Hope you can join us for our monthly NASA Retirees Luncheon this Thursday at Hibachi Grill at 11:30.
Also, per Nick Lance/NAL--- The next "First Thursday Series" program will be this Thursday, November 6 at Tietronix Software, Inc. (1331 Gemini Ave, Suite 300). Garrett Reisman, SpaceX Dragon V2 Program Lead will provide a "SpaceX Commercial Crew Program Update". The program will run from 2:30 – 4:00 pm.
Per Larry Ratcliff ----After the NAL program, at 4pm the monthly Keg O The Month gathering will still convene at the Gilruth pavilion in front of the Girluth Center.
| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- KSC Car Passes for Viewing Orion's EFT-1 Launch
- The Taming of the Flu
- Watch for Deer on the Road
- What Are Physical Sciences, Anyway?
- Managed Elevated Privileges Continues - Organizations/Social
- Virtual Seminar Speakers Wanted
- Spring Ahead With Toastmasters - Jobs and Training
- Human Systems Academy Lecture
- IRDLive Presents: NAMS Upgrade Coming Nov. 12
- Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Training: Dec. 8-12
- Russian Phase One Language Course - for Beginners
- Job Opportunities - Community
- Texas High School Juniors Needed: Apply Now |  |
| Headlines - KSC Car Passes for Viewing Orion's EFT-1 Launch
JSC has received a limited number of car passes for employees to view the Orion Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1) launch from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) causeway, the Turn Basin, or KARS Park. The 25 car passes are far fewer than the number of requests, so JSC distributes the passes by a random selection of interested employees. Passes are only issued to civil servants and contractor employees with an active JSC badge. Co-ops and interns may qualify for a pass if they possess a permanent JSC badge. Pass recipients may have friends and family with them in the vehicle, limited to no more than four people, and ALL guests must be U.S. citizens. Causeway pass recipients must read and comply with a safety and information agreement before obtaining the pass. If you are interested in a car pass, please email Stephanie M. Lee no later than close of business TODAY, Nov. 3. Selected employees will be notified on or before Nov. 13, and passes will be issued approximately two weeks before the launch. Please do not send multiple requests/emails—and no phone calls will be accepted. Passes are non-transferable; a waiting list will be maintained in the event that the recipient is unable to attend or does not meet eligibility requirements. - The Taming of the Flu
Our thanks to the nearly 3,000 JSC team members who received their seasonal flu shot during the month of October! Although we have concluded our outreach sessions, a limited amount of seasonal flu vaccine is still available. If you are still interested, here is what you need to do: If you are a JSC civil servant or contractor housed on-site, call the JSC Clinic at x34111 (281-483-4111) and ask for an appointment for a flu shot. Before your appointment, visit our website (below), read the Vaccine Information Statement, complete the consent form and bring it with you on the day of your appointment. Seasonal influenza activity usually peaks between December and February; however, outbreaks can occur as early as October. It takes two weeks for your body to develop antibodies against the flu after the vaccination, so now is the time to act! - Watch for Deer on the Road
Please be extra cautious as you drive around JSC during the next two months. The deer-breeding season, or "the rut," begins this week. Deer are far more active during this period and less attentive to vehicles. Consequently, the risk of dangerous deer-vehicle collisions increases drastically. Deer are most active around sunrise and sunset, which now coincides with periods of high traffic. Practice safe driving: Watch for deer, maintain a safe speed and following distance, avoid using cell phones while driving ,and be especially alert when arriving in the morning and leaving in the evenings. Some deer may also be more aggressive during this period—so, as always, never feed or approach a wild animal. - What Are Physical Sciences, Anyway?
During November, a month that marks 14 years of continuous crewed operations aboard the International Space Station, NASA will highlight physical science research on the space station. Understanding the fundamentals of combustion, surface tension and colloids will lead to more efficient combustion engines; better portable medical diagnostics; stronger, lighter alloys; medicines with longer shelf life; and maybe even buildings that are more resistant to earthquakes. - Managed Elevated Privileges Continues
Tomorrow, Nov. 4, Managed Elevated Privileges (MEP) continues with the Q, S and T org codes. MEP controls admin rights (Elevated Privileges, or EP) on NASA computers and allows users to request EP when needed. Users must complete SATERN training before submitting any requests for EP. All users, especially those scheduled for MEP deployment, are strongly urged to complete the SATERN training for "Basic Users" (Elevated Privileges on NASA Information System - ITS-002-09). The next scheduled deployment date is Nov. 11, which will complete the Q, S, T and V org codes. Organizations/Social - Virtual Seminar Speakers Wanted
JSC is hosting an agencywide virtual seminar next month as part of an effort by the Early Career Scientists and Engineers Working Group to promote work being done by early-career scientists and engineers. We are looking for THREE early-career speakers (ONE scientist and TWO engineers) to give 10-minute presentations to an agencywide audience. The seminar is scheduled for Nov. 19 at noon CST. For consideration, please send a title and brief (three- to five-sentence) description of the talk you'd like to give. Event Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 Event Start Time:11:45 AM Event End Time:1:00 PM Event Location: Adobe Connect Virtual Seminar Add to Calendar Aaron Burton x42773 [top] - Spring Ahead With Toastmasters
Clocks may have fallen back an hour, but Toastmasters continues to move forward—refining public speaking skills and making every hour count. - Thursday, Nov. 6
- Friday, Nov. 14
- Thursday, Nov. 20
Jobs and Training - Human Systems Academy Lecture
Join the Human Systems Academy lecture tomorrow on "Kidney Stones - Rock Your World." Kidney stones are common medical problem. This seminar will discuss the causes, treatments and potential prevention of this disease. There will also be a discussion of impact to the Earthbound population, as well as the results from investigations on both short- and long-duration space missions. - IRDLive Presents: NAMS Upgrade Coming Nov. 12
The Information Resources Directorate (IRD) invites you to participate in an IRDLive session to introduce you to the NAMS 7.0 upgrade. We will focus on the NAMS 7.0 new look, capabilities and user navigation. You can attend the presentation, demonstration and Q&A from your desk via Lync and telecom. NAMS 7.0 is scheduled to go live Nov. 12. Bring your questions about NAMS 7.0. Save the link. You must dial in to the telecom and join the Lync meeting. - Telecon: 866-459-2110, passcode 1561614
- Tomorrow, Nov. 4, from 1 to 2 p.m.; Join Lync Meeting
Note: NAMS will be unavailable 6 p.m. Friday, Nov. 7, through Tuesday, Nov. 11, as the system is prepared for the Nov. 12 go-live event. - Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Training: Dec. 8-12
Lean Six Sigma is one of the continuous improvement tools and methods used to help achieve operational excellence. The Lean Six Sigma approach helps identify process deficiencies; eliminates redundant or ineffective steps; and overcomes barriers that inhibit the rapid and smooth flow of work. The overall purpose of Lean Six Sigma is to improve process quality, which ultimately helps reduce operational costs and schedules. Green Belt training provides both the knowledge and tools necessary to effectively identify improvement opportunities, confidently participate on the Lean Six Sigma teams and apply lean principles and Six Sigma methodology to respective NASA/JSC projects and work areas. The skills acquired in class are beneficial to aspiring project managers, team leads—and anyone who works in groups to make risk-based decisions. Dates: Dec. 8 to 12 in Building 20, Room 205/206 Open to civil servants and a limited number of contractors. Prerequisites and approval are required. - Russian Phase One Language Course - for Beginners
Russian Phase One is an introductory course designed to acquaint the novice student with certain elementary aspects of the Russian language and provide a brief outline of Russian history and culture. Our goal is to introduce students to skills and strategies necessary for successful foreign language study that they can apply immediately in the classroom. The linguistic component of this class consists of learning the Cyrillic alphabet and a very limited number of simple words and phrases, which will serve as a foundation for further language study. Dates: Nov. 10 to Dec. 11 When: Monday through Thursday, noon to 1 p.m. Where: Building 12, Room 158Q Please register via SATERN. The registration deadline is tomorrow, Nov. 4. - Job Opportunities
Where do I find job opportunities? To help you navigate to JSC vacancies, use the filter drop-down menu and select "JSC HR." The "Jobs" link will direct you to the USAJOBS website for the complete announcement and the ability to apply online. Lateral reassignment and rotation opportunities are posted in the Workforce Transition Tool. To access, click: HR Portal > Employees > Workforce Transition > Workforce Transition Tool. These opportunities do not possess known promotion potential; therefore, employees can only see positions at or below their current grade level. If you have questions about any JSC job vacancies or reassignment opportunities, please call your HR representative. Community - Texas High School Juniors Needed: Apply Now
High School Aerospace Scholars (HAS) needs Texas high school juniors. The application is due tomorrow, Nov. 4. HAS is an interactive, online experience highlighted by a six-day residential summer experience at JSC. Students will explore science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) concepts, with an emphasis on space exploration, during the online experience. Students who are selected to come to JSC will continue their STEM studies with hands-on team activities while mentored by NASA engineers and scientists. | |
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| JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles. Disclaimer: Accuracy and content of these notes are the responsibility of the submitters. |
NASA and Human Spaceflight News
Monday – November 3, 2014
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Commercial Vehicle Promises More Frequent Return of ISS Experiments
Jeff Foust - Space News
A Houston startup established by a former NASA official is developing a small vehicle to return experiments from the international space station that could be ready for flight by late 2016.
Antares Failure Raises Questions About Vehicle's Future
Jeff Foust - Space News
The explosion of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket seconds after liftoff Oct. 28, destroying a Cygnus cargo spacecraft, will likely have a modest near-term effect on NASA and international space station operations, but a far greater one on the future of the Antares itself.
NTSB says rocket planet braking mechanism deployed early
William Harwood - CBS News
Investigators looking into the fatal crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane said Sunday twin tail booms that rotate away from the fuselage to increase drag during atmospheric re-entry deployed earlier than expected during a test flight Friday. Seconds later, the futuristic spaceplane broke apart while traveling at roughly the speed of sound, injuring one pilot and killing the other.
Privately-Funded Space Research Leverages Scarce Public Funding | Commentary
Jeffrey Manber - Roll Call
Roll Call recently reported on Sen. Tom Coburn's final "Wastebook" with negative descriptions of two of my company's customers' use of the International Space Station. Coburn went on to call for canceling the ISS entirely, which he claimed would save $3 billion, not understanding these two projects are mostly privately funded.
Shuttle monument dedicated during Titusville ceremony
Rick Neale – Florida Today
Facing a crowd next to an eight-ton stainless steel space shuttle emblem, astronaut Bob Crippen reminisced about his NASA spaceflight career that started in April 1981.
Can space industry survive 2 explosions in 4 days?
Seth Borenstein - Associated Press
Fiery failures are no stranger to the space game. It's what happens when you push the boundaries of what technology can do, where people can go. And it happened again to Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo.
Commercial Space Advocates Remain Confident Despite Accidents
Jeff Foust - Space News
After two high-profile commercial space accidents in less than a week, advocates of private space ventures told attendees of a student space conference that, while saddened by the failures, they were still confident about the future of the overall industry.
OPINION: Commercial space learns a valuable, painful lesson
It's been a bad week for commercial space companies. On Tuesday, Oct. 28, Orbital Sciences' Cygnus cargo ship Deke Slayton was destroyed when the Antares rocket carrying it exploded just after liftoff from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Barely three days later, on Friday, Oct. 31, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo crashed east of Mojave. No one was hurt in the explosion of the unmanned Antares, but SpaceShipTwo was crewed by two pilots, one of whom was killed – the other was badly injured.
Virgin Galactic rocket plane deployed braking system prematurely
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane disintegrated in mid-air after two tail stabilizers prematurely extended, federal investigators said Sunday, a discovery that could shift the focus of the probe into Friday's fatal crash away from the craft's rocket motor.
NTSB Says SS2 Debris Field Indicates In-Flight Breakup, Scaled Identifies Pilots
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said tonight that the wreckage from the SpaceShipTwo (SS2) crash yesterday is spread over 5 miles and that indicates an in-flight breakup. Earlier today, Scaled Composites identified the two SS2 pilots: Michael Alsbury, who perished, and Peter Siebold, who is hospitalized.
UPDATE 3-Branson determined to find cause of Virgin spaceship crash, pilots identified
Lucy Nicholson and Irene Klotz – Reuters
Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson on Saturday vowed to find out what caused his space tourism company's passenger spaceship to crash during a test flight, killing one pilot and injuring the other, but expressed a desire to press on with the dream of commercial space flight.
Virgin Galactic craft probably broke up in midair, NTSB chief says
Melody Petersen, Ruben Vives, W.J. Hennigan – Los Angeles Times
The National Transportation Safety Board's top official said late Saturday that he believes a Virgin Galactic space craft that crashed Friday, killing a test pilot, broke apart in midair.
First stage propulsion system is early focus of Antares investigation
The first sign of failure during Tuesday's doomed launch of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket from Virginia came from the booster's first stage about 15 seconds after liftoff, according to engineers studying what triggered a fiery mishap that destroyed a commercial cargo craft heading to the International Space Station.
Cargo from failed rocket launch found at Wallops pad
Carol Vaughn - WVEC-TV, of Hampton Roads, Va.
Some of the cargo from a failed commercial mission to the International Space Station has been found at the launch site on Wallops Island, the company that was to conduct the mission said.
United Launch Alliance hints at new rocket line at Decatur plant and possible engine plant in Alabama
A new partnership between United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, could mean production of a new rocket at ULA's massive plant in Decatur and a new rocket engine somewhere in North Alabama, ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno said this week.
Battle Looming over Russian Engine Ban in U.S. Defense Bill
Mike Gruss – Space News
A provision in the pending defense authorization bill that ultimately would ban the use of Russian-built engines in launching U.S. national security satellites is expected to be the subject of debate in the coming weeks that could divide members of the House, sources said.
Military communications satellite launched from Russia
A Russian military communications relay platform blasted off Oct. 30 from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, riding a Soyuz rocket and Fregat upper stage into an egg-shaped orbit reaching nearly 25,000 miles above Earth.
Isro gearing up to launch unmanned crew module
After a series of successes, the Indian Space Research Organisation(Isro) is now gearing for its unmanned crew module in December.
COMPLETE STORIES
Commercial Vehicle Promises More Frequent Return of ISS Experiments
Jeff Foust - Space News
Intuitive Machines' Terrestrial Return Vehicle (TRV) – about the size of a bag of golf clubs
A Houston startup established by a former NASA official is developing a small vehicle to return experiments from the international space station that could be ready for flight by late 2016.
The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), the nonprofit organization that manages the national laboratory portion of the ISS, announced Oct. 16 an agreement with Intuitive Machines LLC to support the company's development of its Terrestrial Return Vehicle (TRV).
The TRV, company president Steve Altemus said in an Oct. 27 interview, came out of a desire to find ways to increase the utilization of the ISS. One barrier, he said, is the difficulty of returning samples from experiments on the station back to Earth. Today, only the Dragon spacecraft by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and the Russian Soyuz spacecraft can return items from the station, and the latter has limited cargo capability.
"We were talking inside NASA for a number of years about rapid sample return vehicles from ISS," said Altemus, the former deputy director of NASA's Johnson Space Center who started Intuitive Machines last year. "What if we could return samples from the ISS on a nearly daily basis?"
While the TRV the company is developing will not achieve that frequency of operations, it is designed to allow samples to be returned to Earth without waiting for a Dragon or Soyuz spacecraft. The vehicle, which Altemus described as about the size of a bag of golf clubs, would fly to the ISS inside an Orbital Sciences Corp. Cygnus or Dragon cargo spacecraft. The ISS crew would bring the TRV into the station and load it with samples for return to Earth.
Once loaded, the ISS crew would place the TRV into the airlock in the Japanese Kibo module, attached to an adapter called Cyclops developed at JSC for deploying small satellites. The module's robotic arm would remove the TRV and Cyclops from the airlock, and Cyclops would gently eject the TRV away from the station.
Once the TRV has reached a safe distance, it would fire thrusters to deorbit. After re-entry, the lifting body vehicle would deploy a parafoil to glide to a landing.
Altemus said the company is initially planning to use the Utah Test and Training Range as the landing site for the TRV, but is also looking at other locations in the Western U.S. Eventually, he said, it may be possible to bring the TRV back to a runway, like the Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Bringing an item inside the ISS that has a propulsion system, like the TRV, does pose some safety challenges, Altemus said. The company plans to use a warm gas propulsion system called tridyne, where an inert gas like nitrogen or argon is mixed with trace amounts of hydrogen and oxygen. The system is modeled after a jet backpack worn by astronauts performing spacewalks outside the station.
Once the TRV is operational, Altemus said, it could fly several times a year, with access to the Kibo airlock the limiting factor. "With the commercial customers that we're talking to, I think we can fly six to eight of them per year," he said.
Altemus estimated the first TRV would be ready for flight within 24 months at a development cost of no more than $5 million. He said Intuitive Machines had the funding it needed to support its development, although he did not disclose the company's funding sources. CASIS spokesman Patrick O'Neill said Oct. 21 that the organization was providing Intuitive Machines with $300,000 as part of its agreement with the company, as well as transportation to the ISS for the TRV's initial mission.
Altemus said the company planned to make use of lifting body technology that is under development at JSC for possible application on future Mars missions. The company is negotiating a nonreimbursable Space Act Agreement with JSC regarding that technology, providing hypersonic re-entry data from the TRV to NASA in exchange for technical assistance.
"It does enable more commercial use of the space station as a national laboratory," he said, "but it also advances the state of exploration in the form of entry, descent and landing technology for Mars."
Antares Failure Raises Questions About Vehicle's Future
Jeff Foust - Space News
The explosion of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket seconds after liftoff Oct. 28, destroying a Cygnus cargo spacecraft, will likely have a modest near-term effect on NASA and international space station operations, but a far greater one on the future of the Antares itself.
