MOJAVE, Calif. — The loss of an experimental spaceship that broke up over the Mojave Desert, killing one pilot and seriously injuring another, has renewed criticism of the way the craft’s designer and Virgin Galactic handled a deadly explosion seven
MOJAVE, Calif. — The loss of an experimental spaceship that broke up over the Mojave Desert, killing one pilot and seriously injuring another, has renewed criticism of the way the craft’s designer and Virgin Galactic handled a deadly explosion seven years ago.
Space enthusiasts watching Virgin Galactic’s race to send tourists on suborbital flights have complained for years about a 2007 explosion that killed three people on the ground and critically injured three others during a ground test in the development of a rocket engine for the same vehicle that crashed Friday.
“Now we’ve got another person killed, another person seriously injured. So we’ve got a lot that has hurt the industry,” said Geoff Daly, an engineer who has filed complaints with several federal agencies over the use of nitrous oxide to power the ship’s engine.
SpaceShipTwo tore apart Friday after the craft detached from the underside of its jet-powered mothership and fired its rocket engine for a test flight. Authorities have not given any indication what caused the accident. National Transportation Safety Board investigators were on the scene Sunday. The agency could take up to a year to issue a final report.
Daly was co-author of a critical report on the 2007 incident at Scaled Composites, the company owned by Northrop Grumman Corp. that designed SpaceShipTwo. The report was critical of Virgin’s claims that nitrous oxide was safe to use in engines for passenger flight, and it complained that the public was never given a full accounting of what happened.
“Something is wrong here,” Daly said Sunday. “We offered to talk, give our experience. It was either ignored or totally dismissed.”
Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides issued a statement Sunday to tamp down conjecture about the cause of the crash.
“Now is not the time for speculation,” he said. “Now is the time to focus on all those affected by this tragic accident and to work with the experts at the NTSB, to get to the bottom of what happened on that tragic day, and to learn from it so that we can move forward safely with this important mission.”
