Five Years Ago SpaceShipTwo VSS Enterprise Crashed in the Mojave Desert
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
Five years ago today, SpaceShipTwo VSS Enterprise broke up over the Mojave Desert during a flight test. Co-pilot Mike Alsbury died and pilot Pete Siebold was seriously injured.
The crash ended Virgin Galactic’s effort to begin commercial crewed suborbital spaceflights in the first quarter of 2015. Those flights are not forecast to begin in June 2020 — five years later than planned.
The accident occurred when Alsbury prematurely unlocked the spaceship’s feather device during powered ascent. A subsequent investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) faulted builder Scaled Composites for failing to anticipate that one of its pilots could make such a mistake.
The NTSB report criticized the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation (FAA AST) for approving SpaceShipTwo flight tests despite an inadequate safety analysis by Scaled. FAA AST subsequently issued a safety waiver for pilot and safety errors rather than cause a delay in testing.
The report documents the frustrations of FAA AST’s own safety experts, who said political pressure led the office to accept allow flight tests to continue despite the inadequate safety analysis and to issue the safety waiver.
NTSB also criticized the local emergency response to the accident as being slow.
Below are links to Parabolic Arc’s coverage of the crash and the NTSB report.
The Crash
A detailed account of the day and its aftermath based on the NTSB report.
- Part 1: SpaceShipTwo’s PF04: A High Risk Fight
- Part 2: SpaceShipTwo Pilots Faced Extremely High Work Loads
- Part 3: A Good Light, Then a Fatal Mistak
- Part 4: Pete Siebold’s Harrowing Descent
- Part 5: Shock, Tears & Spin: The Aftermath of the SpaceShipTwo Crash
Supporting Material
- Part 3.1: SpaceShipTwo Powered Flight No. 4 Flight Transcript
- Part 3.2: The Breakup of SpaceShipTwo Frame by Frame From the Tail Boom
- Part 4.1: SpaceShipTwo Emergency Response Timeline
NTSB Report
- Final Report (PDF)
- NTSB Findings, Probable Cause and Safety Recommendations
- Initial NTSB Synopsis on SpaceShipTwo Accident
- Scaled Composites Statement on NTSB Findings
- Executive Summary of Scaled Composites Submission to NTSB
- Virgin Galactic Statement on NTSB Report About SpaceShipTwo Crash
- Branson’s Video Statement on NTSB Findings
- FAA AST Responds to NTSB Recommendations in SpaceShipTwo Accident Report
- Experts: FAA Review Process for SpaceShipTwo Flawed, Subject to Political Pressure
36 responses to “Five Years Ago SpaceShipTwo VSS Enterprise Crashed in the Mojave Desert”
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there will be more of this in the entirety of new space…
But if we really are about to become space faring, we really do need to come to some sport of mature way of dealing with this. Launch vehicles are headed in the direction of tactical nuclear weapons levels of latent energy. Things are going to go wrong, and lots of people are going to die. On the ground, in flight, on the Moon, etc. Musk and Bezos would do well to prepare the society they are helping push into the cosmos to deal with disaster in a sane fashion.
my impression is that if we are lucky it will happen like aviation…the prime difference between human spaceflight and aviation is that the latter had an economic justification almost immediately after it started, the former even today does not
its interesting to look at the difficulties Boeing is going through with the Max…the Max is perfectly safe as long as it is flown by well trained pilots not third and fourth world “less” …but now Boeing is having to lower its level to that training
at some point Musk or BEzos or someone will kill some people on the ground and in flight and people will ask why? and then how? and then “we need to regulate this”
and we move on
Probably the best move in both fields will be to maintain a separation between the manufacturer and the regulator. Letting Boeing self certify was a silly move. The share holders wanting to maximize return was sure to dominate the engineering. Likewise with ultra large launch vehicles coming through the pipelines. I wonder if FAA AST was formed to deal with Saturn V class launch vehicles?
In theory yes, but as with the FAA certification of airliners, they have been captured by industry which is never good for regulators. All you need to do is look at the licenses given to locations like Mojave, Midland, Boca Chica and Spaceport Georgia to see they are not doing it based on good safety engineering data.
