutan acted as a buffer between the two since Sir Richard seems to respect him, so the relationship probably became worst after he retired.
What will be really interesting will be if the NTSB determines that the “feathering system” is too dangerous for them to use. That is even more a core part of the design than the rocket.
Although it does given them an advantage of re-entry if it works, if it doesn’t its LOS as the re-entry heat would be too great for it to survive. Similarly it appears that if its not locked solid before it is need it results in LOS. Given that you really need to wonder if the risks outweigh the benefits, especially for a commercial human spaceflight vehicle.
It will be very interesting to read what the NTSB report says about the feathering system in a year or two when its released.
good point!
I had heard that it might not survive if it reentered unfeathered… not that it *would* not. That might have been for SS1 though, and SS2 might have higher heat loads (or not, if it doesn’t get up as high…)
Andy Pasztor is notorious for his attacks against SpaceX and private space.
One of the three main shills….
This is actually fairly accurate, as to the concerns expressed, even if dates and some details are wrong.
He also believes that only a few people outside the company knew about these problems.
LOL!
Just you, me about tens of thousands of other monthly visitors.
Hello Mr. Messier, does exist meanwhile a statement of Burt Rutan to accident? Did anybody try to contact him in Idaho?
None of which I am aware.
“It’s an enormously sad day for a company,” Burt Rutan told The
Associated Press in a phone interview from his home in Idaho, where he lives since retiring.
http://www.thestate.com/201…
All I have seen.
In 1829 the Stevensons Rocket had a top speed of 29 miles an hour. This was widely thought that humankind could not survive travel at this speed and that suffocation would likely occur. Trains moved on from there and now often travel over 200 mph. We all fly, routinely, in aircraft that have previously crashed (very few have not). Yet we continue to happily hop on board and strap in. Why? Because every accident makes them safer. If the pioneers in any field of new technology simply gave up and walked away when something went awfully wrong, or didn’t produce the desired and necessary results in the predicted timeframe, then we would all probably still be getting around in Stevensons Rocket. And another point: It was the super-rich customers who funded the early development of air-travel (and many other things we now all take for granted). I am constantly astonished at the negativity towards Galactic from armchair critics who would likely not have the courage and determination to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles and do it themselves.
And this has nothing to do with VG and the Ansari X-Prize. Its not a question of if its possible to fly sub-orbital or even orbital. Its about the development of a scalable and suitable business models. In short its about commercial success, not physical limits.
For example its possible to build airplanes that turn into cars, but no one was able to made it commercially successful. The same with cars that turned into boats.
Also the major funding behind early air travel was the reliability of government mail contracts and governments paying the premium to send government employees to distant locations quickly because the government needed to do so. The rich tourists, although getting a lot of hype, weren’t enough to drive the development of early global airlines like Pan Am and British Imperial Airways.
It was only after World War Two left a global aviation infrastructure in place, and paid for the development of large four engine transports, that international airlines were able to really move into the tourists markets.
The problem with the Sub-Orbital Launch industry, made worst by the Ansari X-Prize, was that it focused the industry away from those profitable and sustainable markets. The reason XCOR is as successful as it has been is that it has ignored that siren call and focus on multiple markets, with space tourist just be a niche segment for all the hype it gets.
I would argue that government employees were also technically “wealthy travelers” in the 1920’s and 30’s. The ticket price was the same for all and the government was happy to pay the premium, so the fact they did not buy the ticket personally does not remove them from the category.
But you could hardly call them tourists.
I agree that XCOR is very promising (likely more so than VG despite their comparative lack of funding) but they still have a long way to go compared to their goals.
“And another point: It was the super-rich customers who funded the early development of air-travel”
Early aircraft, flight and air travel was massively funded by the militaries of the world during and after WWI.
WWII further precipitated the need for additional air travel infrastructure and manufacturing capability and was kept intact after WWII which paved the way for the real expansion of global aviation.
Not rich people.
I don’t disagree that WW2 helped, but it really all began long before that, in about 1925 with the launch of the 12 passenger Ford Tri Motor. Without wealthy paying passengers regular commercial flights would not have been viable. Your average Joe was not hopping on a plane to NY in the 30’s.
But it was still the airmail contracts that made it pay, passengers were a secondary source of income. But more importantly those wealthy passengers were flying for business, not pleasure, which is a key difference. Sub-orbital tourism exist entirely for the thrill seeker market, not business travelers looking to gain a time advantage to beat the competition to a deal. The same was also true for the early railroad and steam packets. Fast point to point service has provides a business advantage.
The closest analogy to sub-orbital tourism would be the early balloon flights in France in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, which were more of a fad for the wealthy than a solid industry.
Thanks for keeping the torch of history focused in these times. People have hijacked the evolution of aviation and use it to support ventures going in completely different directions. Government money, not individual surplus wealth, made aviation happen.
To me it is more about the culture of VG, its promise to deliver soon so it takes shortcuts in the development. Using a engine designed for a demonstration for a commercial service, hiding the development problems. Instead of conducting a full engineering review of the system they effectively just said scale it up a bit and it will be fine. However when it became obvious that was not the case with the engine they did not step back and review the situation just tried to tweak the motor and suffer vibration issues.
It is not so much the concept that is bad just the way VG are going about it. The technology is not that new, apart from the feathering the X15 did this about 60 years ago so it is not pioneering technology but rolling out a commercial product..
That interview may be also of interest in context with the topic:
http://www.spaceflightinsid…
Better hop on MiG-29, it will take you to the edge of space, plus you will get enjoy aerobics flying back & definitely lot safer than trying a Virgin, lol.