The Antares rocket lifted off from Pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia, at 6:22 pm EDT Oct. 28. No technical problems had been reported during the countdown, and the initial seconds after liftoff appeared to be no different from the previous four Antares missions.
However, within 15 seconds after liftoff, video of the launch showed the plume from the Antares' first-stage engines suddenly brighten, followed by an explosion at the base of the rocket. The rocket fell back to the ground near the launch pad, triggering an even larger explosion that destroyed the vehicle and Cygnus spacecraft, and damaged the pad.
The cause of the failure was not immediately clear. In a statement issued 48 hours after the accident, Orbital indicated that the problem was with the rocket's first stage but was not more specific.
"All systems appeared to be performing nominally until approximately T+15 seconds at which point the failure occurred," Orbital reported in its Oct. 30 statement. "Evidence suggests the failure initiated in the first stage after which the vehicle lost its propulsive capability and fell back to the ground impacting near, but not on, the launch pad."
The mission, designated Orb-3 by NASA, was the third of eight Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) missions that Orbital Sciences is under contract to perform for the space agency. The Cygnus, named by Orbital the "SS Deke Slayton" after the late astronaut, was carrying 2,290 kilograms of cargo for the station.
NASA officials said that the failure will not have an immediate effect on ISS operations. "We're in good shape from a consumables and supplies standpoint," William Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said at an Oct. 28 press conference about three hours after the failure. "There was no cargo that was absolutely critical to us that was lost on this flight. The crew is in no danger."
ISS Program Manager Michael Suffredini said at that press conference there were four to six months of supplies on the ISS. A Russian Progress spacecraft launched to the station Oct. 29, and a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Dragon spacecraft is planned for launch no earlier than Dec. 9 to deliver more supplies.
About one-third of the cargo on the Cygnus was food and other consumables. Another third was hardware for the station, none of which Suffredini said was irreplaceable or immediately critical for the station. The rest included 29 small satellites that would have been later deployed from the station, as well as experiments, some of which were developed by students.
Antares' Future
While the failure was a setback to ISS operations, its effects may be greater on Orbital Sciences and the Antares program. Orbital, seeking to extend its current contract to ferry cargo to the station and to win new business for the launch vehicle, was already planning to replace the rocket's first stage engine, an effort company executives suggested might be accelerated by this failure.
The AJ-26 engines used in the Antares first stage — refurbished versions of the Soviet-era NK-33 engines — were under scrutiny prior to the launch failure. Although the engines had performed well in the previous four launches, an AJ-26 failed during a test at the NASA Stennis Space Center in Mississippi in May. Another AJ-26 failed in a test there in June 2011, a problem traced back to a fuel leak in the engine.
Neither Orbital nor Aerojet Rocketdyne, which provides the AJ-26 engines for Orbital, had disclosed the cause of the May engine failure. In a Sept. 30 speech at the International Astronautical Congress in Toronto, Orbital Executive Vice President Frank Culbertson said the investigation into that failure was wrapping up.
"We have come up with probably two potential root causes, both of which we can screen for," he said at the conference. Engine tests were scheduled to resume in October at Stennis, but Aerojet Rocketdyne spokesman Glenn Mahone said Oct. 29 that the company had been waiting until after the Antares launch to resume those tests.
At the post-failure press conference Oct. 28, Culbertson declined to speculate on any role AJ-26 problems may have played in the launch failure. The engines used on this vehicle had gone through normal acceptance testing both at Stennis and at Wallops prior to the launch. "We didn't see any anomalies or anything that would indicate there were problems with the engine," he said.
In a conference call with financial analysts Oct. 29, Orbital executives suggested that the failure may accelerate plans they previously announced to replace the AJ-26. Orbital had planned to use the AJ-26 for the remainder of its CRS missions to the ISS, then likely switch to a new engine. The company currently has no Antares missions on its manifest beyond its remaining CRS flights.
Orbital Chief Executive David W. Thompson said in a quarterly earnings call Oct. 16 that the company had selected a replacement engine, but declined to announce that choice. Speculation about the new Antares engine has ranged from a solid-rocket motor provided by ATK, with whom Orbital is merging, to a derivative of the RD-180 engine from Russian manufacturer NPO Energomash.
"It is possible that we may decide to accelerate this change if the AJ-26 turns out to be implicated in the failure," Thompson said in the Oct. 29 call. The first launch of an Antares with a "second-generation" engine was about 24 months away prior to this failure, he said, but he did not know by how much Orbital could accelerate the introduction of the new engine.
Thompson said it likely would be "days, not weeks" for Orbital to narrow down the potential causes of the Oct. 28 failure. He expected the next Antares launch, previously scheduled for April 2015, would likely be delayed at least three months. "It certainly could be considerably longer than that, depending on what we find in the review," he cautioned. "I hope it would be not more than a year."
As NASA and Orbital investigate the failure, recover the ISS science lost in the accident, and make decisions on the future of the Antares program, they are — for the time being — avoiding major political scrutiny. While NASA's plans to commercialize ISS cargo and eventually crew transportation have been the subject of controversy in the past, the agency and the company got messages of condolences from Capitol Hill in the failure's immediate aftermath.
"We add our disappointment to the thousands in the space community who worked tirelessly in support of Tuesday evening's launch attempt at Wallops Island," Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.), the chairmen of the House Science Committee and its space subcommittee, respectively, said in a statement. "We anticipate learning more about the circumstances surrounding the launch failure in the near future."
"I remain supportive of Spaceport Wallops and NASA's Commercial Cargo mission in achieving America's independence in transporting supplies to the Space Station," Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and a long-time supporter of launch activities at Wallops, said in an Oct. 29 statement.
"Something went wrong and we will find out what that is," Orbital's Culbertson said Oct. 28. "We will correct that and we will come back and fly here at Wallops again, hopefully in the very near future."
NTSB says rocket planet braking mechanism deployed early
William Harwood - CBS News
Investigators looking into the fatal crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane said Sunday twin tail booms that rotate away from the fuselage to increase drag during atmospheric re-entry deployed earlier than expected during a test flight Friday. Seconds later, the futuristic spaceplane broke apart while traveling at roughly the speed of sound, injuring one pilot and killing the other.
Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told reporters late Sunday that investigators had been able to review at least some of the on-board video from a half-dozen cameras, along with stored telemetry, and while the results do not yet indicate a root cause of the mishap, the data do show the sequence of events.
"What I'm about to say is a statement of fact and not a statement of cause," Hart said. "We are a long way from finding cause, we still have months and months of investigation, there's a lot that we don't know."
The flight got underway Friday with SpaceShipTwo carried aloft by a twin-fuselage carrier jet known as WhiteKnightTwo that took off from Mojave, Calif., where spaceplane-builder Scaled Composites is based.
Pilot Peter Siebold, director of flight operations for Scaled, and co-pilot Michael Alsbury, were at the controls when the rocket plane was released from WhiteKnightTwo at an altitude of roughly 50,000 feet above the Mojave Desert.
After a short free fall, the pilots fired the ship's hybrid rocket motor, burning nitrous oxide with solid propellant to begin a steep climb. Seconds later, the aircraft broke apart in a cloud of debris that fell to the Mojave Desert along a five-mile-long swath.
Siebold managed to escape the wreckage and parachute back to Earth, enduring unspecified injuries. Alsbury, a 39-year-old father of two, was killed.
It was the first powered flight for SpaceShipTwo since January and the first featuring a new fuel mixture intended to improve performance as Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites worked to complete a long test program before beginning commercial flights next spring.
Based on witness accounts, some speculated the hybrid motor might have malfunctioned, triggering the mishap.
But Hart said Sunday that investigators "found the fuel tanks, the oxidizer tanks and the engine, and all were intact, showed no signs of burn through, no signs of being breached."
Instead, investigators found video evidence and telemetry indicating SpaceShipTwo's twin tail booms, known as "feathers," apparently deployed prematurely.
The tail booms extend straight away to the rear of the spaceplane's fuselage during normal powered flight. Designed by famed aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, the booms, or feathers, are intended to rotate upward with respect to the fuselage during atmospheric entry to increase drag, slowing the craft down and easing stresses on the vehicle.
"The spaceship was released normally and shortly after it was released, the rocket engine ignited," Hart said. "About nine seconds after the engine ignited, the telemetry data told us the feather parameters changed from locked to unlocked. Now, in order for feathering, this action to be commanded by the pilots, two actions must occur. One is, the lock-unlock handle most be moved from locked to unlocked and number two is, the feathering handle must be moved to the feather position.
"Approximately two seconds after the feathering parameters indicated that the lock-unlock lever was moved from lock to unlock, the feathers moved toward the extended position, the deploy position, even though the feather handle itself had not been moved. This occurred at a speed just above approximately Mach 1.0.
Seconds later, telemetry and video ceased as the vehicle broke apart.
"The engine burn was normal up until the extension of the feathers," Hart said. "There is a camera in the cockpit -- there are several cameras in the space vehicle -- there's a camera in the cockpit mounted on the ceiling that looks forward and shows the actions of the pilots and the instruments.
"And review of that camera is consistent with telemetry data and shows that the feather lock-unlock lever was moved by the co-pilot from the lock position to the unlock position. Normal launch procedures are that after the release (from the WhiteKnightTwo carrier jet), ignition of the rocket and acceleration, that the feathering devices are not to be moved, the lock-unlock lever is not to be moved into the unlock position, until the acceleration is up to Mach 1.4. As I indicated, that occurred at approximately Mach 1.0."
In any case, simply unlocking the mechanism should not have triggered deployment. The second action normally required to deploy the feather -- moving the feathering handle to the deploy position -- did not occur. How the mechanism could activate in the absence of the second step is not yet known.
It also was not immediately clear how the ship's aerodynamic stability was affected by a premature feather deploy at a lower velocity than planned.
Hart re-emphasized that investigators were drawing no conclusions yet and that "months and months of investigation" will be needed to determine the root cause of the mishap.
"We'll be looking at training issues, we'll be looking at was there pressure to continue testing, we'll be looking at safety culture, we'll be looking at the design, the procedures, we've got many, many issues to look into much more extensively before we can determine the cause."
Asked specifically if pilot error was a factor, Hart said "we are not ruling anything out. We are looking at all of these issues to determine what was the root cause of this mishap. We are looking at a number of possibilities, including that possibility."
The crash was a devastating setback to Virgin Galactic and its founder Richard Branson, one of the leaders in the push to commercialize space travel, and a disheartening tragedy for the tight-knit group of test pilots, engineers and designers based at the Mojave Air and Space Port that have been working for the past decade to turn the dream of commercial spaceflight into reality.
The mishap has given fresh ammunition to critics of commercial space, who claim only the super rich can afford private spaceflight and that the risks outweigh any potential benefits. Supporters argue private industry, unshackled by government bureaucracy and regulations that stifle innovation, is best suited to turn space travel into a viable industry open to average citizens.
Branson created Virgin Galactic after Scaled Composites, founded by Rutan, won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004, becoming the first private company to send a manned spacecraft -- SpaceShipOne -- higher than 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, the generally agreed-on boundary of space.
Virgin Galactic entered into a partnership with Scaled to build a much larger space plane -- SpaceShipTwo -- capable of carrying a crew of two and four to six passengers out of the dense lower atmosphere for brief sub-orbital forays into the weightless environment of space. After several delays and false starts, Branson was hoping to begin commercial operations next spring.
But the loss of SpaceShipTwo has put those plans on hold indefinitely.
In a statement released earlier Sunday, Virgin Galactic warned against premature speculation, saying safety was the company's top priority and "any suggestion to the contrary is categorically untrue."
"We have the privilege to work with some of the best minds in the space industry, who have dedicated their lives to the development of technologies to enable the continued exploration of space," the statement said. "All of us at Virgin Galactic understand the importance of our mission and the significance of creating the first ever commercial spaceline. This is not a mission that anyone takes lightly."
The statement went on to say "we have been overwhelmed and grateful for the outpouring of support we have received from our future astronauts, friends in the industry and people all over the world who are inspired by the work our industry is doing and who are urging us to continue."
"Now is not the time for speculation," the company 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."
Privately-Funded Space Research Leverages Scarce Public Funding | Commentary
Jeffrey Manber - Roll Call
Roll Call recently reported on Sen. Tom Coburn's final "Wastebook" with negative descriptions of two of my company's customers' use of the International Space Station. Coburn went on to call for canceling the ISS entirely, which he claimed would save $3 billion, not understanding these two projects are mostly privately funded.
What the good senator and other readers of Roll Call may not realize is that ISS utilization is changing dramatically. For example, NanoRacks has invested millions of private dollars to enable more businesses, researchers and educators to use the incredible capabilities of our National Laboratory in Space. Instead of a traditional contract where NASA pays a company, we raise private capital to place new hardware on ISS and sell the use of that research equipment to organizations and companies worldwide so they can cost-effectively utilize ISS. Indeed, the two projects the Wastebook criticizes were primarily funded by the ISS users themselves, using hardware privately financed by NanoRacks.
In the late 1980s, I worked in the Office of Space Commercialization in President Ronald Reagan's Commerce Department. Back then we were worried about whether NASA's then-named Space Station Freedom would really achieve the potential that led the president to launch the program. I can report that we are starting to realize a commercial marketplace onboard this government-owned facility in low-earth orbit.
The Wastebook's assertion that we should throw the ISS away because a commercial golf club company and middle-school science students invested their own money to use the ISS is wrong. Why wouldn't we want taxpayers to use an asset they paid for?
Indeed, the very nature of the ISS program is changing. After all, NASA is not just a science agency. It exists to open the frontiers of air and space to the American people. Do NASA's spaceflight programs — including the ISS — deliver a lot of scientific knowledge for the American people? Yes. But that is only one of NASA's payoffs.
Today, America is taking a new pathway in human space flight, with a much greater role for the private sector. Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan signed into law a change to NASA's charter mandating that NASA "seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space." It's taken a long time, but ISS is becoming a global community of commercial customers across many industries, and yes, even reaching down into schools and universities. The ISS is more successful every day because NASA is embracing privatization and commercialization to address the very budget problems Coburn wrote about.
Specifically, the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program highlighted in the Wastebook is not a NASA project. This non-profit educational organization raises money from parents, community groups, businesses, and receives less than 10 percent of its funding from the NASA-funded Center for the Advancement of Science in Space. The educational organizations then pay to use NanoRacks facilities at ISS, with prices starting about $28,000 per project. This isn't waste, this is main street America creating more public value from a unique asset Congress has funded. This is America at its finest.
As Jeff Goldstein, SSEP's director, points out: "Those 15 experiments represent the culmination of 6,750 grade 5-12 students engaged in experiment design. Instead of passive 'inspiration', a small commercial company enabled a nonprofit organization and 15 American communities to actually use this National Laboratory in Space. Nearly 7000 students didn't just watch astronauts on television, they got their minds working (and their hearts racing) figuring out what question they wanted to ask — and attempt to answer — about the unique environment of space." All of this is made possible because Congress and the Administration have directed NASA to pursue a more business-friendly path for the ISS.
Of course, Congress is right to still question the high cost of operating the ISS, and to press NASA to make even more changes. As the pointy end of the ISS commercialization spear, I appreciate their challenging NASA to move faster. NASA is now looking at transitioning from managing its own space station to becoming a customer of privately-owned space stations. That's critical to increase the return on taxpayers' investments and also allow NASA to start opening up the rest of the solar system to Americans. By enabling more people to do something productive in space, NanoRacks is partnering with NASA to pay back the American taxpayer for the investment they have made in ISS. I would hope that everyone appreciates that in 2014, not all projects in outer space are managed and paid for solely by the government.
Jeffrey Manber is managing director of NanoRacks LLC.
Shuttle monument dedicated during Titusville ceremony
Rick Neale – Florida Today
Facing a crowd next to an eight-ton stainless steel space shuttle emblem, astronaut Bob Crippen reminisced about his NASA spaceflight career that started in April 1981.
"When I look back on the program, it was a great experience. Yes, we had two terrible tragedies. But every time it happened, the program picked itself up by its bootstraps and got the program back flying again — and flying safely," said Crippen, who orbited the earth aboard shuttle Columbia during STS-1.
Saturday morning, a jacket-wearing crowd attended the dedication ceremony of the 15-foot-tall shuttle monument at Space View Park.
The audience was largely comprised of current and retired space workers, some dating to the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo days.
The U.S. Space Walk of Fame Museum spearheaded creation of the monument, which cost about $350,000. Six black granite panels on the 8-foot-tall base display information on shuttle processing, ground operations, missions and major NASA and space contractor sites.
"When my daughter called from Houston and told me that we had lost contact with Columbia, I knew that that was probably going to be the demise of the program. But truthfully, I never expected the shuttle would be canceled without some other way of putting our crews up in space here from the United States," Crippen said.
"But that's what's happened. And we can look back and remember the program fondly," he said.
Dozens of former shuttle workers lined up at the podium, then briefly took the microphone, introduced themselves and described the work they did.
"We get a lot of the credit, a lot of the glory for going up there in space, get to meet the presidents and all the other people and things like that. But we couldn't have done anything we have done, had it not been for all those we stood up and spoke to us — and all the others who couldn't be with us today," said astronaut Jon McBride, who commanded shuttle Challenger in 1984.
"God bless them," McBride said.
Astronaut Andy Allen, a veteran of three shuttle missions, concurred.
"I think it's wonderful that we have a monument here for the folks that make it all work right. It's really not that hard to get strapped into a rocket," Allen said.
"My mother told me it was a lack of intelligence to get strapped into a rocket," he joked, drawing laughs from the crowd.
"You know, I've got to echo what Andy just said," said astronaut Fred Gregory, a commander and pilot who also logged three shuttle missions.
"Everybody gives us the credit. And for every launch we had, I think there were probably 40,000 people around the world who were going to make that the safest, most successful mission ever," Gregory said.
Can space industry survive 2 explosions in 4 days?