SpaceshipTwo should have never been tested over a populated area. And SpaceX should be doing its Starship work further up the coast either at the former Matagorda Island AFB or in the dunes below Port Mansfield, not so close to populated areas.
Striking a good balance between the needs of business, the government, and the public good is one of the eternal challenges of our form of government. It’s easy to fail, esp when two thirds of the players will feel very pleased with themselves as things go wrong until major systems failure ensue.
It’s the challenge of any form of government. But it could be worst, as in a socialist nation, where both the regulators and manufacturers are owned by the government. Ever take a long at the track record of Soviet airliners?
Concentration of ownership is socialism’s major malfunction. However Aeroflot’s air accident rate was not any worse from the accident rate of Western carriers. The problem was nobody knew what the accident rate was because it was a state secret. If American airlines could keep accidents a secret, don’t you think they’d do the same thing? Human power holders don’t like to be held accountable for their failures. In that thread, Donald Trump represents what any executive would aspire to if they could. Stable geniuses, with the rest of the schmucks “
unequipped to handle the genius of our great President.”. Unless held in check that’s where the majority of people who achieve high executive power would go if they could.
You speak as though the government actually has some real-world choice about whether or not to allow aircraft manufacturers to self-certify much of what they do. The FAA does not now, never has and never will have the in-house expertise to do the entire aircraft certification job itself.
The people with the most knowledge about aircraft are those who design them. Engineers content to make a career of backseat-driving actual practitioners of aerospace engineering are hard to find which is why the best the FAA and NTSB have typically been able to do is hire retired engineers who spent their main careers doing actual engineering.
The same is even more lopsidedly true of spacecraft engineering. No, the FAA AST was not formed to deal with privately engineered Saturn V-class launch vehicles. That would have been a fool’s errand from the get-go and it would still be a fool’s errand to attempt such a thing now. If private enterprise, where the vast majority of the current spacecraft designers now work, is not capable of building and operating spacecraft safely, no government agency is going to be able to magically make up that deficit.
The FAA does not now, never has and never
have the in-house expertise to do the entire aircraft certification job itself.
that is really not true. I was “on loan” from the navy to the FAA to monitor and test fly the P8 and TACAMO plane when I retired from doing that I went to work for Boeing. I was (gasp) the expert 🙂
I think we have now identified the problem.
Kinda makes my point. The FAA borrowed you for a bit to do a particular job it had no one on staff better able to do. That’s how the FAA gets a lot of its expertise – short-term borrowing from their long-term employers.
short term? ten years 🙂
Adding up all the experience say you have, are you actually 173 years old? 🙂
since 17? its been zounds 36 years 🙂 and a few days 🙂 soloed on my 15th birthday 🙂 well legally anyway 🙂
the other day we were havingdinner at our long time Chinese favorite place in Clear Lake and my fortune cookie was “old friends and acquaintances will return and bring you excitement ” (something like that)…my wife has known about the phone calls from Boeing and my old boss in Anbar…she frowned as she read it
very happy where I am…love my job. getting here has been a blast
There’s an old expression that an expert is an SOB from a hundred miles out of town. In my experience, all too many outside “experts” pretty close to fit that description. There are all too many CAD clickers with degrees that have jobs as engineers. All book, no field. (plenty of 30 year rookies in the field, of course}. There is a severe shortage of people that combine education instead of credentialism with enough true field knowledge to make good decisions. Many of the people brought in to remedy this known problem are selling capabilities that they don’t actually have.
An engineering prof decades ago told the class, “engineering is an exact science, and intuition”. Meaning is that it requires the ability to calculate everything, and then stand back and look at it and say “somethings just not right”, and then go back and find out what it is. Intuition, common sense, ability to see what’s missed, and so on are various descriptions of an ability to see beyond the equations. A true expert is valuable beyond price, and a BS artist is the opposite.
close I would say “engineering is an exact science tempered by experience” that latter you get by not applying the science correctly
Unfortunately, experience is much like education in that there are varying abilities to apply it. I’m sure there are pilots with thousands of hours that you wouldn’t trust in one of your birds. Likewise there are engineers with decades of experience that are nearly worthless at their job. Thirty year rookie applies to them as well.
