Probe into crash of Virgin Galactic space rocket may take up to a year
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BILLIONAIRE Richard Branson is promising to find out what caused the crash of his Virgin Galactic prototype space tourism rocket that killed a test pilot, but US federal investigators are cautioning that it may take up to a year to learn exactly what went wrong.
The crash in the California desert almost certainly dashed Branson’s goal of starting suborbital flights next spring, but the mogul said that while he remained committed to civilian space travel “we are not going to push on blindly.”
In grim remarks at the Mojave Air and Space Port, where the craft known as SpaceShipTwo was under development, Branson gave no details of Friday’s accident and deferred to the US National Transportation Safety Board, whose team began its first day of investigation on Saturday.
“Yesterday, we fell short,” he said. “We’ll now comprehensively assess the results of the crash and are determined to learn from this and move forward.”
He asserted that safety has always been the top priority of the program that envisions taking wealthy tourists six at a time to the edge of space for a brief experience of weightlessness and a view of Earth below.
The pilot killed in the test flight has been identified as Michael Tyner Alsbury, 39, of nearby Tehachapi. The surviving pilot is Peter Siebold, 43, who parachuted to safety and was hospitalized.
Both worked for Scaled Composites, the company developing the spaceship for Virgin Galactic. Scaled Composite said Alsbury was the co-pilot for the test flight. Siebold, who was piloting SpaceShipTwo, “is alert and talking with his family and doctors,” it said in a statement.
A former colleague said Alsbury was a “home-schooled, home-brewed” pilot who earned his way up through the ranks at the company, starting as an engineer. Alsbury had also put himself through commercial pilot school and was certified as a flight instructor.
“Mike loved what he did. I think his career ended with him doing exactly that ... That yesterday ended up in a tragedy was kind of heart-breaking for many of us,” said Brian Binnie, another test pilot who worked at Scaled Composites for 14 years before leaving the firm this year.
The NTSB’s acting chairman, Christopher A. Hart, said investigators don’t yet know how Siebold got out of the rocket ship because they haven’t had a chance to interview him. He said they found an undeployed parachute at the crash site.
He said a 8-kilometer path of debris over an area of uninhabited desert indicates the spacecraft broke up in flight. Learning where spacecraft parts fell will help investigators determine when and how the breakup occurred.
“This will be the first time we have been in the lead of a space launch (accident) that involved persons onboard,” said Hart, noting that the NTSB did participate in probing the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters.
Hart said test flights are well-documented. Investigators will review video from multiple cameras that were on the spaceship, on the mother ship, on a chase aircraft and at nearby Edwards Air Force Base.
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