Seth Borenstein - Associated Press
Fiery failures are no stranger to the space game. It's what happens when you push the boundaries of what technology can do, where people can go. And it happened again to Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo.
In the past decade, the space industry has tried to go from risky and government-run to routine private enterprise — so routine that if you have lots of money you can buy a ticket on a private spaceship and become a space tourist.
More than 500 people have booked a flight, including Justin Bieber, Ashton Kutcher and little known space scientist Alan Stern.
But it all depends on flying becoming safe and routine. This week hasn't helped.
Three days after a private unmanned rocket taking cargo up to the International Space Station blew up six seconds into its flight, a test flight of SpaceShipTwo exploded Friday over the Mojave Desert with two people on board.
The developments reignited the debate about the role of business in space and whether it is or will ever be safe enough for everyday people looking for an expensive 50-mile-high thrill ride.
"It's a real setback to the idea that lots of people are going to be taking joyrides into the fringes of outer space any time soon," said John Logsdon, retired space policy director at George Washington University. "There were a lot of people who believed that the technology to carry people is safely at hand."
The question for space tourism might be, "if it survives," Logsdon said. But he thinks its momentum in recent years will keep it alive.
Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson expressed the same view Saturday after arriving in Mojave, California, to meet with the project workforce reeling from the accident.
"We would love to finish what was started some years ago, and I think pretty well all our astronauts would love us to finish it, love to go to space," he said. "Millions of people in the world would love to one day have the chance to go to space."
Federal estimates of the commercial space industry —only a little of it involving tourism — exceed $200 billion. NASA is counting on private companies such as SpaceX and Orbital Sciences to haul cargo to the space station. They are also spending billions to help SpaceX and Boeing build ships that will eventually take people there, too.
Internet pioneers Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have gotten into the space game. Aviation entrepreneur Branson and others are pushing a billion-dollar space tourism industry.
The Virgin Galactic and Orbital accidents have nothing in common except the words private space, Stern said. Still it raises issues about the space industry.
Some experts said they worry that private industry may just not be as safe as the government when it comes to going into space.
Jerry Linenger, a former astronaut who narrowly survived a 1997 fire on the Russian space station Mir, said private industry lacks the experience and the advocates for safety that NASA had when he was launching into space. He pointed to former moonwalking astronaut John Young, who NASA encouraged to raise safety issues and slow things down.
Watching the Orbital Sciences accident on Tuesday, Linenger said, "it was blatantly obvious that it is a dangerous operation that is very nearly on the edge," yet private companies talk of doing it better, faster and cheaper. Then they find out that was naive, he said.
American University space policy professor Howard McCurdy, who wrote the book "Space and the American Imagination," said NASA in the 1990s and private companies tout lean management to get things done faster, better and cheaper in space. But he said that leaves no margin for error and "is like flying an airplane without a qualified pilot. You really need to do it right."
McCurdy pointed to all the Silicon Valley whiz kids in space and worried that they come with the same Microsoft attitude of pushing a product out and fixing it on the fly.
"I'm not sure that works for rocket ships," McCurdy said. "That may work for cellphones, smartphones and computer programs."
With space, he said, "you're working much closer to the edge."
Logsdon said he wouldn't fly on commercial space flights now, but Virgin Galactic customer Alan Stern said he had no qualms about it: "Let's not be Chicken Littles," he says.
He recalled the early days of aviation or the early days of jet test piloting in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, when people died pushing the boundaries of technology.
McCurdy said the private space industry seems to be having the same growing pains and failures that NASA and the military had when the first astronauts watched a rocket blow up in front of them.
It seemed that in the first five years of U.S. rockets, one blew up every other week, but it wasn't quite that bad, said Roger Launius, associate director of the National Air and Space Museum. This week seems a lot like those old times, he said.
Launius wonders if the public will support private efforts despite the visible failures, and can the for-profit companies tolerate the risk that comes with space and accidents. Orbital's stock price has dropped 13 percent since Tuesday's accident.
For Stern the answer is obvious.
"I want to be part of the opening of this future frontier," the former associate administrator of NASA said. "I want to make that better future a reality.
"No frontier has been one without the risk of life and limb," he added. "I stand with the brave pioneers of space who do this for all mankind."
Commercial Space Advocates Remain Confident Despite Accidents
Jeff Foust - Space News
After two high-profile commercial space accidents in less than a week, advocates of private space ventures told attendees of a student space conference that, while saddened by the failures, they were still confident about the future of the overall industry.
"It is a time of reflection for us all," said former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver in a speech here Nov. 1 during SpaceVision 2014, the annual conference of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS).
Garver was referring to the Oct. 28 failure of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares launch vehicle that destroyed a Cygnus cargo spacecraft bound for the international space station, and the Oct. 31 crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane during a test flight, killing one pilot and injuring the other.
Garver, who noted she was speaking at a space conference for the first time since leaving NASA in September 2013 to become general manager of the Air Line Pilots Association, said that she did not expect the failures to lessen the resolve of the agency to rely on the private sector for ISS cargo and crew transportation.
"After all, right now it is your choice if you want to take humans to space: are you going to double down and invest in good old U.S. private enterprise, or are you going to send the money to Russia?" she said. No member of Congress, she argued, would publicly support funding Russia.
"We have a program that is sustainable throughout what are going to be some difficult days ahead," she said.
James Muncy, founder and principal of space policy consulting company PoliSpace, said the recent accidents, while unfortunate, demonstrated that companies were at least attempting to develop new vehicles and spacecraft, versus designs that never got off the drawing board.
"It has not been the greatest week in the world in America's space endeavors," he said in a Nov. 1 conference presentation. "But in some ways, it's a useful illustration of the difference between adversity and impossibility."
The conference, organized by the University of North Carolina SEDS chapter, was already underway when the SpaceShipTwo accident took place on the afternoon of Oct. 31. The conference continued uninterrupted despite the accident, although some speakers changed the topics of their presentation on short notice.
Rick Tumlinson, chairman of the board of space resources company Deep Space Industries and a longtime advocate of commercial space ventures, said he learned about the accident when he arrived at the conference that afternoon, and brought it up in a previously scheduled speech at the end of the day. "We had a heart-to-heart talk about it," he said in a Nov. 1 interview.
Tumlinson said he was relieved about the initial response in the media to the accident, but that the commercial space industry will need to work harder to demonstrate its commitment to safety.
"The thing to do is to acknowledge the challenges we're facing and make sure we're doing everything possible to mitigate those challenges using the best technologies, the best systems, and the best approaches," he said. "Let's not make the same mistakes that led to things like Challenger."
The SpaceShipTwo accident, Tumlinson said, may provide a stronger argument for calling private human spaceflight something other than "space tourism." That term, widely used both within the industry and among the general public, makes the experience sound safer than it's likely to be for years to come, he claimed.
"When it's a completely passive, 99-percent-safe experience, maybe you can call someone a tourist," he said. "Not somebody who is putting their life on the line to have the most heightened experience of their life."
OPINION: Commercial space learns a valuable, painful lesson
It's been a bad week for commercial space companies. On Tuesday, Oct. 28, Orbital Sciences' Cygnus cargo ship Deke Slayton was destroyed when the Antares rocket carrying it exploded just after liftoff from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Barely three days later, on Friday, Oct. 31, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo crashed east of Mojave. No one was hurt in the explosion of the unmanned Antares, but SpaceShipTwo was crewed by two pilots, one of whom was killed – the other was badly injured.
The investigations into the two accidents are likely to continue for some time. For now, it's known that the Antares was exploded by the range safety officer who activated the Flight Termination System after a failure occurred in the rocket's first stage. Many observers reported noticing something detach from the rocket before the first explosion.
Although no one was hurt, there was damage to the launch pad, and 5,000 lbs (2,268 kg) of cargo intended for the International Space Station were lost. These included food, scientific experiments, as well as Planetary Resources' Arkyd 3 demonstrator. Despite being a major setback for Orbital Sciences, which has already lost market share and drawn criticism for its use of 40-year old Soviet rocket engines. In terms of spaceflight however, at least no one was killed. The same cannot be said for the fatal crash of Richard Branson's very popular SpaceShipTwo.
Shortly after Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo detached from its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnight Two it activated its engine, at that point, something went tragically wrong causing one pilot to be killed – and the other to be seriously injured.
No doubt about it, it's been a tough week. It's impossible to say at this early stage what the future holds for either Orbital or Virgin Galactic. The public, long on the side of these private firms, have now begun questioning their assertions. What's important to remember, though, is that spaceflight is a dangerous, hard business, and even after 56 years, it is far from "routine." The events of this week should be taken as a reminder of that. Although no one wants accidents to happen, they do serve a purpose in spaceflight. Explosions on launch pads and fiery crashes in the desert used to be commonplace – when the U.S. was learning the hard lessons of the black sky. Now? Private space, not wanting to take lessons from NASA, is re-learning what the Space Agency was taught all those years ago.
In the years following World War II, test pilots accepted the risk in testing high-performance aircraft, and the failures were used to fine-tune the vehicles and improve them. From those tests we broke the sound barrier with the X-1, achieved spaceflight for the first time with the X-15, and ultimately developed the Space Shuttle. The constant array of rocket explosions along what would become Florida's Space Coast – were just a part of the development process.
You launch a rocket, blow it up, fix whatever blew it up, build a new one and hopefully the next time it blows up it's for a different reason. Over time, rockets have become more reliable, the launches more frequent, to the point that people have forgotten that they're extremely powerful, complex and dangerous devices.
According to NASA researcher Jim Slade: "I heard Neil Armstrong one time say that, today, they're shocked when the shuttle doesn't work every time, but they were always surprised when the Saturn V did."
It's important to remember that NASA has been in the business of launching rockets since 1958. Private spaceflight is still fairly new, even when the principles of rocketry are tried and true. The Antares rocket made its inaugural flight in 2013, and Tuesday's failed launch – was only the fifth flight. Also worthy of note is the fact that roughly 75 percent of all new launch vehicles encounter failures of this sort – during the first three flights.
As a point of comparison, the Soviet N1 rocket from which the Antares rocket engines were at least partially derived; the N1 flew four flights and exploded every time. Orbital has had greater success with Antares, having flown four successful missions thus far. However, the use of the old Soviet engine in the modern Antares is a matter of concern. One that apparently Orbital itself has – as the company has put out a call for new engines for the booster. Some reports – suggest that another Russian engine might be considered to replace the AJ-26.
Frank Culbertson, Orbital's executive vice president and former NASA astronaut, addressed the issue of the engines after the explosion.
"As we went through testing, we did discover there were some effects of aging since they had been in storage for awhile, including some stress corrosion cracking. That's what we [corrected] with weld repairs and other inspections."
The issue was brought up in a 2012 interview by Wired.com of Elon Musk, CEO of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX ), in the interview the billionaire harshly criticized Orbital, saying it: "…has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the '60s. I don't mean their design is from the '60s — I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the '60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere." However, it's not clear yet that the Soviet engines were connected with the failure of the launch. Whether they were or were not, such failures are part of the dangerous game of spaceflight.
What's disturbing about these accidents was not that they occurred. What is distressing, is that these firms, partially, or as a whole, are part of what has been dubbed 'NewSpace.' NewSpace, has been less than kind toward NASA's record.
One notable example is a sign that was held up when SpaceShipOne completed the Ansari X Prize which read "SpaceShipONE, Government=ZERO." A strange observation considering the actual historical record — 2 suborbital flights versus more than 160 successful crewed, orbital missions including 6 Moon landings, plus countless unmanned satellites and probes.
Back in January of 2013, Spaceflight Insider's editor, Jason Rhian, described the hubris of the NewSpace proponents. "No NewSpace firm has launched a single astronaut into orbit. They have not landed anything on the surface of the Red Planet, or any other planet for that matter, and haven't sent probes to orbit our nearest celestial neighbor. Check your egos at the door. What NewSpace has done is impressive, but they are stating statistics about things that might happen and rockets that might fly—in the past tense. Pride goeth before a fall, and when this toddler falls off its high chair, it is going to be a very far fall indeed."
Jeffrey Kluger, a senior writer at Time magazine and co-author of the Apollo 13 opus Lost Moon with Jim Lovell, was particularly damning of Richard Branson. "I visited Branson's self-styled spaceport in the Mojave last year to watch a brief test flight of his spacecraft. The mission that day was intended more as an air show than anything else—part of a pep rally for the hundreds of Virgin customers who would be attending to hear about the company's progress. All of them had reserved a seat and paid a deposit toward their $200,000 ticket for a trip that—if it ever happened—would last just 15 minutes and ascend to just 62 miles (100 kilometers), which technically counts as being in space, but only to the extent that riding a jet ski off the beach in Ft. Lauderdale counts as going to sea."
Kluger does not mention that NASA hasn't gone much farther than that since the last Moon landing, way back in 1972. Nevertheless, the Space Shuttle did fly 135 missions with two fatal accidents—an astonishing record for such a complicated machine.
This week's accidents—the first to befall commercial spacecraft—show that private industry is not immune to the problems that the U.S. government has encountered.
Space technology is risky no matter who flies it. So far public response to these two accidents appears to be acceptance and encouragement to move on. "Onward and upward," say many comments online.
This is not the reaction when accidents have taken place solely under NASA's watch. Perhaps this is because these were not solely taxpayer-funded efforts (Antares and Cygnus were developed with taxpayer-provided funds), there does not seem to be the widespread notion that we saw in abundance after the Columbia disaster that spaceflight is "too" dangerous.
Orbital and Virgin will recover. The flaws in the Antares and SpaceShipTwo will, no doubt, be fixed. That is the history of rocketry and spaceflight. But this week the private sector learned an important lesson. Spaceflight is not safe and it's not "routine," and it won't be for a long time.
Two terms kept cropping up on news channels that were reporting the twin space disasters this week: "passionate" and "enthusiastic." These traits are the hypergolic fuel which has propelled space endeavors through the long, lean years. However, the structure of the vehicle that uses those fuels – is comprised of sturdy materials which include, experience, patience and wisdom.
These titanium-strong substances are acquired through many lessons, mistakes and epiphanies. New, private, commercial – whatever you choose to call it – has just learned two hard lessons. As Rhian noted – the toddler has taken a very hard fall. It now needs to dust itself off, accept the cause of these incidents – with humility – and move forward.
However, one part of this process, needs to be an acknowledgement – that their reach might be exceeding their grasp, that not everything those with five decades of experience has to say should be ignored just because they are "old" and that having a large following on Twitter and a flashy ad campaign – allows one to sidestep basic tenants of engineering.
As part of the Rogers Commission which investigated the loss of space shuttle Challenger on mission STS-51L, Nobel physicist Richard P. Feynman made the following, relevant, quote:
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled…"
Virgin Galactic rocket plane deployed braking system prematurely
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane disintegrated in mid-air after two tail stabilizers prematurely extended, federal investigators said Sunday, a discovery that could shift the focus of the probe into Friday's fatal crash away from the craft's rocket motor.
But the National Transportation Safety Board's acting chairman Christopher Hart cautioned against jumping to conclusions.
"What I'm about to say is a statement of fact and not a statement of cause," Hart said. "We are a long way from finding cause. We still have months and months of investigation to do, and there's a lot that we don't know. We have extensive data sources to go through."
An analysis of telemetry and video recorded aboard the doomed space plane has revealed SpaceShipTwo's novel braking system deployed earlier than designed.
The rocket plane's rear-mounted feathering system is supposed to extend before the ship descends back into the atmosphere from space, slowing SpaceShipTwo's speed and putting the craft into a belly-down position during re-entry.
But SpaceShipTwo's twin tail booms rotated upward seconds after it fired a hybrid rocket motor following a drop from Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane 50,000 feet above California's Mojave Desert.
The NTSB is leading the investigation into Friday's crash, and Hart said Sunday that ShipShipTwo's co-pilot moved a lever inside the space plane's cockpit to unlock the tail feathers, which are normally pointed toward the rear of the vehicle when it flies under rocket power.
The co-pilot on Friday's flight — 39-year-old Michael Alsbury — died in the accident. Alsbury's co-workers at Scaled Composites, builder of SpaceShipTwo, have established a memorial fund.
Pilot Peter Siebold, 43, was able to get free of the space plane and parachute to the ground. He was hospitalized with serious injuries.
The rocket's hybrid rocket motor, consuming a mix of nitrous oxide and a plastic-based solid fuel mix, ignited a few seconds after SpaceShipTwo's release from the carrier aircraft. Friday's test flight marked the first time the rocket motor was used on SpaceShipTwo since Virgin Galactic switched from a rubber-based to a plastic-based fuel.
"About nine seconds after the engine ignited, the telemetry data showed us that the feather parameters changed from lock to unlock," Hart said.
According to Hart, a camera mounted inside SpaceShipTwo's cockpit showed Alsbury move a handle to unlock the feather system as the rocket plane passed Mach 1 — the speed of sound.
Such action on a SpaceShipTwo flight is not expected until the rocket plane reaches Mach 1.4, Hart told reporters in a press conference Sunday night in Mojave, Calif.
"Normal launch procedures are that after the release, the ignition of the rocket and acceleration, that the feathering devices are not to be moved — the lock/unlock lever is not to be moved into the unlock position — until the acceleration up to Mach 1.4. Instead, as indicated, that occurred (at) approximately Mach 1.0," Hart said.
The tail booms extended after they were unlocked, even though they were not commanded to do so, Hart said. SpaceShipTwo's pilots normally must unlock the feathers, then send a separate command to move the tail booms into position for descent.
"This was what we would call an uncommanded feather, which means the feather occurred without the feather lever being moved into the feather position," Hart said.
"After it was unlocked, the feathers moved into the deployed position, and two seconds later we saw disintegration," Hart said.
"Shortly after the feathering occurred, the telemtry data terminated and the video data terminated," Hart said.