in my life there have been 10 pilots who after flying with them in a stage check or training them or something I have worked as hard as I can to getting them out of the profession. I was successful with 5…of the 5 I was not…4 killed themselves and their passenger (or other crew person) and 1 continues on butnow is in management.
how to put this….there are pilots who I know that if something happens like say a stabilizer trim failure of any kind…it is unlikely that they will manage it well. they have demonstrated successfully in training or checking but what I call “the Jonathan” in me just kind of figures they dont have it. I do try and prove it in checking but being an examiner is a tricky thing IF they demonstrate success evenin the set piece of training…well we go on.
there is no one that I can say I have interacted with in the commercial flying world in some training way…and they cannot (or couldnt at the moment of training) handle what I would consider the normal stuff plus likely inflight problems
they are not test pilots…
I have been surprised with peers. there was one guy I worked with who I thought was an excellent instructor, one of teh best in fact and one day he and his copilot landed their DC9 gear upin Houston…another who I thought was pretty good took off in their B737 from Hobby with the pressurization CB’s collared. oops
both those events (what almost a decade and a half ago) caused me to start a continuing program of reevaluating my own 1) judgement of other people and 2) review of my own performance in technical task to see if I am missing “trends” which are part of the error tree
being the father of a pre teenage daughter and a five year old…has also helped me to constantly reevaluate my decision making in therms of “right choices” for a lot of things
I find the people who taught me…get wiser as I age. 🙂
I see I used a poor analogy. There are quick real world consequences for being a poor pilot which weeds out many before they become a danger to themselves and others. Engineers on the other hand can do piss poor work for decades without suffering more than a bad reputation, and possibly not even that. Roughly a third of the blueprints we get now are flawed to the point of having portions being unbuildable. I am having to argue with superintendents and engineers on a regular basis to fix the problems. I am hearing about projects in serious trouble because no one was willing or possibly able to argue the problems.
I am hearing of similar issues in aerospace. Mike Griffen and Ares>SLS as an obvious example.
Unbuildable blueprints are a venerable complaint. Back in the 60’s, my welding instructor told jokes about cubical boxes specified as needing two-sided welds on all seams. A retired machinist I knew in the 70’s had a lot of comparable stories from his decades at TRW and its predecessors.
My favorite two are milled recesses with dead square corners and dimensions in millimeters (known to many machinists as “Communist units” LOL) to three or four (or more) decimal places…
Machining joke designed to trip up newbies (which sadly a non-zero percentage fall for):
“Why do you move the milling table both ways in X (or Y) when milling a surface flat?”
“So you wear the cutter out evenly on both sides.”
YIKES!
And I suppose that the Australians grounded those B737 NG because of the cracks they developed is not Boeing’s fault, but the fault of poor maintenance by “foreign” mechanics?
the cracks normal wear in high cycle airplanes
So that is how the Great Boeing is going to spin it? Did I mention that the Brazilian airline Gol found them first?
I am hoping that these post-merger quality problems are limited to the commercial airliner part of Boeing and not their space business.
Robert Oler wrote: “the prime difference between human spaceflight and aviation is that the latter had an economic justification almost immediately after it started, the former even today does not”
No there wasn’t. In business there is something called the cost of entry. THOUSANDS of brand new surplus planes going for 300 bucks and an army of unemployed pilots …
How about if Uncle Sugar paid for a few thousand reusable dream chasers and the rockets to launch them .. and sold them to retired astronauts to fly for less than scrap prices and see how many tickets for joyrides to LEO would be sold.
“The Curtiss JN-4, built by the Curtiss Aeroplane Company in Buffalo, New York, became a mainstay of the US Army Air Service, which bought thousands of them to train pilots. It was a rudimentary plane, even then, with one seat for a student and another for the instructor. It had two fixed wheels and a wooden tail skid. Fitted with a 90-horsepower Curtiss OX–5 V8 engine, the biplane could hit 75 mph and fly as high as 11,000 feet. It had a wingspan of 43 feet, weighed less than a ton fully loaded, and could stay airborne for just over two hours. Most of them carried no weapons and were used solely for training.
