Video of My Appearance on the Tipping Point New Mexico Podcast
Posted by Douglas Messier on Monday, December 21, 2020
On Monday, I joined Rio Grande Foundation President Paul Gessing for an episode of the Tipping Point New Mexico podcast. We talked about the latest developments involving Virgin Galactic and Spaceport America. Topics include:
- aborted SpaceShipTwo flight test of Dec. 12
- reasons for 22-month delay in powered flights
- new Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier’s extravagant vision for the space tourism company
- why Virgin Galactic hasn’t been able to deliver on promises made to New Mexico taxpayers
- shakeup in the management at the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, and
- recent audit that recommended former Spaceport America Executive Director Dan Hicks and ex-CFO Zach DeGregorio be invested for possible criminal charges.
Enjoy!
6 responses to “Video of My Appearance on the Tipping Point New Mexico Podcast”
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Looks like Starlink is needed for Mojave…sweet Jesus that is some crap bandwidth.
The number of things we need in Mojave is long and depressing….
I thought you were going to break into a Top Gun line on that response, but that works too.
Excellent interview, Doug… lots of insight on the technical and business aspects of VG.
I hadn’t realized they’d projected about 30 powered test flights back in 2008, though I still think that’s way short of what such a ‘novel’ system like this needs to demonstrate successfully before flying civilian fare-paying passengers.
Thanks.
I agree that more flights tests would be helpful. There are only five suborbital ones on the schedule.
Aabar invested in August 2009. We don’t know what the agreement stipulated on flight tests and deadlines. We do know that by summer 2014, Aabar was impatient with delays. They wanted to see a flight to maximum altitude that year or no more investment. The delays and engine development were also costing Virgin a fortune.
The plan was to use a new nylon engine on powered flights 4-6 with 38s, 50s and 60s burns. Then Branson & son would be on first commercial flight in Q1 2015. The ship broke up on powered flight 4. And here we are six years later.
One of VG’s biggest blunders may be setting the spacecraft design in stone before having a fully vetted power plant. The Nylon engine needed a whole bunch of infrastructure that wasn’t required for the HTPB fuel grains. To completely re-engineer the airframe to accommodate the Nylon core wouldn’t have really set them back. It still may have been worth it if the performance specs were a big enough improvement. I’ve run into that sort of dilemma before. Fortunately, I learned enough in the first iteration of the product to make the redesign go pretty fast and got right on it once I could see that chances were high that I was barreling down a dead end street. Engineers get that sort of thing, the executive floor doesn’t. Their carefully mapped calendars and press statements don’t take those sorts of things into account.
The test flights aren’t cheap, but customer confidence will be a huge factor in selling lots of tickets. It will never be perfectly safe, but the chances of bad things happening needs to be demonstrated to be very low. If I had millions of dollars, the last thing I’d want to do is expire before I’ve done everything on my list.