The video embedded below shows how SpaceShipTwo's feathering system works from a camera attached to one of the ship's tail booms on a previous flight.
The performance of SpaceShipTwo's rocket motor, which was flying for the first time with a new type of propellant, was normal up until the extension of the rocket plane's tail feathers, according to Hart.
Investigators combing the five-mile-long debris field have located SpaceShipTwo's rocket motor and propellant tanks, which were found intact and show no sign of burn-through or breaching, according to Hart. Some of the rocket plane's wreckage has been moved into hangars for examination.
Six video cameras and six data recorders on-board SpaceShipTwo will also help the investigation, Hart said, along with footage from the space plane's carrier plane, ground-based imagers, and eyewitness interviews. Investigators also planned to interview Siebold, the surviving pilot.
When asked if Sunday's revelation would put the focus of the investigation on pilot error, Hart said the NTSB is not ruling anything out.
"We are looking at a number of possibilities, including that possibility," Hart said.
"I want to emphasize that we have not determined the cause," Hart said. "I am not stating that this is the cause of this mishap. We have months and months of investigation to determine what the cause was. We'll be looking at training issues, we'll be looking at was there pressure to continue testing, we'll be looking at safety culture. We'll be looking at the design (and) the procedure. We've got many, many issues to look into much more extensively before we can determine the cause.
"There is much that we don't know, and our investigation is far from over."
Friday's test flight was the next step to realize Virgin Galactic's plans to start operational service with SpaceShipTwo by next spring, ferrying paying passengers to a speed three-and-a-half times the speed of sound at an altitude of more than 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, above Earth — the internationally-recognized boundary of space.
Passengers at that altitude could unstrap from their seats and float around the rocket plane's six-person cabin for a few minutes before gliding back to the ground for landing on a runway.
Virgin Galactic issued a statement Sunday defending the company's safety record and urging against speculation on the cause of Friday's mishap.
"At Virgin Galactic, we are dedicated to opening the space frontier, while keeping safety as our 'North Star'. This has guided every decision we have made over the past decade, and any suggestion to the contrary is categorically untrue," the company said.
"We have the privilege to work with some of the best minds in the space industry, who have dedicated their lives to the development of technologies to enable the continued exploration of space," the company said. "All of us at Virgin Galactic understand the importance of our mission and the significance of creating the first ever commercial spaceline. This is not a mission that anyone takes lightly."
The company, founded by Virgin Group's Richard Branson, said it would not comment on the investigation while the NTSB is doing its work.
"Now is not the time for speculation," the company 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."
NTSB Says SS2 Debris Field Indicates In-Flight Breakup, Scaled Identifies Pilots
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said tonight that the wreckage from the SpaceShipTwo (SS2) crash yesterday is spread over 5 miles and that indicates an in-flight breakup. Earlier today, Scaled Composites identified the two SS2 pilots: Michael Alsbury, who perished, and Peter Siebold, who is hospitalized.
NTSB acting chairman Christopher Hart provided a brief recap of the first day of the NTSB investigation at an 8:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) press conference (11:00 pm EDT). This was the second NTSB briefing of the day, the first one having been held at 9:00 am PDT. Another NTSB briefing will be held tomorrow.
Virgin Galactic Founder Richard Branson also held a news conference earlier today.
SS2 crashed shortly after 10:00 am PDT yesterday (October 31). The reusable spaceplane separated from its WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft as expected after reaching approximately 45,000 feet, but something happened shortly thereafter that caused it to crash to Earth.
Hart said that one decision made today was who would be parties to the investigation. NTSB has the lead, and the FAA. Scaled Composites, and Virgin Galactic are participants. SS2 was owned by Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and built by Scaled. The two pilots were Scaled employees.
Scaled said in a press release that Siebold was the SS2 pilot and Alsbury the copilot. Alsbury died at the scene. Siebold, who is director of Flight Operations for Scaled, is "alert and talking with his family and doctors," the company reported.
Hart was asked at the press conference why one of the pilots was able to eject and the other did not. Hart replied that it is not clear how the surviving pilot got out the plane. One parachute was found at the crash site, and the other was not deployed, he said, but there is not enough information yet to determine exactly what happened. The NTSB has not interviewed Siebold, the survivor, on the recommendation of his doctors.
When asked if the NTSB has any findings that could affect the short-term future of the program, Hart stressed that the NTSB is investigating this accident and it does not prevent the operator from doing anything. It is "completely up to the operator" as to what to do in the short term. The accident investigation will determine the cause of the accident and make recommendations to avoid another occurrence, he said.
A lot of data and information will be available to investigators, he added. SS2 had six cameras, WhiteKnightTwo had three, a range camera at nearby Edwards Air Force Base was used, a chase airplane had video and radar, and telemetry with over 1,000 parameters is available. It will take some time to comb through all of that data, he said, stressing that he was not complaining, that having so much data is a good thing.
The debris is spread over a 5 mile area from northeast to southwest, which indicates an in-flight breakup, he said. The left and right tail booms fell in the northeast corner, then the fuselage with oxidizer and fuel tanks, then the cockpit, and then the engine itself. Investigators looked at the fuel tanks today, but not the engine.
He said investigators likely would be on-scene for 4-7 days. That will be followed by a period for collecting facts off-scene and then analysis, with the entire investigation taking about 12 months.
UPDATE 3-Branson determined to find cause of Virgin spaceship crash, pilots identified
Lucy Nicholson and Irene Klotz – Reuters
Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson on Saturday vowed to find out what caused his space tourism company's passenger spaceship to crash during a test flight, killing one pilot and injuring the other, but expressed a desire to press on with the dream of commercial space flight.
Michael Alsbury, 39, has been identified as the pilot who died in the crash of Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, and the surviving pilot is Peter Siebold, 43, the Kern County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.
Branson arrived in California's Mojave Desert to meet his Virgin Galactic team and federal officials who were opening their investigation into Friday's accident, the second in less than a week involving a commercial space company.
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo went down during a powered test flight, scattering debris over the Mojave Desert, 95 miles (150 km) north of Los Angeles.
"We owe it to our pilots to find out exactly what went wrong," Branson said during a news conference in Mojave.
"If we can overcome it, we will make absolutely certain that the dream lives on," he said.
Alsbury, who a sheriff's spokesman said was from Tehachapi, California, was a project engineer and test pilot at Scaled Composites, a Northrop Grumman Corp subsidiary that built and designed the spacecraft for Virgin Galactic.
He was flying for the ninth time aboard SpaceShipTwo, including serving as the co-pilot on the vehicle's first rocket-powered test flight on April 29, 2013, according to his biography on the company's website.
He was found dead in the aircraft, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said on Friday.
Siebold parachuted from SpaceShipTwo and was found a mile from the fuselage, Youngblood said. He had moderate to major injuries and was taken by helicopter to Antelope Valley Hospital, the Sheriff's Office said in a statement.
Siebold had been the pilot alongside Alsbury on SpaceShipTwo's maiden test flight last year, according to Scaled Composites.
A team of investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived at the crash site on Saturday to begin piecing together what led to the accident.
"This was a test flight, and test flights are typically very well documented in terms of data," said Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the NTSB. "We may have lots of evidence that will help us with the investigative process," he said.
Friday's crash was the second disaster in less than a week suffered by a private space company, dealing a blow to the fledgling commercial space industry that has been taking on work traditionally done by governments.
On Tuesday, an Antares rocket built and launched by Orbital Sciences Corp exploded after liftoff from Wallops Island, Virginia, destroying a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station.
NEW TYPE of FUEL
The Virgin probe will likely will focus on SpaceShipTwo's rocket engine, which on Friday was flying with a new type of fuel for the first time, experts said.
The solid plastic-type propellant is ignited by nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas.
Virgin Galactic announced in May that it was replacing the rubber-based propellant used during the spaceship's three previous rocket-powered test flights to get better performance.
"We've tested both of these fuel grains a lot," Virgin Galactic chief executive George Whitesides told Reuters at the time.
Before Friday's flight, SpaceShipTwo's last powered test flight was in January, though the rocket and its new propellant had passed multiple ground tests.
Virgin Galactic is a U.S. offshoot of the London-based Virgin Group founded by Branson, one of the world's most famous entrepreneurs whose business empire ranges from airlines to music stores and mobiles phones.
Friday's accident marked the fourth fatality in Scaled's SpaceShipTwo development effort. In 2007, a fuel tank exploded, killing three Scaled employees.
"While not a NASA mission, the pain of this (new) tragedy will be felt by all the men and women who have devoted their lives to exploration," NASA, the U.S. space agency, said in a statement.
Virgin Galactic craft probably broke up in midair, NTSB chief says
Melody Petersen, Ruben Vives, W.J. Hennigan – Los Angeles Times
The National Transportation Safety Board's top official said late Saturday that he believes a Virgin Galactic space craft that crashed Friday, killing a test pilot, broke apart in midair.
Christopher Hart, acting NTSB chairman, said the wreckage of SpaceShipTwo was spread over five miles in the Mojave Desert, suggesting an "in-flight break up."
After the first day of the investigation, Hart said NTSB officials have also determined that the breakup and subsequent crash were filmed by at least six on-board cameras, a camera at Edwards Air Force Base and cameras on a "chase aircraft" that was following SpaceShipTwo's test flight from Mojave.
"Because it was a test flight it was heavily documented in a way that we don't normally see in accidents," Hart said.
It could take up to a year for investigators to determine the cause of the crash. NTSB officials will remain in Mojave for at least seven days.
Earlier in the day, authorities identified the craft's two test pilots as Michael Alsbury, 39, who was found dead at the crash site with the main fuselage, and Peter Siebold, 43, who suffered a shoulder injury.
Siebold "is alert and talking with his family and doctors," according to a statement from Scaled Composites, the designers of Virgin Galactic's space launch system.
"We remain focused on supporting the families of the two pilots and all of our employees, as well as the agencies investigating the accident," the statement said.
Siebold is the company's director of flight operations.
Virgin Galactic's billionaire founder Richard Branson, who flew to Mojave overnight, vowed Saturday morning to find out what doomed the SpaceShipTwo rocket ship that he hoped would eventually carry paying passengers into space.
"In testing the boundaries of human capabilities and technologies, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Yesterday, we fell short," Branson told reporters. "We will now comprehensively assess the results of the crash and are determined to learn from this and move forward together."
Branson added: "We do understand the risks involved and we're not going to push on blindly. To do so would be an insult to all those affected by this tragedy."
He said it was "fair to say that all 400 engineers that work here ... and I think most people in the world" want to see the dream of commercial space travel live on.
Branson said the company adhered to rigorous testing standards "precisely to ensure that this never happens to the public."
This will be the first time that the NTSB has led an investigation into a space launch with people on board, Hart said. The NTSB assisted in the investigations of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, he said.
The crash site and debris field had been protected by the Kern County Sheriff's Department overnight, Hart said. On Saturday night, Hart said investigators had recovered fuel tanks and oxidizer tanks, as well as tail booms and the fuselage where Alsbury's body was discovered.
Based on the recommendation of doctors, Hart said investigators will wait to interview Siebold.
Much of the investigation is likely to focus around SpaceShipTwo's rocket engine, which is designed to propel the craft to more than 60 miles above the Earth's surface.
Since April 2009, Virgin Galactic used a hybrid rocket motor built by Sierra Nevada Corp., a Sparks, Nev., company that has contracts with the U.S. military, NASA and commercial space firms.
The engine, fueled by nitrous oxide and a rubber compound, had been fired in flight and on the ground around 50 times. SpaceShipTwo had three successful test flights powered by the Sierra Nevada–built rocket engine.
However, in May, Virgin Galactic announced it was switching to an alternate plastic-based rocket motor fuel. It is not clear when testing began, but Scaled Composites said on its website that there have been 10 test fires since May.
Friday's test flight was the first in which SpaceShipTwo used a motor with the plastic-based fuel.
Executives said after the crash that the new motor and fuel had been thoroughly tested on the ground before the rocket plane took off, suspended under its carrier plane, WhiteKnightTwo, shortly after 9 a.m. Friday from the Mojave Air and Space Port, about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles.
WhiteKnightTwo typically carries SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of 50,000 feet before releasing the space plane. The malfunction occurred just seconds after separation, officials said.
Branson vows to find cause of spacecraft crash
"The aircraft is in several different pieces," said Kern County Sheriff Don Youngblood.
Alsbury, 39, worked for Scaled Composites in Mojave for 14 years as a project engineer and test pilot.
He was married for at least 12 years and had a young son and daughter, both under the age of 5, according to neighbor Patricia Kinn, who said their desert community of Tehachapi was horrified by news of the crash.
"I know all the neighbors feel the same way," Kinn told The Times, speaking through tears. "They all know that he was a wonderful person, family man, humble and he was a great dad."
Kinn said Alsbury and many of her neighbors work in the aerospace community, either at a military facility or in nearby Mojave. Alsbury was a constant presence in the neighborhood, often seen walking his dog or playing with his children, Kinn said.
While Alsbury was passionate about his work, Kinn said he rarely spoke about the industry at home.
"He loved what he did, his work," she said. "I believe he was very proud of it."
Kinn said neighbors have spoken briefly with Alsbury's wife and that the community plans to rally around the family in the coming days.
"It's hard for his wife and this neighborhood is devastated from it."
In April 2013 Alsbury served as co-pilot, with Mark Stucky as pilot, on SpaceShipTwo's first rocket-powered flight. The aircraft broke the sound barrier, reaching Mach 1.2, and climbed to about 56,000 feet in altitude. The entire flight lasted a little more than 10 minutes. It ended with a smooth landing in Mojave.
Alsbury received a bachelor of science in aeronautical engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. As of last year, he had logged more than 1,800 hours of flight experience, 1,600 as a test pilot and engineer in Scaled aircraft.
He, along with Stucky and Clint Nichols, won the Ray E. Tenhoff Award last year. It recognizes the most outstanding technical paper presented at the annual Society of Experimental Test Pilots Symposium.
News that SpaceShipTwo had crashed spread quickly through Mojave.
Katie Stokes said she was at home when her mother, a fabricator at the Mojave facility, sent her a text message: "Katie, you need to pray right now …"
Stokes first thought there had been a family emergency. She quickly realized the message was about the crash.
"This is a close-knit community," Stokes said. "We feel the general pain of the workers and of the family."
Stokes' brother also works at Mojave Air and Space Port, where numerous aerospace companies like Virgin Galactic, Orbital Sciences and XCOR test and develop aircraft.
Many in the town of about 4,300 residents work in the aerospace industry. Their thoughts quickly turned to the families of the test pilots.
At her family's doughnut shop -- the site of an old Kern County branch library -- model airplanes hung from the ceilings and photos of test flights decorated the walls.
Many of the pilots and other airport workers frequented the shop, Stokes said Friday evening as she folded pink bakery boxes.
"Did I know them? Should I have known them? All those things passed through my mind," she said.
Marlena Rowley, a nursing school student, was at the airport Friday morning and took a moment to watch WhiteKnightTwo take off.
"It's a sad day," she said. "This accident touches the lives of the pilots, the community members and leaders and the commercial space industry as a whole."
First stage propulsion system is early focus of Antares investigation
The first sign of failure during Tuesday's doomed launch of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket from Virginia came from the booster's first stage about 15 seconds after liftoff, according to engineers studying what triggered a fiery mishap that destroyed a commercial cargo craft heading to the International Space Station.
The rocket's 13-foot-diameter first stage, containing tanks with more than 50,000 gallons of kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants, is made in Ukraine and powered by Soviet-era engines built in the 1970s for Russia's moon program.
"Evidence suggests the failure initiated in the first stage after which the vehicle lost its propulsive capability and fell back to the ground impacting near, but not on, the launch pad," Orbital Sciences said in a statement released Thursday.
The company's acknowledgment that the failure occurred in the first stage is not a surprise, but it is the first detail to be revealed in the investigation into the cause of the rocket crash at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia's Eastern Shore.
A range safety official triggered the Antares rocket's self-destruct mechanism before it hit the ground, Orbital said.
In an update posted Friday to Orbital's website, the company said workers are sifting through the debris field surrounding the Antares launch pad are focusing on identifying components of the rocket's first stage propulsion system and clearing them before bad weather arrives this weekend.
"Yesterday's focus was on clearing any potentially hazardous items," Orbital said. "Current priorities are on finding, cataloging and securing any elements of the Stage 1 propulsion system that will be of particular interest to the AIB (accident investigation board), as well as any cargo that may be found at the site. The team's goal is to complete that work today."
The Antares rocket's first stage is powered by two AJ26 main engines. The kerosene-burning engines each generate 338,000 pounds at sea level.
Supplied to Orbital by Aerojet Rocketdyne, the engines were built in Russia in the early 1970s by the Kuznetsov Design Bureau for the Soviet-era N1 moon rocket. Aerojet imported 43 of the NK-33 engines to the United States in the 1990s for use on American rockets.
According to its website, Aerojet Rocketdyne upgraded the engine with a gimbal block to help steer rockets in flight, new wiring harnesses and electrical circuitry, electromechanical valve actuators and instrumentation.
Orbital Sciences selected the engine for its efficiency — it produces more power for its weight than any other liquid-fueled engine ever built, save SpaceX's Merlin 1D, which generates about half the thrust of an AJ26 engine. It also saved what some Orbital Sciences officials estimated was roughly $500 million in costs to develop a comparable engine from scratch in the United States.
See details of the AJ26 engine's history on our story before the Antares rocket's first launch in April 2013.
At the time it selected the AJ26, Orbital Sciences was locked out of buying the RD-180 engine from Russia.
The engine flies on United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 launcher, and ULA said it had exclusive rights to the powerplant.
The first stage airframe, including its propellant tanks, are manufactured in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, by Yuzhmash, an aerospace company which also builds the Zenit rocket and upper stages for Europe's Vega launcher.