What made the plane so special, and so popular, was the fact that it was mass-produced. The JN-4D, the most popular model, came out in 1917, and four other companies joined Curtiss in producing enough of them to meet wartime demand. All told, nearly 7,000 Jennies were built, most of them JN–4Ds produced during the 12 months before the end of the war.
As popular as the plane was with the Army, the Jenny came into her own after the war. The government sold hundreds of surplus JN-4s, some of them still in their shipping containers, to anyone with $300 (about $4,130 today), says Jeffery S. Underwood, a historian at the United States Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. The plane proved especially adept at barnstorming, becoming the most popular aircraft used in that daring sport. Thousands of pilots learned to fly in a Jenny, including Amelia Earhart.”
https://www.wired.com/2014/…
I’ve flown a replica of the Jenny. completely different handling qualities then today 🙂
the USAAF built JEnny’s for WW1 the great war because it could concieve of something that crewed aircraft could do of value hence when that purpose ended they were surplus and people found other things to use them for
nothing like that exist in human spaceflight. there is not a single thing humans do in space that pays for the cost of being there. one day we will probably have surplus X37’s…someone could find a use for them…they will be uncrewed
I think extra-terrestrial business enterprise will become a self-powering thing over the coming couple decades or so in which case the approaches to space disasters – as well as the generally non-panicky reaction of the general public – will parallel that we now see in the wake of terrestrial transportation disasters and for the same reasons.
If extra-terrestrial business enterprise does not become a self-powering thing, then worries about human casualties incurred in space disasters will become irrelevant as there will be no human spaceflight to which such disasters may occur.
The rational way to handle it is to do what we now do anent airline crashes, bus crashes, train derailments and ferryboat or cruise ship sinkings – do the best we can and, when that isn’t enough, try to learn and apply new lessons. This process will most assuredly not be assisted by people whose main motivation is to aggrandize government power by loudly demanding that “something be done.” As those people are exclusively on your side of the political divide, maybe you’re the one who should have a word with them.
I think I need to remind you about how it’s taken care of today and works very well.
N
T
S
B
!
I’m talking about the expectations of the culture. The public gets bent out of shape when Astronauts die. Getting bent out of shape when the public at large dies is a good thing to get worked up over. Professionals are expendable to some degree.
The NTSB and, to a rather lesser extent, the FAA, are the institutional instantiation of what I said.
Despite the dim-witted illusions of many leftists, neither of these agencies exists to prevent transportation accidents – that is impossible. What they do, to the extent possible, is try to prevent repetition of accidents due to any single particular cause or causality chain.
Even that is not possible when two or more such accidents happen in a short period of time that is less than the minimum OODA loop of the NTSB and FAA. That’s what happened, for example, with the 737 MAX.
Anent spacecraft and future fatal accidents involving them, the process is going to have to be the same. The NTSB has a fairly obvious role in autopsying such accidents, but the FAA – or any future space-oriented FAA-equivalent – will not have any useful role to play in certification of spacecraft until a sufficient real-world knowledge base is obtained via operations. That was the case with aircraft and will be the case, again, with spacecraft.
Giving a government agency certification authority before a knowledge base is accumulated sufficient to allow meaningful certification to take place will simply retard forward progress. If the FAA had been stood up before WW1, for example, the era of the biplane – at least for civilian purposes – might well still be with us.
Michael Alsbury was Honored by being added to the Astronaut Memorial.
Commercial Space Pilot Honored at Space Mirror Memorial
By Greg Pallone
Brevard County
PUBLISHED 4:42 PM EDT Nov. 01, 2019
Good.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
this kind of construction is going to take us to Mars?
this is like a scene from Ask this old House where Norm Tom and the gang sit around and laugh at home inspection boners
several things jump out. corrosion with rust, rivets that are rusting, welds that are rusting, rust…gee…my welds dont rust like that
the panel that is new is square meaning well sheer force is less. obviously no WD 40 is being used on the SX Rustoleum
lets hop on in
The Mk1 is never going to Mars.
As to more substantive matters, I see no rust and no rivets. Those dots look like spot welds to me, probably to attach the skin panels to the internal ribbing. The seam welds have the same grey appearance as the spot welds because no pointless effort has been wasted polishing them. That’s going to be saved for vehicles that are expected to be in long-term use.
sure