NTSB officials said early in the investigation that the co-pilot prematurely unlocked equipment designed to slow the descent of the spacecraft during initial re-entry. Aerodynamic forces extended the feather mechanism as the vehicle moved past the speed of sound, Mach 1, and broke up.
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The crash of a Virgin Galactic spaceship last year was caused by a catastrophic structural failure triggered when the co-pilot unlocked the craft’s braking system early, federal safety investigators said Tuesday. “You don’t go into it believing that ‘Oh, no one will ever make a mistake.’ A single point human failure has to be anticipated and then the system has to be designed to compensate for that error”, he said.
But sharing the blame, safety officials said, was the company testing the space plane, Scaled Composites.
On the morning of October 31, 2014, the white shape of SpaceShipTwo took to the skies over the Mojave Desert in California.
NTSB chairman Christopher Hart said he hoped the investigation will prevent such an accident from happening again.
The accident killed co-pilot Michael Alsbury and badly injured the pilot. But the NTSB found that Alsbury began this process early, and the wings repositioned without the levers being pulled.
Despite the fact that because of his actions, the spaceship crashed into the desert, the NTSB noted that Alsbury as “very professional”.
Virgin Galactic, part of British billionaire Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, is now building another spacecraft. Siebold told investigators he managed to unbuckle himself from his seat before his parachute deployed automatically. There was optimism on the part of many that commercial flights were perhaps only months away. The waiver, posted on the website parabolicarc.com this morning, essentially gave Virgin Galactic’s partner company license to carry out crewed flight tests without conducting an analysis of “hazards resulting from human and software error”.
In the future, Scaled will have less of a role in SpaceShipTwo’s development.
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Virgin Galactic also confirmed Monday that it suffered a hard start on a motor during a test fire operation on June 30, but the extent of the damage to that motor is unknown. When construction is completed, the craft and its WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane will be flown by Virgin Galactic pilots under different procedures.