Engineers presented a first-look assessment of telemetry recorded from the rocket to Orbital's accident investigation board Thursday. Investigators found no sign of problems during the countdown or the first few seconds of flight, according to the company's statement.
Orbital Sciences is leading the inquiry into the rocket crash, which scattered debris hundreds of feet into the air as the launcher erupted in a blinding fireball, destroying an unmanned Cygnus cargo ship packed with equipment for the International Space Station.
The mission was part of a $1.9 billion contract Orbital has with NASA to delivery cargo the space station. Orbital Sciences and SpaceX won deals to resupply the orbiting research outpost after the retirement of the space shuttle.
NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, which has oversight authority for commercial space launches, will assist Orbital in the mishap investigation.
Orbital appointed Dave Steffy, senior vice president and chief engineer of the company's advanced programs group, to serve as permanent chairman of the board looking into the launch failure.
Steffy held engineering and management positions in Orbital's development of the air-launched Pegasus rocket and the Antares program.
One of the first jobs of the investigation team will be the recovery of debris littering Wallops Island.
Orbital said in a statement "it is likely substantial hardware evidence will be available to aid in determining root cause of the Antares launch failure."
Recovered rocket and spacecraft hardware will be transferred into storage bays for close-up assessments, the company said.
Cargo from failed rocket launch found at Wallops pad
Carol Vaughn - WVEC-TV, of Hampton Roads, Va.
Some of the cargo from a failed commercial mission to the International Space Station has been found at the launch site on Wallops Island, the company that was to conduct the mission said.
The cargo will be retrieved as soon as an Orbital Sciences Corp. team is given clearance to do so, according to an update the company posted on its website. What the cargo is or its condition is not yet known.
Additionally, based on initial inspection by a safety team, Orbital said "it appears likely substantial hardware evidence will be available to aid in determining (the) root cause" of an Antares rocket's failure.
There is a lot of debris remaining at the launch site after the 13-story rocket exploded in a fiery inferno shortly after liftoff from Wallops Island the evening of Oct. 28, officials said.
Orbital has started documenting the location of each piece of debris found. Once that is completed, the pieces will be moved to a storage area on Wallops Island, where they will be further examined in an effort to determine what went wrong.
The launch was intended to deliver 5,000 pounds of science and research materials, crew supplies, 1,300 pounds of food and 1,400 pounds of vehicle hardware to the space station.
After reviewing data from the launch, Orbital said it appears the rocket had a "nominal" prelaunch, with no issues noted.
All systems seemed to be performing as expected until about 15 seconds after liftoff, when the failure happened.
The problem appears to have started in the first stage, evidence indicates. The rocket "lost its propulsive capability and fell back to the ground, impacting near, but not on, the launch pad," the update said.
Orbital confirmed a range official the NASA Wallops control center engaged the rocket's flight termination system before it hit the ground, intentionally destroying the vehicle.
The company's safety team has inspected the launch pad itself closely and said it still appears the pad suffered no major damage but there is evidence of damage to piping going between fuel storage tanks and the launch mount.
Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport engineers will evaluate the launch facility thoroughly during the next few days.
United Launch Alliance hints at new rocket line at Decatur plant and possible engine plant in Alabama
A new partnership between United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, could mean production of a new rocket at ULA's massive plant in Decatur and a new rocket engine somewhere in North Alabama, ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno said this week.
In an interview with AL.com, Bruno said the Decatur plant that employs about 1,000 people now will continue to be ULA's "primary assembly and integration site" for rockets including its Atlas and Delta lines. "Decatur is just a great place," Bruno said. "For Atlas, for Delta, which will go on for years, and for whatever (the) product line looks like in the future, I anticipate it being here." Bruno and Bezos announced in September that they would team up to replace the Russian-built RD-180 engines that now power the Atlas with a modified Blue Origin BE-4 engine already under development. The RD-180 has been reliable for years, and ULA has used it to boost a long line of national security and NASA payloads, but political tension between the U.S. and Russia has the government looking for an alternative.
The Blue Origin engine, fueled by liquid methane, has been in development for more than three years, which Bruno said was critical to ULA's interest given the typical 5-7 year development time for a new rocket engine. The partners will add 10-20 percent more thrust "so we can improve the performance of Atlas to take more payload up," Bruno said. He called the Blue Origin engine innovative, less complex, less expensive and, critically, "halfway done."
What ULA brings to the table
What ULA "brings to the table" is the ability to move the new engine from prototype to production, Bruno said. The engine will be built using what is commonly called 3-D printing. "It's just far simplified," he said. "It promises to be more reliable, higher thrust, easier to manufacture, easier to test."
"Today, we have Atlas and Delta," Bruno said of ULA's product line. The company is completing studies leading to an announcement early next year of "what we will have next." He confirmed, "It could be a new rocket."
Blue Origin and ULA are also discussing "where (Bezos's) engine should be manufactured," Bruno said. "We're looking all over the country, including here, Texas and other states to find the best place to do that."
Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said Friday the city has been talking to ULA for the past three years about new engines and "new capabilities engineered in Huntsville, but also possibly produced in Huntsville." The city will work to make that happen, Battle said, "to make sure the Rocket City is actually producing rockets in the future."
Bezos: He's a serious rocket man
Bruno called his new partner Bezos "a really nice guy with a genuine interest in this, a commitment to learn the technology.... He's fully immersed in this." Bezos is "smart" and "serious," Bruno said, "and that's one of the things that attracted us. They've been working on this methodically for years."
ULA plans to enter new commercial markets, Bruno said. After 89 straight successful launches, he said the company understands what is necessary and what tests and procedures are like wearing "a belt and suspenders." Early in a product run, he said the company went above and beyond to make sure it could reliably launch vital and expensive national security and science hardware. Now, he said, "We can take (things) out and make (the process) a lot more streamlined without losing any of our reliability. That's going to take a whole bunch of cost and cycle time out."
When ULA does that and hits a certain launch price, Bruno said it will gain access to NASA commercial missions, telecommunications launches and other markets. "We're shrinking to get lean," he said, "and then we're going to grow."
What Bruno knows about Alabama
Although he has never lived here, Bruno has worked on various rocket programs in North Alabama for 15 years and is familiar with the region. "This is a great place to do this kind of work," he said. "A lot of people around the country don't know what Huntsville and North Alabama and Decatur are all about. There's such a technology industry here, a highly educated workforce. This is one of the educated regions in the country, and people don't know that.
"Mission-focused," he said. "The thing that brings me to work every day and has brought me to work every day for 30 years is the missions we are privileged to serve for our country. The workforce you find here, they get that."
Battle Looming over Russian Engine Ban in U.S. Defense Bill
Mike Gruss – Space News
A provision in the pending defense authorization bill that ultimately would ban the use of Russian-built engines in launching U.S. national security satellites is expected to be the subject of debate in the coming weeks that could divide members of the House, sources said.
The Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2015 specifically bars the Pentagon from signing new contracts or renewing existing contracts with launch companies that rely on Russian suppliers. The language, inserted into the bill by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), appears to target government launch services provider United Launch Alliance, whose Atlas 5 rocket features a Russian-built main engine dubbed RD-180.
ULA currently launches the lion's share of high-value U.S. government payloads, particularly those used by the military. The Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture, which also operates the Delta 4 rocket powered by U.S.-made engines, recently was awarded a sole-source contract to continue launching national security payloads at least through 2018.
The Defense Department's reliance on the Atlas 5 has come under fire in recent months amid the rapid deterioration of U.S.-Russian relations.
Tory Bruno, chief executive of Denver-based ULA, characterized the bill's Russian-engine provision as "very damaging" and "anti-competitive." Among his concerns is that the language would hinder ULA's use of the Atlas 5 under the current block buy contract.
"I don't believe the authors meant for it do what it actually would do," Bruno said in an interview. "Unfortunately, the way it was worded, I believe inadvertently, it even prohibits us from offering Deltas because we have the Atlas product line and the RD-180 still delivering out missions. It would just be terrible. It would be so anti-competitive because it would take your most important provider and say you can no longer participate."
Other organizations, such as the Satellite Industry Association, a trade group here, also oppose the language, in part out of fear that it would be applied too broadly across the space business, which relies on a variety of Russian technologies.
But sources told SpaceNews the language explicitly would not apply to ULA's current $11 billion block buy contract, which includes the purchase of a combined 36 Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rocket cores.
Rather, these sources say, the language is aimed at ending the reliance on Russian engines after the current contract is completed, by which time relative newcomer Space Exploration Technologies Corp. should be well established in the national security market with its Falcon 9 rocket. In addition, there are plans in the works for an American-built alternative to the RD-180, which could be available by around 2018.
The provision in question, specifically known as Section 1623, prohibits the secretary of defense from "entering into a new contract or renewing a current contract for space launch supplies if those supplies are provided by Russian suppliers," language in the report accompanying the Senate version of the bill said.
"The committee also strongly recommends that if the Secretary of Defense determines that a waiver is issued under this section for the procurement of rocket engines, the waiver should be approved well in advance of the start of contract negotiations," the report reads.
ULA currently has about two years worth of RD-180 engines in its inventory and has worked to accelerate delivery of the remaining engines ordered under its existing contract with RD-Amross, the U.S.-Russian joint venture that imports the hardware. The last of those engines, previously slated to arrive in 2018, is now expected in 2017.
The prohibition had strong support in the Senate Armed Services Committee. ULA's supporters in the House, which in the coming weeks will be negotiating a final version of the defense authorization bill with the Senate, appear more wary.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, told SpaceNews in September that the House staff planned to focus on the issue during conference negotiations to ensure the language does not apply to ULA's current contract.
On Oct. 9, Reps. Mike Coffman and Doug Lamborn, both Colorado Republicans, wrote to the leaders of the defense oversight committees to express their opposition to the language. In the letter, the lawmakers said the language would "eliminate its best launcher from competition" and noted "serious concerns" if other companies could meet national security demands.
But these concerns are not universally shared in the House. Notably, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, has voiced his support for the Senate language.
The Air Force did not respond by press time to a request for comment, but in an October list of appeals submitted to Capitol Hill in advance of the conference negotiations, the service did not object to the language.
Military communications satellite launched from Russia
A Russian military communications relay platform blasted off Oct. 30 from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, riding a Soyuz rocket and Fregat upper stage into an egg-shaped orbit reaching nearly 25,000 miles above Earth.
The satellite launched at 0143 GMT on Oct. 30 (9:43 p.m. EDT on Oct. 29) on top of a Soyuz 2-1a rocket from Plesetsk, Russian's northern spaceport in the country's Archangelsk oblast, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
A Fregat upper stage released from the Soyuz booster's three-stage core vehicle fired three times to inject the Meridian communications satellite into an elliptical orbit with a low point of 600 miles and a high point of nearly 25,000 miles.
Tilted at an angle of 62.8 degrees to the equator, the orbit provides coverage to Russian polar regions with limited access to conventional communications satellites over the equator.
Separation of the Meridian satellite from the Fregat upper stage was expected around 0400 GMT (12 a.m. EDT).
Russian media reports declared the launch successful.
The launch marked the seventh Meridian satellite to lift off since 2006. One of the spacecraft was sent into an incorrect orbit during a May 2009 launch, and another Meridian satellite crashed in Russia in December 2011 after a Soyuz rocket failure.
The Oct. 30 liftoff was delayed several weeks for engineers to inspect the rocket's Fregat upper stage for damage after a train derailment during launch preparations at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.
The Meridian spacecraft are manufactured by ISS Reshetnev, a Russian space contractor, as replacements for a previous generation of Molniya communications satellites.
The Meridian satellites link Russian ground forces, aircraft, ships and command centers in the Arctic, Siberia and the North Sea.
"In accordance with the planned timetable, Meridian separated from the launch vehicle's upper stage and arrived at its final orbit," ISS Reshetnev said in a press release.
The company said the satellite was transmitting telemetry and all systems were functioning as designed following launch.
Isro gearing up to launch unmanned crew module
After a series of successes, the Indian Space Research Organisation(Isro) is now gearing for its unmanned crew module in December.
"Yes we plan to launch it onboard GSLV Mk111 experimental flight in December," Isro chairman Dr K Radhakrishnan told Hindustan Times.
The success of this will form the basis of a future human space project.
MkIII will test the recovery of a dummy crew module from sea. The module is the core of a future Human Space Project.
Speaking to HT director Space Application Center Dr Kiran Kumar said there would be two parachutes that will open and reduce the impact velocity.
"The crew module parachutes are essential to reduce the impact velocity,"
The experimental flight with the crew module in a spacecraft will go up to 100-120 km above earth to test its heat shield survive very high temperatures (about 1, 500 degrees Celsius) during the re-entry into the atmosphere.
The parachute will open up for a soft landing in the Bay of Bengal.
END
Intuitive Machines' Terrestrial Return Vehicle (TRV) – about the size of a bag of golf clubsA Houston startup established by a former NASA official is developing a small vehicle to return experiments from the international space station that could be ready for flight by late 2016.The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), the nonprofit organization that manages the national laboratory portion of the ISS, announced Oct. 16 an agreement with Intuitive Machines LLC to support the company's development of its Terrestrial Return Vehicle (TRV).The TRV, company president Steve Altemus said in an Oct. 27 interview, came out of a desire to find ways to increase the utilization of the ISS. One barrier, he said, is the difficulty of returning samples from experiments on the station back to Earth. Today, only the Dragon spacecraft by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and the Russian Soyuz spacecraft can return items from the station, and the latter has limited cargo capability."We were talking inside NASA for a number of years about rapid sample return vehicles from ISS," said Altemus, the former deputy director of NASA's Johnson Space Center who started Intuitive Machines last year. "What if we could return samples from the ISS on a nearly daily basis?"While the TRV the company is developing will not achieve that frequency of operations, it is designed to allow samples to be returned to Earth without waiting for a Dragon or Soyuz spacecraft. The vehicle, which Altemus described as about the size of a bag of golf clubs, would fly to the ISS inside an Orbital Sciences Corp. Cygnus or Dragon cargo spacecraft. The ISS crew would bring the TRV into the station and load it with samples for return to Earth.Once loaded, the ISS crew would place the TRV into the airlock in the Japanese Kibo module, attached to an adapter called Cyclops developed at JSC for deploying small satellites. The module's robotic arm would remove the TRV and Cyclops from the airlock, and Cyclops would gently eject the TRV away from the station.Once the TRV has reached a safe distance, it would fire thrusters to deorbit. After re-entry, the lifting body vehicle would deploy a parafoil to glide to a landing.Altemus said the company is initially planning to use the Utah Test and Training Range as the landing site for the TRV, but is also looking at other locations in the Western U.S. Eventually, he said, it may be possible to bring the TRV back to a runway, like the Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Bringing an item inside the ISS that has a propulsion system, like the TRV, does pose some safety challenges, Altemus said. The company plans to use a warm gas propulsion system called tridyne, where an inert gas like nitrogen or argon is mixed with trace amounts of hydrogen and oxygen. The system is modeled after a jet backpack worn by astronauts performing spacewalks outside the station.Once the TRV is operational, Altemus said, it could fly several times a year, with access to the Kibo airlock the limiting factor. "With the commercial customers that we're talking to, I think we can fly six to eight of them per year," he said.Altemus estimated the first TRV would be ready for flight within 24 months at a development cost of no more than $5 million. He said Intuitive Machines had the funding it needed to support its development, although he did not disclose the company's funding sources. CASIS spokesman Patrick O'Neill said Oct. 21 that the organization was providing Intuitive Machines with $300,000 as part of its agreement with the company, as well as transportation to the ISS for the TRV's initial mission.Altemus said the company planned to make use of lifting body technology that is under development at JSC for possible application on future Mars missions. The company is negotiating a nonreimbursable Space Act Agreement with JSC regarding that technology, providing hypersonic re-entry data from the TRV to NASA in exchange for technical assistance."It does enable more commercial use of the space station as a national laboratory," he said, "but it also advances the state of exploration in the form of entry, descent and landing technology for Mars."Antares Failure Raises Questions About Vehicle's FutureJeff Foust - Space NewsThe explosion of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket seconds after liftoff Oct. 28, destroying a Cygnus cargo spacecraft, will likely have a modest near-term effect on NASA and international space station operations, but a far greater one on the future of the Antares itself.The Antares rocket lifted off from Pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia, at 6:22 pm EDT Oct. 28. No technical problems had been reported during the countdown, and the initial seconds after liftoff appeared to be no different from the previous four Antares missions.However, within 15 seconds after liftoff, video of the launch showed the plume from the Antares' first-stage engines suddenly brighten, followed by an explosion at the base of the rocket. The rocket fell back to the ground near the launch pad, triggering an even larger explosion that destroyed the vehicle and Cygnus spacecraft, and damaged the pad.The cause of the failure was not immediately clear. In a statement issued 48 hours after the accident, Orbital indicated that the problem was with the rocket's first stage but was not more specific."All systems appeared to be performing nominally until approximately T+15 seconds at which point the failure occurred," Orbital reported in its Oct. 30 statement. "Evidence suggests the failure initiated in the first stage after which the vehicle lost its propulsive capability and fell back to the ground impacting near, but not on, the launch pad."The mission, designated Orb-3 by NASA, was the third of eight Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) missions that Orbital Sciences is under contract to perform for the space agency. The Cygnus, named by Orbital the "SS Deke Slayton" after the late astronaut, was carrying 2,290 kilograms of cargo for the station.NASA officials said that the failure will not have an immediate effect on ISS operations. "We're in good shape from a consumables and supplies standpoint," William Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said at an Oct. 28 press conference about three hours after the failure. "There was no cargo that was absolutely critical to us that was lost on this flight. The crew is in no danger."ISS Program Manager Michael Suffredini said at that press conference there were four to six months of supplies on the ISS. A Russian Progress spacecraft launched to the station Oct. 29, and a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Dragon spacecraft is planned for launch no earlier than Dec. 9 to deliver more supplies.About one-third of the cargo on the Cygnus was food and other consumables. Another third was hardware for the station, none of which Suffredini said was irreplaceable or immediately critical for the station. The rest included 29 small satellites that would have been later deployed from the station, as well as experiments, some of which were developed by students.Antares' FutureWhile the failure was a setback to ISS operations, its effects may be greater on Orbital Sciences and the Antares program. Orbital, seeking to extend its current contract to ferry cargo to the station and to win new business for the launch vehicle, was already planning to replace the rocket's first stage engine, an effort company executives suggested might be accelerated by this failure.The AJ-26 engines used in the Antares first stage — refurbished versions of the Soviet-era NK-33 engines — were under scrutiny prior to the launch failure. Although the engines had performed well in the previous four launches, an AJ-26 failed during a test at the NASA Stennis Space Center in Mississippi in May. Another AJ-26 failed in a test there in June 2011, a problem traced back to a fuel leak in the engine.Neither Orbital nor Aerojet Rocketdyne, which provides the AJ-26 engines for Orbital, had disclosed the cause of the May engine failure. In a Sept. 30 speech at the International Astronautical Congress in Toronto, Orbital Executive Vice President Frank Culbertson said the investigation into that failure was wrapping up."We have come up with probably two potential root causes, both of which we can screen for," he said at the conference. Engine tests were scheduled to resume in October at Stennis, but Aerojet Rocketdyne spokesman Glenn Mahone said Oct. 29 that the company had been waiting until after the Antares launch to resume those tests.At the post-failure press conference Oct. 28, Culbertson declined to speculate on any role AJ-26 problems may have played in the launch failure. The engines used on this vehicle had gone through normal acceptance testing both at Stennis and at Wallops prior to the launch. "We didn't see any anomalies or anything that would indicate there were problems with the engine," he said.In a conference call with financial analysts Oct. 29, Orbital executives suggested that the failure may accelerate plans they previously announced to replace the AJ-26. Orbital had planned to use the AJ-26 for the remainder of its CRS missions to the ISS, then likely switch to a new engine. The company currently has no Antares missions on its manifest beyond its remaining CRS flights.Orbital Chief Executive David W. Thompson said in a quarterly earnings call Oct. 16 that the company had selected a replacement engine, but declined to announce that choice. Speculation about the new Antares engine has ranged from a solid-rocket motor provided by ATK, with whom Orbital is merging, to a derivative of the RD-180 engine from Russian manufacturer NPO Energomash."It is possible that we may decide to accelerate this change if the AJ-26 turns out to be implicated in the failure," Thompson said in the Oct. 29 call. The first launch of an Antares with a "second-generation" engine was about 24 months away prior to this failure, he said, but he did not know by how much Orbital could accelerate the introduction of the new engine.Thompson said it likely would be "days, not weeks" for Orbital to narrow down the potential causes of the Oct. 28 failure. He expected the next Antares launch, previously scheduled for April 2015, would likely be delayed at least three months. "It certainly could be considerably longer than that, depending on what we find in the review," he cautioned. "I hope it would be not more than a year."As NASA and Orbital investigate the failure, recover the ISS science lost in the accident, and make decisions on the future of the Antares program, they are — for the time being — avoiding major political scrutiny. While NASA's plans to commercialize ISS cargo and eventually crew transportation have been the subject of controversy in the past, the agency and the company got messages of condolences from Capitol Hill in the failure's immediate aftermath."We add our disappointment to the thousands in the space community who worked tirelessly in support of Tuesday evening's launch attempt at Wallops Island," Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.), the chairmen of the House Science Committee and its space subcommittee, respectively, said in a statement. "We anticipate learning more about the circumstances surrounding the launch failure in the near future.""I remain supportive of Spaceport Wallops and NASA's Commercial Cargo mission in achieving America's independence in transporting supplies to the Space Station," Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and a long-time supporter of launch activities at Wallops, said in an Oct. 29 statement."Something went wrong and we will find out what that is," Orbital's Culbertson said Oct. 28. "We will correct that and we will come back and fly here at Wallops again, hopefully in the very near future."NTSB says rocket planet braking mechanism deployed earlyWilliam Harwood - CBS NewsInvestigators looking into the fatal crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane said Sunday twin tail booms that rotate away from the fuselage to increase drag during atmospheric re-entry deployed earlier than expected during a test flight Friday. Seconds later, the futuristic spaceplane broke apart while traveling at roughly the speed of sound, injuring one pilot and killing the other.Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told reporters late Sunday that investigators had been able to review at least some of the on-board video from a half-dozen cameras, along with stored telemetry, and while the results do not yet indicate a root cause of the mishap, the data do show the sequence of events."What I'm about to say is a statement of fact and not a statement of cause," Hart said. "We are a long way from finding cause, we still have months and months of investigation, there's a lot that we don't know."The flight got underway Friday with SpaceShipTwo carried aloft by a twin-fuselage carrier jet known as WhiteKnightTwo that took off from Mojave, Calif., where spaceplane-builder Scaled Composites is based.Pilot Peter Siebold, director of flight operations for Scaled, and co-pilot Michael Alsbury, were at the controls when the rocket plane was released from WhiteKnightTwo at an altitude of roughly 50,000 feet above the Mojave Desert.After a short free fall, the pilots fired the ship's hybrid rocket motor, burning nitrous oxide with solid propellant to begin a steep climb. Seconds later, the aircraft broke apart in a cloud of debris that fell to the Mojave Desert along a five-mile-long swath.Siebold managed to escape the wreckage and parachute back to Earth, enduring unspecified injuries. Alsbury, a 39-year-old father of two, was killed.It was the first powered flight for SpaceShipTwo since January and the first featuring a new fuel mixture intended to improve performance as Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites worked to complete a long test program before beginning commercial flights next spring.Based on witness accounts, some speculated the hybrid motor might have malfunctioned, triggering the mishap.But Hart said Sunday that investigators "found the fuel tanks, the oxidizer tanks and the engine, and all were intact, showed no signs of burn through, no signs of being breached."Instead, investigators found video evidence and telemetry indicating SpaceShipTwo's twin tail booms, known as "feathers," apparently deployed prematurely.The tail booms extend straight away to the rear of the spaceplane's fuselage during normal powered flight. Designed by famed aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, the booms, or feathers, are intended to rotate upward with respect to the fuselage during atmospheric entry to increase drag, slowing the craft down and easing stresses on the vehicle."The spaceship was released normally and shortly after it was released, the rocket engine ignited," Hart said. "About nine seconds after the engine ignited, the telemetry data told us the feather parameters changed from locked to unlocked. Now, in order for feathering, this action to be commanded by the pilots, two actions must occur. One is, the lock-unlock handle most be moved from locked to unlocked and number two is, the feathering handle must be moved to the feather position."Approximately two seconds after the feathering parameters indicated that the lock-unlock lever was moved from lock to unlock, the feathers moved toward the extended position, the deploy position, even though the feather handle itself had not been moved. This occurred at a speed just above approximately Mach 1.0.Seconds later, telemetry and video ceased as the vehicle broke apart."The engine burn was normal up until the extension of the feathers," Hart said. "There is a camera in the cockpit -- there are several cameras in the space vehicle -- there's a camera in the cockpit mounted on the ceiling that looks forward and shows the actions of the pilots and the instruments."And review of that camera is consistent with telemetry data and shows that the feather lock-unlock lever was moved by the co-pilot from the lock position to the unlock position. Normal launch procedures are that after the release (from the WhiteKnightTwo carrier jet), ignition of the rocket and acceleration, that the feathering devices are not to be moved, the lock-unlock lever is not to be moved into the unlock position, until the acceleration is up to Mach 1.4. As I indicated, that occurred at approximately Mach 1.0."In any case, simply unlocking the mechanism should not have triggered deployment. The second action normally required to deploy the feather -- moving the feathering handle to the deploy position -- did not occur. How the mechanism could activate in the absence of the second step is not yet known.It also was not immediately clear how the ship's aerodynamic stability was affected by a premature feather deploy at a lower velocity than planned.Hart re-emphasized that investigators were drawing no conclusions yet and that "months and months of investigation" will be needed to determine the root cause of the mishap."We'll be looking at training issues, we'll be looking at was there pressure to continue testing, we'll be looking at safety culture, we'll be looking at the design, the procedures, we've got many, many issues to look into much more extensively before we can determine the cause."Asked specifically if pilot error was a factor, Hart said "we are not ruling anything out. We are looking at all of these issues to determine what was the root cause of this mishap. We are looking at a number of possibilities, including that possibility."The crash was a devastating setback to Virgin Galactic and its founder Richard Branson, one of the leaders in the push to commercialize space travel, and a disheartening tragedy for the tight-knit group of test pilots, engineers and designers based at the Mojave Air and Space Port that have been working for the past decade to turn the dream of commercial spaceflight into reality.The mishap has given fresh ammunition to critics of commercial space, who claim only the super rich can afford private spaceflight and that the risks outweigh any potential benefits. Supporters argue private industry, unshackled by government bureaucracy and regulations that stifle innovation, is best suited to turn space travel into a viable industry open to average citizens.Branson created Virgin Galactic after Scaled Composites, founded by Rutan, won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004, becoming the first private company to send a manned spacecraft -- SpaceShipOne -- higher than 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, the generally agreed-on boundary of space.Virgin Galactic entered into a partnership with Scaled to build a much larger space plane -- SpaceShipTwo -- capable of carrying a crew of two and four to six passengers out of the dense lower atmosphere for brief sub-orbital forays into the weightless environment of space. After several delays and false starts, Branson was hoping to begin commercial operations next spring.But the loss of SpaceShipTwo has put those plans on hold indefinitely.In a statement released earlier Sunday, Virgin Galactic warned against premature speculation, saying safety was the company's top priority and "any suggestion to the contrary is categorically untrue.""We have the privilege to work with some of the best minds in the space industry, who have dedicated their lives to the development of technologies to enable the continued exploration of space," the statement said. "All of us at Virgin Galactic understand the importance of our mission and the significance of creating the first ever commercial spaceline. This is not a mission that anyone takes lightly."The statement went on to say "we have been overwhelmed and grateful for the outpouring of support we have received from our future astronauts, friends in the industry and people all over the world who are inspired by the work our industry is doing and who are urging us to continue.""Now is not the time for speculation," the company 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."Privately-Funded Space Research Leverages Scarce Public Funding | CommentaryJeffrey Manber - Roll CallRoll Call recently reported on Sen. Tom Coburn's final "Wastebook" with negative descriptions of two of my company's customers' use of the International Space Station. Coburn went on to call for canceling the ISS entirely, which he claimed would save $3 billion, not understanding these two projects are mostly privately funded.What the good senator and other readers of Roll Call may not realize is that ISS utilization is changing dramatically. For example, NanoRacks has invested millions of private dollars to enable more businesses, researchers and educators to use the incredible capabilities of our National Laboratory in Space. Instead of a traditional contract where NASA pays a company, we raise private capital to place new hardware on ISS and sell the use of that research equipment to organizations and companies worldwide so they can cost-effectively utilize ISS. Indeed, the two projects the Wastebook criticizes were primarily funded by the ISS users themselves, using hardware privately financed by NanoRacks.In the late 1980s, I worked in the Office of Space Commercialization in President Ronald Reagan's Commerce Department. Back then we were worried about whether NASA's then-named Space Station Freedom would really achieve the potential that led the president to launch the program. I can report that we are starting to realize a commercial marketplace onboard this government-owned facility in low-earth orbit.The Wastebook's assertion that we should throw the ISS away because a commercial golf club company and middle-school science students invested their own money to use the ISS is wrong. Why wouldn't we want taxpayers to use an asset they paid for?Indeed, the very nature of the ISS program is changing. After all, NASA is not just a science agency. It exists to open the frontiers of air and space to the American people. Do NASA's spaceflight programs — including the ISS — deliver a lot of scientific knowledge for the American people? Yes. But that is only one of NASA's payoffs.Today, America is taking a new pathway in human space flight, with a much greater role for the private sector. Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan signed into law a change to NASA's charter mandating that NASA "seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space." It's taken a long time, but ISS is becoming a global community of commercial customers across many industries, and yes, even reaching down into schools and universities. The ISS is more successful every day because NASA is embracing privatization and commercialization to address the very budget problems Coburn wrote about.Specifically, the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program highlighted in the Wastebook is not a NASA project. This non-profit educational organization raises money from parents, community groups, businesses, and receives less than 10 percent of its funding from the NASA-funded Center for the Advancement of Science in Space. The educational organizations then pay to use NanoRacks facilities at ISS, with prices starting about $28,000 per project. This isn't waste, this is main street America creating more public value from a unique asset Congress has funded. This is America at its finest.As Jeff Goldstein, SSEP's director, points out: "Those 15 experiments represent the culmination of 6,750 grade 5-12 students engaged in experiment design. Instead of passive 'inspiration', a small commercial company enabled a nonprofit organization and 15 American communities to actually use this National Laboratory in Space. Nearly 7000 students didn't just watch astronauts on television, they got their minds working (and their hearts racing) figuring out what question they wanted to ask — and attempt to answer — about the unique environment of space." All of this is made possible because Congress and the Administration have directed NASA to pursue a more business-friendly path for the ISS.Of course, Congress is right to still question the high cost of operating the ISS, and to press NASA to make even more changes. As the pointy end of the ISS commercialization spear, I appreciate their challenging NASA to move faster. NASA is now looking at transitioning from managing its own space station to becoming a customer of privately-owned space stations. That's critical to increase the return on taxpayers' investments and also allow NASA to start opening up the rest of the solar system to Americans. By enabling more people to do something productive in space, NanoRacks is partnering with NASA to pay back the American taxpayer for the investment they have made in ISS. I would hope that everyone appreciates that in 2014, not all projects in outer space are managed and paid for solely by the government.Jeffrey Manber is managing director of NanoRacks LLC.Shuttle monument dedicated during Titusville ceremonyRick Neale – Florida TodayFacing a crowd next to an eight-ton stainless steel space shuttle emblem, astronaut Bob Crippen reminisced about his NASA spaceflight career that started in April 1981."When I look back on the program, it was a great experience. Yes, we had two terrible tragedies. But every time it happened, the program picked itself up by its bootstraps and got the program back flying again — and flying safely," said Crippen, who orbited the earth aboard shuttle Columbia during STS-1.Saturday morning, a jacket-wearing crowd attended the dedication ceremony of the 15-foot-tall shuttle monument at Space View Park.The audience was largely comprised of current and retired space workers, some dating to the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo days.The U.S. Space Walk of Fame Museum spearheaded creation of the monument, which cost about $350,000. Six black granite panels on the 8-foot-tall base display information on shuttle processing, ground operations, missions and major NASA and space contractor sites."When my daughter called from Houston and told me that we had lost contact with Columbia, I knew that that was probably going to be the demise of the program. But truthfully, I never expected the shuttle would be canceled without some other way of putting our crews up in space here from the United States," Crippen said."But that's what's happened. And we can look back and remember the program fondly," he said.Dozens of former shuttle workers lined up at the podium, then briefly took the microphone, introduced themselves and described the work they did."We get a lot of the credit, a lot of the glory for going up there in space, get to meet the presidents and all the other people and things like that. But we couldn't have done anything we have done, had it not been for all those we stood up and spoke to us — and all the others who couldn't be with us today," said astronaut Jon McBride, who commanded shuttle Challenger in 1984."God bless them," McBride said.Astronaut Andy Allen, a veteran of three shuttle missions, concurred."I think it's wonderful that we have a monument here for the folks that make it all work right. It's really not that hard to get strapped into a rocket," Allen said."My mother told me it was a lack of intelligence to get strapped into a rocket," he joked, drawing laughs from the crowd."You know, I've got to echo what Andy just said," said astronaut Fred Gregory, a commander and pilot who also logged three shuttle missions."Everybody gives us the credit. And for every launch we had, I think there were probably 40,000 people around the world who were going to make that the safest, most successful mission ever," Gregory said.Can space industry survive 2 explosions in 4 days?Seth Borenstein - Associated PressFiery failures are no stranger to the space game. It's what happens when you push the boundaries of what technology can do, where people can go. And it happened again to Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo.In the past decade, the space industry has tried to go from risky and government-run to routine private enterprise — so routine that if you have lots of money you can buy a ticket on a private spaceship and become a space tourist.More than 500 people have booked a flight, including Justin Bieber, Ashton Kutcher and little known space scientist Alan Stern.But it all depends on flying becoming safe and routine. This week hasn't helped.Three days after a private unmanned rocket taking cargo up to the International Space Station blew up six seconds into its flight, a test flight of SpaceShipTwo exploded Friday over the Mojave Desert with two people on board.The developments reignited the debate about the role of business in space and whether it is or will ever be safe enough for everyday people looking for an expensive 50-mile-high thrill ride."It's a real setback to the idea that lots of people are going to be taking joyrides into the fringes of outer space any time soon," said John Logsdon, retired space policy director at George Washington University. "There were a lot of people who believed that the technology to carry people is safely at hand."The question for space tourism might be, "if it survives," Logsdon said. But he thinks its momentum in recent years will keep it alive.Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson expressed the same view Saturday after arriving in Mojave, California, to meet with the project workforce reeling from the accident."We would love to finish what was started some years ago, and I think pretty well all our astronauts would love us to finish it, love to go to space," he said. "Millions of people in the world would love to one day have the chance to go to space."Federal estimates of the commercial space industry —only a little of it involving tourism — exceed $200 billion. NASA is counting on private companies such as SpaceX and Orbital Sciences to haul cargo to the space station. They are also spending billions to help SpaceX and Boeing build ships that will eventually take people there, too.Internet pioneers Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have gotten into the space game. Aviation entrepreneur Branson and others are pushing a billion-dollar space tourism industry.The Virgin Galactic and Orbital accidents have nothing in common except the words private space, Stern said. Still it raises issues about the space industry.Some experts said they worry that private industry may just not be as safe as the government when it comes to going into space.Jerry Linenger, a former astronaut who narrowly survived a 1997 fire on the Russian space station Mir, said private industry lacks the experience and the advocates for safety that NASA had when he was launching into space. He pointed to former moonwalking astronaut John Young, who NASA encouraged to raise safety issues and slow things down.Watching the Orbital Sciences accident on Tuesday, Linenger said, "it was blatantly obvious that it is a dangerous operation that is very nearly on the edge," yet private companies talk of doing it better, faster and cheaper. Then they find out that was naive, he said.American University space policy professor Howard McCurdy, who wrote the book "Space and the American Imagination," said NASA in the 1990s and private companies tout lean management to get things done faster, better and cheaper in space. But he said that leaves no margin for error and "is like flying an airplane without a qualified pilot. You really need to do it right."McCurdy pointed to all the Silicon Valley whiz kids in space and worried that they come with the same Microsoft attitude of pushing a product out and fixing it on the fly."I'm not sure that works for rocket ships," McCurdy said. "That may work for cellphones, smartphones and computer programs."With space, he said, "you're working much closer to the edge."Logsdon said he wouldn't fly on commercial space flights now, but Virgin Galactic customer Alan Stern said he had no qualms about it: "Let's not be Chicken Littles," he says.He recalled the early days of aviation or the early days of jet test piloting in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, when people died pushing the boundaries of technology.McCurdy said the private space industry seems to be having the same growing pains and failures that NASA and the military had when the first astronauts watched a rocket blow up in front of them.It seemed that in the first five years of U.S. rockets, one blew up every other week, but it wasn't quite that bad, said Roger Launius, associate director of the National Air and Space Museum. This week seems a lot like those old times, he said.Launius wonders if the public will support private efforts despite the visible failures, and can the for-profit companies tolerate the risk that comes with space and accidents. Orbital's stock price has dropped 13 percent since Tuesday's accident.For Stern the answer is obvious."I want to be part of the opening of this future frontier," the former associate administrator of NASA said. "I want to make that better future a reality."No frontier has been one without the risk of life and limb," he added. "I stand with the brave pioneers of space who do this for all mankind."Commercial Space Advocates Remain Confident Despite AccidentsJeff Foust - Space NewsAfter two high-profile commercial space accidents in less than a week, advocates of private space ventures told attendees of a student space conference that, while saddened by the failures, they were still confident about the future of the overall industry."It is a time of reflection for us all," said former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver in a speech here Nov. 1 during SpaceVision 2014, the annual conference of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS).Garver was referring to the Oct. 28 failure of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares launch vehicle that destroyed a Cygnus cargo spacecraft bound for the international space station, and the Oct. 31 crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane during a test flight, killing one pilot and injuring the other.Garver, who noted she was speaking at a space conference for the first time since leaving NASA in September 2013 to become general manager of the Air Line Pilots Association, said that she did not expect the failures to lessen the resolve of the agency to rely on the private sector for ISS cargo and crew transportation."After all, right now it is your choice if you want to take humans to space: are you going to double down and invest in good old U.S. private enterprise, or are you going to send the money to Russia?" she said. No member of Congress, she argued, would publicly support funding Russia."We have a program that is sustainable throughout what are going to be some difficult days ahead," she said.James Muncy, founder and principal of space policy consulting company PoliSpace, said the recent accidents, while unfortunate, demonstrated that companies were at least attempting to develop new vehicles and spacecraft, versus designs that never got off the drawing board."It has not been the greatest week in the world in America's space endeavors," he said in a Nov. 1 conference presentation. "But in some ways, it's a useful illustration of the difference between adversity and impossibility."The conference, organized by the University of North Carolina SEDS chapter, was already underway when the SpaceShipTwo accident took place on the afternoon of Oct. 31. The conference continued uninterrupted despite the accident, although some speakers changed the topics of their presentation on short notice.Rick Tumlinson, chairman of the board of space resources company Deep Space Industries and a longtime advocate of commercial space ventures, said he learned about the accident when he arrived at the conference that afternoon, and brought it up in a previously scheduled speech at the end of the day. "We had a heart-to-heart talk about it," he said in a Nov. 1 interview.Tumlinson said he was relieved about the initial response in the media to the accident, but that the commercial space industry will need to work harder to demonstrate its commitment to safety."The thing to do is to acknowledge the challenges we're facing and make sure we're doing everything possible to mitigate those challenges using the best technologies, the best systems, and the best approaches," he said. "Let's not make the same mistakes that led to things like Challenger."The SpaceShipTwo accident, Tumlinson said, may provide a stronger argument for calling private human spaceflight something other than "space tourism." That term, widely used both within the industry and among the general public, makes the experience sound safer than it's likely to be for years to come, he claimed."When it's a completely passive, 99-percent-safe experience, maybe you can call someone a tourist," he said. "Not somebody who is putting their life on the line to have the most heightened experience of their life."OPINION: Commercial space learns a valuable, painful lessonCollin Skocik - Spaceflightinsider.comIt's been a bad week for commercial space companies. On Tuesday, Oct. 28, Orbital Sciences' Cygnus cargo ship Deke Slayton was destroyed when the Antares rocket carrying it exploded just after liftoff from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Barely three days later, on Friday, Oct. 31, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo crashed east of Mojave. No one was hurt in the explosion of the unmanned Antares, but SpaceShipTwo was crewed by two pilots, one of whom was killed – the other was badly injured.The investigations into the two accidents are likely to continue for some time. For now, it's known that the Antares was exploded by the range safety officer who activated the Flight Termination System after a failure occurred in the rocket's first stage. Many observers reported noticing something detach from the rocket before the first explosion.Although no one was hurt, there was damage to the launch pad, and 5,000 lbs (2,268 kg) of cargo intended for the International Space Station were lost. These included food, scientific experiments, as well as Planetary Resources' Arkyd 3 demonstrator. Despite being a major setback for Orbital Sciences, which has already lost market share and drawn criticism for its use of 40-year old Soviet rocket engines. In terms of spaceflight however, at least no one was killed. The same cannot be said for the fatal crash of Richard Branson's very popular SpaceShipTwo.Shortly after Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo detached from its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnight Two it activated its engine, at that point, something went tragically wrong causing one pilot to be killed – and the other to be seriously injured.No doubt about it, it's been a tough week. It's impossible to say at this early stage what the future holds for either Orbital or Virgin Galactic. The public, long on the side of these private firms, have now begun questioning their assertions. What's important to remember, though, is that spaceflight is a dangerous, hard business, and even after 56 years, it is far from "routine." The events of this week should be taken as a reminder of that. Although no one wants accidents to happen, they do serve a purpose in spaceflight. Explosions on launch pads and fiery crashes in the desert used to be commonplace – when the U.S. was learning the hard lessons of the black sky. Now? Private space, not wanting to take lessons from NASA, is re-learning what the Space Agency was taught all those years ago.In the years following World War II, test pilots accepted the risk in testing high-performance aircraft, and the failures were used to fine-tune the vehicles and improve them. From those tests we broke the sound barrier with the X-1, achieved spaceflight for the first time with the X-15, and ultimately developed the Space Shuttle. The constant array of rocket explosions along what would become Florida's Space Coast – were just a part of the development process.You launch a rocket, blow it up, fix whatever blew it up, build a new one and hopefully the next time it blows up it's for a different reason. Over time, rockets have become more reliable, the launches more frequent, to the point that people have forgotten that they're extremely powerful, complex and dangerous devices.According to NASA researcher Jim Slade: "I heard Neil Armstrong one time say that, today, they're shocked when the shuttle doesn't work every time, but they were always surprised when the Saturn V did."It's important to remember that NASA has been in the business of launching rockets since 1958. Private spaceflight is still fairly new, even when the principles of rocketry are tried and true. The Antares rocket made its inaugural flight in 2013, and Tuesday's failed launch – was only the fifth flight. Also worthy of note is the fact that roughly 75 percent of all new launch vehicles encounter failures of this sort – during the first three flights.As a point of comparison, the Soviet N1 rocket from which the Antares rocket engines were at least partially derived; the N1 flew four flights and exploded every time. Orbital has had greater success with Antares, having flown four successful missions thus far. However, the use of the old Soviet engine in the modern Antares is a matter of concern. One that apparently Orbital itself has – as the company has put out a call for new engines for the booster. Some reports – suggest that another Russian engine might be considered to replace the AJ-26.Frank Culbertson, Orbital's executive vice president and former NASA astronaut, addressed the issue of the engines after the explosion."As we went through testing, we did discover there were some effects of aging since they had been in storage for awhile, including some stress corrosion cracking. That's what we [corrected] with weld repairs and other inspections."The issue was brought up in a 2012 interview by Wired.com of Elon Musk, CEO of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX ), in the interview the billionaire harshly criticized Orbital, saying it: "…has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the '60s. I don't mean their design is from the '60s — I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the '60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere."However, it's not clear yet that the Soviet engines were connected with the failure of the launch. Whether they were or were not, such failures are part of the dangerous game of spaceflight.What's disturbing about these accidents was not that they occurred. What is distressing, is that these firms, partially, or as a whole, are part of what has been dubbed 'NewSpace.' NewSpace, has been less than kind toward NASA's record.One notable example is a sign that was held up when SpaceShipOne completed the Ansari X Prize which read "SpaceShipONE, Government=ZERO." A strange observation considering the actual historical record — 2 suborbital flights versus more than 160 successful crewed, orbital missions including 6 Moon landings, plus countless unmanned satellites and probes.Back in January of 2013, Spaceflight Insider's editor, Jason Rhian, described the hubris of the NewSpace proponents. "No NewSpace firm has launched a single astronaut into orbit. They have not landed anything on the surface of the Red Planet, or any other planet for that matter, and haven't sent probes to orbit our nearest celestial neighbor. Check your egos at the door. What NewSpace has done is impressive, but they are stating statistics about things that might happen and rockets that might fly—in the past tense. Pride goeth before a fall, and when this toddler falls off its high chair, it is going to be a very far fall indeed."Jeffrey Kluger, a senior writer at Time magazine and co-author of the Apollo 13 opus Lost Moon with Jim Lovell, was particularly damning of Richard Branson. "I visited Branson's self-styled spaceport in the Mojave last year to watch a brief test flight of his spacecraft. The mission that day was intended more as an air show than anything else—part of a pep rally for the hundreds of Virgin customers who would be attending to hear about the company's progress. All of them had reserved a seat and paid a deposit toward their $200,000 ticket for a trip that—if it ever happened—would last just 15 minutes and ascend to just 62 miles (100 kilometers), which technically counts as being in space, but only to the extent that riding a jet ski off the beach in Ft. Lauderdale counts as going to sea."Kluger does not mention that NASA hasn't gone much farther than that since the last Moon landing, way back in 1972. Nevertheless, the Space Shuttle did fly 135 missions with two fatal accidents—an astonishing record for such a complicated machine.This week's accidents—the first to befall commercial spacecraft—show that private industry is not immune to the problems that the U.S. government has encountered.Space technology is risky no matter who flies it. So far public response to these two accidents appears to be acceptance and encouragement to move on. "Onward and upward," say many comments online.This is not the reaction when accidents have taken place solely under NASA's watch. Perhaps this is because these were not solely taxpayer-funded efforts (Antares and Cygnus were developed with taxpayer-provided funds), there does not seem to be the widespread notion that we saw in abundance after the Columbia disaster that spaceflight is "too" dangerous.Orbital and Virgin will recover. The flaws in the Antares and SpaceShipTwo will, no doubt, be fixed. That is the history of rocketry and spaceflight. But this week the private sector learned an important lesson. Spaceflight is not safe and it's not "routine," and it won't be for a long time.Two terms kept cropping up on news channels that were reporting the twin space disasters this week: "passionate" and "enthusiastic." These traits are the hypergolic fuel which has propelled space endeavors through the long, lean years. However, the structure of the vehicle that uses those fuels – is comprised of sturdy materials which include, experience, patience and wisdom.These titanium-strong substances are acquired through many lessons, mistakes and epiphanies. New, private, commercial – whatever you choose to call it – has just learned two hard lessons. As Rhian noted – the toddler has taken a very hard fall. It now needs to dust itself off, accept the cause of these incidents – with humility – and move forward.However, one part of this process, needs to be an acknowledgement – that their reach might be exceeding their grasp, that not everything those with five decades of experience has to say should be ignored just because they are "old" and that having a large following on Twitter and a flashy ad campaign – allows one to sidestep basic tenants of engineering.As part of the Rogers Commission which investigated the loss of space shuttle Challenger on mission STS-51L, Nobel physicist Richard P. Feynman made the following, relevant, quote:"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled…"Virgin Galactic rocket plane deployed braking system prematurelyStephen Clark - Spaceflightnow.comVirgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane disintegrated in mid-air after two tail stabilizers prematurely extended, federal investigators said Sunday, a discovery that could shift the focus of the probe into Friday's fatal crash away from the craft's rocket motor.But the National Transportation Safety Board's acting chairman Christopher Hart cautioned against jumping to conclusions."What I'm about to say is a statement of fact and not a statement of cause," Hart said. "We are a long way from finding cause. We still have months and months of investigation to do, and there's a lot that we don't know. We have extensive data sources to go through."An analysis of telemetry and video recorded aboard the doomed space plane has revealed SpaceShipTwo's novel braking system deployed earlier than designed.The rocket plane's rear-mounted feathering system is supposed to extend before the ship descends back into the atmosphere from space, slowing SpaceShipTwo's speed and putting the craft into a belly-down position during re-entry.But SpaceShipTwo's twin tail booms rotated upward seconds after it fired a hybrid rocket motor following a drop from Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane 50,000 feet above California's Mojave Desert.The NTSB is leading the investigation into Friday's crash, and Hart said Sunday that ShipShipTwo's co-pilot moved a lever inside the space plane's cockpit to unlock the tail feathers, which are normally pointed toward the rear of the vehicle when it flies under rocket power.The co-pilot on Friday's flight — 39-year-old Michael Alsbury — died in the accident. Alsbury's co-workers at Scaled Composites, builder of SpaceShipTwo, have established a memorial fund.Pilot Peter Siebold, 43, was able to get free of the space plane and parachute to the ground. He was hospitalized with serious injuries.The rocket's hybrid rocket motor, consuming a mix of nitrous oxide and a plastic-based solid fuel mix, ignited a few seconds after SpaceShipTwo's release from the carrier aircraft. Friday's test flight marked the first time the rocket motor was used on SpaceShipTwo since Virgin Galactic switched from a rubber-based to a plastic-based fuel."About nine seconds after the engine ignited, the telemetry data showed us that the feather parameters changed from lock to unlock," Hart said.According to Hart, a camera mounted inside SpaceShipTwo's cockpit showed Alsbury move a handle to unlock the feather system as the rocket plane passed Mach 1 — the speed of sound.Such action on a SpaceShipTwo flight is not expected until the rocket plane reaches Mach 1.4, Hart told reporters in a press conference Sunday night in Mojave, Calif."Normal launch procedures are that after the release, the ignition of the rocket and acceleration, that the feathering devices are not to be moved — the lock/unlock lever is not to be moved into the unlock position — until the acceleration up to Mach 1.4. Instead, as indicated, that occurred (at) approximately Mach 1.0," Hart said.The tail booms extended after they were unlocked, even though they were not commanded to do so, Hart said. SpaceShipTwo's pilots normally must unlock the feathers, then send a separate command to move the tail booms into position for descent."This was what we would call an uncommanded feather, which means the feather occurred without the feather lever being moved into the feather position," Hart said."After it was unlocked, the feathers moved into the deployed position, and two seconds later we saw disintegration," Hart said."Shortly after the feathering occurred, the telemtry data terminated and the video data terminated," Hart said.The video embedded below shows how SpaceShipTwo's feathering system works from a camera attached to one of the ship's tail booms on a previous flight.The performance of SpaceShipTwo's rocket motor, which was flying for the first time with a new type of propellant, was normal up until the extension of the rocket plane's tail feathers, according to Hart.Investigators combing the five-mile-long debris field have located SpaceShipTwo's rocket motor and propellant tanks, which were found intact and show no sign of burn-through or breaching, according to Hart. Some of the rocket plane's wreckage has been moved into hangars for examination.Six video cameras and six data recorders on-board SpaceShipTwo will also help the investigation, Hart said, along with footage from the space plane's carrier plane, ground-based imagers, and eyewitness interviews. Investigators also planned to interview Siebold, the surviving pilot.When asked if Sunday's revelation would put the focus of the investigation on pilot error, Hart said the NTSB is not ruling anything out."We are looking at a number of possibilities, including that possibility," Hart said."I want to emphasize that we have not determined the cause," Hart said. "I am not stating that this is the cause of this mishap. We have months and months of investigation to determine what the cause was. We'll be looking at training issues, we'll be looking at was there pressure to continue testing, we'll be looking at safety culture. We'll be looking at the design (and) the procedure. We've got many, many issues to look into much more extensively before we can determine the cause."There is much that we don't know, and our investigation is far from over."Friday's test flight was the next step to realize Virgin Galactic's plans to start operational service with SpaceShipTwo by next spring, ferrying paying passengers to a speed three-and-a-half times the speed of sound at an altitude of more than 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, above Earth — the internationally-recognized boundary of space.Passengers at that altitude could unstrap from their seats and float around the rocket plane's six-person cabin for a few minutes before gliding back to the ground for landing on a runway.Virgin Galactic issued a statement Sunday defending the company's safety record and urging against speculation on the cause of Friday's mishap."At Virgin Galactic, we are dedicated to opening the space frontier, while keeping safety as our 'North Star'. This has guided every decision we have made over the past decade, and any suggestion to the contrary is categorically untrue," the company said."We have the privilege to work with some of the best minds in the space industry, who have dedicated their lives to the development of technologies to enable the continued exploration of space," the company said. "All of us at Virgin Galactic understand the importance of our mission and the significance of creating the first ever commercial spaceline. This is not a mission that anyone takes lightly."The company, founded by Virgin Group's Richard Branson, said it would not comment on the investigation while the NTSB is doing its work."Now is not the time for speculation," the company 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."NTSB Says SS2 Debris Field Indicates In-Flight Breakup, Scaled Identifies PilotsMarcia S. Smith - Spacepolicyonline.comThe National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said tonight that the wreckage from the SpaceShipTwo (SS2) crash yesterday is spread over 5 miles and that indicates an in-flight breakup. Earlier today, Scaled Composites identified the two SS2 pilots: Michael Alsbury, who perished, and Peter Siebold, who is hospitalized.NTSB acting chairman Christopher Hart provided a brief recap of the first day of the NTSB investigation at an 8:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) press conference (11:00 pm EDT). This was the second NTSB briefing of the day, the first one having been held at 9:00 am PDT. Another NTSB briefing will be held tomorrow.Virgin Galactic Founder Richard Branson also held a news conference earlier today.SS2 crashed shortly after 10:00 am PDT yesterday (October 31). The reusable spaceplane separated from its WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft as expected after reaching approximately 45,000 feet, but something happened shortly thereafter that caused it to crash to Earth.Hart said that one decision made today was who would be parties to the investigation. NTSB has the lead, and the FAA. Scaled Composites, and Virgin Galactic are participants. SS2 was owned by Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and built by Scaled. The two pilots were Scaled employees.Scaled said in a press release that Siebold was the SS2 pilot and Alsbury the copilot. Alsbury died at the scene. Siebold, who is director of Flight Operations for Scaled, is "alert and talking with his family and doctors," the company reported.Hart was asked at the press conference why one of the pilots was able to eject and the other did not. Hart replied that it is not clear how the surviving pilot got out the plane. One parachute was found at the crash site, and the other was not deployed, he said, but there is not enough information yet to determine exactly what happened. The NTSB has not interviewed Siebold, the survivor, on the recommendation of his doctors.When asked if the NTSB has any findings that could affect the short-term future of the program, Hart stressed that the NTSB is investigating this accident and it does not prevent the operator from doing anything. It is "completely up to the operator" as to what to do in the short term. The accident investigation will determine the cause of the accident and make recommendations to avoid another occurrence, he said.A lot of data and information will be available to investigators, he added. SS2 had six cameras, WhiteKnightTwo had three, a range camera at nearby Edwards Air Force Base was used, a chase airplane had video and radar, and telemetry with over 1,000 parameters is available. It will take some time to comb through all of that data, he said, stressing that he was not complaining, that having so much data is a good thing.The debris is spread over a 5 mile area from northeast to southwest, which indicates an in-flight breakup, he said. The left and right tail booms fell in the northeast corner, then the fuselage with oxidizer and fuel tanks, then the cockpit, and then the engine itself. Investigators looked at the fuel tanks today, but not the engine.He said investigators likely would be on-scene for 4-7 days. That will be followed by a period for collecting facts off-scene and then analysis, with the entire investigation taking about 12 months.UPDATE 3-Branson determined to find cause of Virgin spaceship crash, pilots identifiedLucy Nicholson and Irene Klotz – ReutersBillionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson on Saturday vowed to find out what caused his space tourism company's passenger spaceship to crash during a test flight, killing one pilot and injuring the other, but expressed a desire to press on with the dream of commercial space flight.Michael Alsbury, 39, has been identified as the pilot who died in the crash of Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, and the surviving pilot is Peter Siebold, 43, the Kern County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.Branson arrived in California's Mojave Desert to meet his Virgin Galactic team and federal officials who were opening their investigation into Friday's accident, the second in less than a week involving a commercial space company.Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo went down during a powered test flight, scattering debris over the Mojave Desert, 95 miles (150 km) north of Los Angeles."We owe it to our pilots to find out exactly what went wrong," Branson said during a news conference in Mojave."If we can overcome it, we will make absolutely certain that the dream lives on," he said.Alsbury, who a sheriff's spokesman said was from Tehachapi, California, was a project engineer and test pilot at Scaled Composites, a Northrop Grumman Corp subsidiary that built and designed the spacecraft for Virgin Galactic.He was flying for the ninth time aboard SpaceShipTwo, including serving as the co-pilot on the vehicle's first rocket-powered test flight on April 29, 2013, according to his biography on the company's website.He was found dead in the aircraft, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said on Friday.Siebold parachuted from SpaceShipTwo and was found a mile from the fuselage, Youngblood said. He had moderate to major injuries and was taken by helicopter to Antelope Valley Hospital, the Sheriff's Office said in a statement.Siebold had been the pilot alongside Alsbury on SpaceShipTwo's maiden test flight last year, according to Scaled Composites.A team of investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived at the crash site on Saturday to begin piecing together what led to the accident."This was a test flight, and test flights are typically very well documented in terms of data," said Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the NTSB. "We may have lots of evidence that will help us with the investigative process," he said.Friday's crash was the second disaster in less than a week suffered by a private space company, dealing a blow to the fledgling commercial space industry that has been taking on work traditionally done by governments.On Tuesday, an Antares rocket built and launched by Orbital Sciences Corp exploded after liftoff from Wallops Island, Virginia, destroying a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station.NEW TYPE of FUELThe Virgin probe will likely will focus on SpaceShipTwo's rocket engine, which on Friday was flying with a new type of fuel for the first time, experts said.The solid plastic-type propellant is ignited by nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas.Virgin Galactic announced in May that it was replacing the rubber-based propellant used during the spaceship's three previous rocket-powered test flights to get better performance."We've tested both of these fuel grains a lot," Virgin Galactic chief executive George Whitesides told Reuters at the time.Before Friday's flight, SpaceShipTwo's last powered test flight was in January, though the rocket and its new propellant had passed multiple ground tests.Virgin Galactic is a U.S. offshoot of the London-based Virgin Group founded by Branson, one of the world's most famous entrepreneurs whose business empire ranges from airlines to music stores and mobiles phones.Friday's accident marked the fourth fatality in Scaled's SpaceShipTwo development effort. In 2007, a fuel tank exploded, killing three Scaled employees."While not a NASA mission, the pain of this (new) tragedy will be felt by all the men and women who have devoted their lives to exploration," NASA, the U.S. space agency, said in a statement.Virgin Galactic craft probably broke up in midair, NTSB chief saysMelody Petersen, Ruben Vives, W.J. Hennigan – Los Angeles TimesThe National Transportation Safety Board's top official said late Saturday that he believes a Virgin Galactic space craft that crashed Friday, killing a test pilot, broke apart in midair.Christopher Hart, acting NTSB chairman, said the wreckage of SpaceShipTwo was spread over five miles in the Mojave Desert, suggesting an "in-flight break up."After the first day of the investigation, Hart said NTSB officials have also determined that the breakup and subsequent crash were filmed by at least six on-board cameras, a camera at Edwards Air Force Base and cameras on a "chase aircraft" that was following SpaceShipTwo's test flight from Mojave."Because it was a test flight it was heavily documented in a way that we don't normally see in accidents," Hart said.It could take up to a year for investigators to determine the cause of the crash. NTSB officials will remain in Mojave for at least seven days.Earlier in the day, authorities identified the craft's two test pilots as Michael Alsbury, 39, who was found dead at the crash site with the main fuselage, and Peter Siebold, 43, who suffered a shoulder injury.Siebold "is alert and talking with his family and doctors," according to a statement from Scaled Composites, the designers of Virgin Galactic's space launch system."We remain focused on supporting the families of the two pilots and all of our employees, as well as the agencies investigating the accident," the statement said.Siebold is the company's director of flight operations.Virgin Galactic's billionaire founder Richard Branson, who flew to Mojave overnight, vowed Saturday morning to find out what doomed the SpaceShipTwo rocket ship that he hoped would eventually carry paying passengers into space."In testing the boundaries of human capabilities and technologies, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Yesterday, we fell short," Branson told reporters. "We will now comprehensively assess the results of the crash and are determined to learn from this and move forward together."Branson added: "We do understand the risks involved and we're not going to push on blindly. To do so would be an insult to all those affected by this tragedy."He said it was "fair to say that all 400 engineers that work here ... and I think most people in the world" want to see the dream of commercial space travel live on.Branson said the company adhered to rigorous testing standards "precisely to ensure that this never happens to the public."This will be the first time that the NTSB has led an investigation into a space launch with people on board, Hart said. The NTSB assisted in the investigations of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, he said.The crash site and debris field had been protected by the Kern County Sheriff's Department overnight, Hart said. On Saturday night, Hart said investigators had recovered fuel tanks and oxidizer tanks, as well as tail booms and the fuselage where Alsbury's body was discovered.Based on the recommendation of doctors, Hart said investigators will wait to interview Siebold.Much of the investigation is likely to focus around SpaceShipTwo's rocket engine, which is designed to propel the craft to more than 60 miles above the Earth's surface.Since April 2009, Virgin Galactic used a hybrid rocket motor built by Sierra Nevada Corp., a Sparks, Nev., company that has contracts with the U.S. military, NASA and commercial space firms.The engine, fueled by nitrous oxide and a rubber compound, had been fired in flight and on the ground around 50 times. SpaceShipTwo had three successful test flights powered by the Sierra Nevada–built rocket engine.However, in May, Virgin Galactic announced it was switching to an alternate plastic-based rocket motor fuel. It is not clear when testing began, but Scaled Composites said on its website that there have been 10 test fires since May.Friday's test flight was the first in which SpaceShipTwo used a motor with the plastic-based fuel.Executives said after the crash that the new motor and fuel had been thoroughly tested on the ground before the rocket plane took off, suspended under its carrier plane, WhiteKnightTwo, shortly after 9 a.m. Friday from the Mojave Air and Space Port, about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles.WhiteKnightTwo typically carries SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of 50,000 feet before releasing the space plane. The malfunction occurred just seconds after separation, officials said.Branson vows to find cause of spacecraft crash"The aircraft is in several different pieces," said Kern County Sheriff Don Youngblood.Alsbury, 39, worked for Scaled Composites in Mojave for 14 years as a project engineer and test pilot.He was married for at least 12 years and had a young son and daughter, both under the age of 5, according to neighbor Patricia Kinn, who said their desert community of Tehachapi was horrified by news of the crash."I know all the neighbors feel the same way," Kinn told The Times, speaking through tears. "They all know that he was a wonderful person, family man, humble and he was a great dad."Kinn said Alsbury and many of her neighbors work in the aerospace community, either at a military facility or in nearby Mojave. Alsbury was a constant presence in the neighborhood, often seen walking his dog or playing with his children, Kinn said.While Alsbury was passionate about his work, Kinn said he rarely spoke about the industry at home."He loved what he did, his work," she said. "I believe he was very proud of it."Kinn said neighbors have spoken briefly with Alsbury's wife and that the community plans to rally around the family in the coming days."It's hard for his wife and this neighborhood is devastated from it."In April 2013 Alsbury served as co-pilot, with Mark Stucky as pilot, on SpaceShipTwo's first rocket-powered flight. The aircraft broke the sound barrier, reaching Mach 1.2, and climbed to about 56,000 feet in altitude. The entire flight lasted a little more than 10 minutes. It ended with a smooth landing in Mojave.Alsbury received a bachelor of science in aeronautical engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. As of last year, he had logged more than 1,800 hours of flight experience, 1,600 as a test pilot and engineer in Scaled aircraft.He, along with Stucky and Clint Nichols, won the Ray E. Tenhoff Award last year. It recognizes the most outstanding technical paper presented at the annual Society of Experimental Test Pilots Symposium.News that SpaceShipTwo had crashed spread quickly through Mojave.Katie Stokes said she was at home when her mother, a fabricator at the Mojave facility, sent her a text message: "Katie, you need to pray right now …"Stokes first thought there had been a family emergency. She quickly realized the message was about the crash."This is a close-knit community," Stokes said. "We feel the general pain of the workers and of the family."Stokes' brother also works at Mojave Air and Space Port, where numerous aerospace companies like Virgin Galactic, Orbital Sciences and XCOR test and develop aircraft.Many in the town of about 4,300 residents work in the aerospace industry. Their thoughts quickly turned to the families of the test pilots.At her family's doughnut shop -- the site of an old Kern County branch library -- model airplanes hung from the ceilings and photos of test flights decorated the walls.Many of the pilots and other airport workers frequented the shop, Stokes said Friday evening as she folded pink bakery boxes."Did I know them? Should I have known them? All those things passed through my mind," she said.Marlena Rowley, a nursing school student, was at the airport Friday morning and took a moment to watch WhiteKnightTwo take off."It's a sad day," she said. "This accident touches the lives of the pilots, the community members and leaders and the commercial space industry as a whole."First stage propulsion system is early focus of Antares investigationStephen Clark - Spaceflightnow.comThe first sign of failure during Tuesday's doomed launch of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket from Virginia came from the booster's first stage about 15 seconds after liftoff, according to engineers studying what triggered a fiery mishap that destroyed a commercial cargo craft heading to the International Space Station.The rocket's 13-foot-diameter first stage, containing tanks with more than 50,000 gallons of kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants, is made in Ukraine and powered by Soviet-era engines built in the 1970s for Russia's moon program."Evidence suggests the failure initiated in the first stage after which the vehicle lost its propulsive capability and fell back to the ground impacting near, but not on, the launch pad," Orbital Sciences said in a statement released Thursday.The company's acknowledgment that the failure occurred in the first stage is not a surprise, but it is the first detail to be revealed in the investigation into the cause of the rocket crash at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia's Eastern Shore.A range safety official triggered the Antares rocket's self-destruct mechanism before it hit the ground, Orbital said.In an update posted Friday to Orbital's website, the company said workers are sifting through the debris field surrounding the Antares launch pad are focusing on identifying components of the rocket's first stage propulsion system and clearing them before bad weather arrives this weekend."Yesterday's focus was on clearing any potentially hazardous items," Orbital said. "Current priorities are on finding, cataloging and securing any elements of the Stage 1 propulsion system that will be of particular interest to the AIB (accident investigation board), as well as any cargo that may be found at the site. The team's goal is to complete that work today."The Antares rocket's first stage is powered by two AJ26 main engines. The kerosene-burning engines each generate 338,000 pounds at sea level.Supplied to Orbital by Aerojet Rocketdyne, the engines were built in Russia in the early 1970s by the Kuznetsov Design Bureau for the Soviet-era N1 moon rocket. Aerojet imported 43 of the NK-33 engines to the United States in the 1990s for use on American rockets.According to its website, Aerojet Rocketdyne upgraded the engine with a gimbal block to help steer rockets in flight, new wiring harnesses and electrical circuitry, electromechanical valve actuators and instrumentation.Orbital Sciences selected the engine for its efficiency — it produces more power for its weight than any other liquid-fueled engine ever built, save SpaceX's Merlin 1D, which generates about half the thrust of an AJ26 engine. It also saved what some Orbital Sciences officials estimated was roughly $500 million in costs to develop a comparable engine from scratch in the United States.See details of the AJ26 engine's history on our story before the Antares rocket's first launch in April 2013.At the time it selected the AJ26, Orbital Sciences was locked out of buying the RD-180 engine from Russia.The engine flies on United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 launcher, and ULA said it had exclusive rights to the powerplant.The first stage airframe, including its propellant tanks, are manufactured in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, by Yuzhmash, an aerospace company which also builds the Zenit rocket and upper stages for Europe's Vega launcher.Engineers presented a first-look assessment of telemetry recorded from the rocket to Orbital's accident investigation board Thursday. Investigators found no sign of problems during the countdown or the first few seconds of flight, according to the company's statement.Orbital Sciences is leading the inquiry into the rocket crash, which scattered debris hundreds of feet into the air as the launcher erupted in a blinding fireball, destroying an unmanned Cygnus cargo ship packed with equipment for the International Space Station.The mission was part of a $1.9 billion contract Orbital has with NASA to delivery cargo the space station. Orbital Sciences and SpaceX won deals to resupply the orbiting research outpost after the retirement of the space shuttle.NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, which has oversight authority for commercial space launches, will assist Orbital in the mishap investigation.Orbital appointed Dave Steffy, senior vice president and chief engineer of the company's advanced programs group, to serve as permanent chairman of the board looking into the launch failure.Steffy held engineering and management positions in Orbital's development of the air-launched Pegasus rocket and the Antares program.One of the first jobs of the investigation team will be the recovery of debris littering Wallops Island.Orbital said in a statement "it is likely substantial hardware evidence will be available to aid in determining root cause of the Antares launch failure."Recovered rocket and spacecraft hardware will be transferred into storage bays for close-up assessments, the company said.Cargo from failed rocket launch found at Wallops padCarol Vaughn - WVEC-TV, of Hampton Roads, Va.Some of the cargo from a failed commercial mission to the International Space Station has been found at the launch site on Wallops Island, the company that was to conduct the mission said.The cargo will be retrieved as soon as an Orbital Sciences Corp. team is given clearance to do so, according to an update the company posted on its website. What the cargo is or its condition is not yet known.Additionally, based on initial inspection by a safety team, Orbital said "it appears likely substantial hardware evidence will be available to aid in determining (the) root cause" of an Antares rocket's failure.There is a lot of debris remaining at the launch site after the 13-story rocket exploded in a fiery inferno shortly after liftoff from Wallops Island the evening of Oct. 28, officials said.Orbital has started documenting the location of each piece of debris found. Once that is completed, the pieces will be moved to a storage area on Wallops Island, where they will be further examined in an effort to determine what went wrong.The launch was intended to deliver 5,000 pounds of science and research materials, crew supplies, 1,300 pounds of food and 1,400 pounds of vehicle hardware to the space station.After reviewing data from the launch, Orbital said it appears the rocket had a "nominal" prelaunch, with no issues noted.
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