“There are no small mistakes in spaceflight.” Not sure who said that first, but I heard it straight from former SS1 pilot Brian Binnie. I can’t help but think no pilot at this level of experience and familiarity with the craft from the blueprints up would make such a mistake other than through trusting the machinery too much.
Although a mechanical problem or system fault through an unanticipated failure condition could contribute to a flight failure such as this, there is also the issue of pilot workload; that is, that if a pilot is required to make too many complex assessments and perform too many complex tasks in a short period they become cognatively overloaded and start making mistakes. Boyd’s concept of the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) applies directly here in understanding that performing too many complex tasks in a short period, especially those that require non-automatic decision making effort, end up interfering with the loop and result in paralysis or making incorrect judgments, especially when those judgments require evaluation of very precise data and conditions.
The NAA X-15 and Northrop M2-F2–vehicles which were roughly comparable to the SS2–experienced crashes that were attribute to pilot error (deviation from flight profile and pilot-induced oscillation, respectively) because of the difficulty in maintaining good control and being able to recover from the induced failured condition. All modern launch vehicles and reentry craft from Apollo forward have used autonomous flight computer control for all regimes of ascent and descent except for the final glide profile on the Shuttle Orbiter Vehicle (and that was strictly at astronaut corps behest; the vehicle could have been design for competely autonomous landing just as the Soviet Buran shuttle was). Although a human pilot was the most reliable and functional flight controller circa 1960, the ability of modern avionics and software systems has vastly exceeded what a human pilot can do even under ideal conditions, and will not suffer acceleration-induced vertigo or blackout, or fail if the oxygen regulation system stops functioning, or otherwse become distracted. But that functionality comes at great cost of software development and V&V testing on the order of hundreds of person-years for even a relatively simple system in order to achieve the high reliability needed for human spaceflight.
Stranger
I think we’re saying somewhat the same thing, but I’ll defer to your far better detailed exposition. The feathering and wing repositioning that SS2 does is novel, if not unique, and may be beyond human control limits - at least, if the craft gets outside any known situation.
Or, “Space is hard,” as someone else said…
There was an article on Friday in the L.A. Times on the investigation and the NTSB conclusions: “Pieces of falling spaceship barely missed people, new evidence shows”
*Parts of the cabin were found 30 miles away, near the high school in nearby Ridgecrest.
The cockpit debris “came down just 30 or 40 feet behind my truck,” said Ricky Valenzuela of Lancaster.
Valenzuela said he immediately stopped after hearing a loud bang and seeing a cloud of dust, thinking the other truck had crashed. When he stepped out, he found debris surrounding his FedEx truck, he said, and stretching more than a mile along the road.
Other documents released this week show that the Federal Aviation Administration issued launch permits to Scaled Composites, the company that designed and built SpaceShipTwo, despite a safety consultant’s warnings that the firm was violating regulations.
Terry Hardy, the consultant, had worked for the FAA on evaluating Scaled’s permits since 2011, but quit after learning about the SpaceShipTwo crash.
…
On Tuesday, federal safety officials harshly criticized the FAA’s oversight of Scaled.
The National Transportation Safety Board, which conducted the investigation, said that the FAA shared the blame for the in-flight breakup of SpaceShipTwo just seconds after it fired its rocket engines.
While investigators found that the copilot had erred by prematurely unlocking the rocket ship’s movable tail, they placed more of the fault on Scaled and the FAA.
The NTSB found that Scaled, which was testing SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic, had failed to consider that a single error by the copilot could lead to the rocket plane’s destruction.
The board also said that the FAA’s evaluations of Scaled’s operations were flawed. Under pressure to quickly approve the company’s permit, the FAA did not ensure that Scaled addressed the possibility of pilot error, the NTSB said.
…
Congress has prohibited the FAA from regulating space companies with rules similar to those used for the airlines, which have detailed requirements ranging from aircraft construction to pilot qualification.
To compensate, anyone flying on a commercial spacecraft must sign documents noting he or she has been told the risks and accepts them — legal language making it extremely difficult to sue after an accident.
The FAA issued its first permit to Scaled to fly SpaceShipTwo in 2012. Virgin Galactic said then that the permit was issued after Scaled had proved it could keep the public safe.
Agency officials eventually agreed with Hardy that the company was not meeting the regulations, according to interviews. But rather than pushing the company to comply, the FAA simply issued Scaled a waiver from the rules in 2013.
Scaled executives told investigators that they believed from their conversations with the FAA that the company was complying with all rules.
The executives also said they had never asked for a waiver from the rules or been told by the FAA that they needed one.*
Stranger
Did some one buy a Congressman?
It doesn’t even take that, although the success of New Mexico’s Spaceport America is basically tied to Virgin Galactic; it’s just that the FAA AST is not equipped, funded, or authorized to develop and impose reasonable spaceflight regulation that balances between encouraging commercial innovation (critical to maintaining US presence in space industries) and protection of public interest and safety. The FAA is struggling to maintain workable oversight over commercial aviation and implement its badly needed (and frankly poorly developed and tested) NextGen air traffic control and information system; AST is so underfunded and understaffed that all it can really do is rubber-stamp permits, and it is clear that the current mandate is to not interfere with operators even at significant potential hazard to public interest.
And this highlights a fundamental problem with space tourism: it requires that the capability be on a firm fiscal basis (i.e. can turn a profit) from essentially the beginning, but has to make that access available and appealing to a large enough portion of the population to make it sustainable (it can’t cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per seat for a suborbital flight). The result, and what I’ve seen is that The Spaceship Company is cutting corners all over the place to try to get some kind of flyable vehicle in order to start showing a profit and attracting investors. One can only assume similar issues with other suborbital space tourism ventures. Frankly, the real long term profitability in the launch industry is in low cost, reasonably reliable access to orbit that supports smallsat and the small end of telecom satellites. A company that could launch smallsats for a manifest cost less than US$1000/kg with 90% reliability, combined with the next generation of robust “rocksat” space vehicles that can tolerate launch environments without elaborate isolation measures and can be horizontally integrated quickly with no more than a 10K environment would lead to a genuine revolution is space communications and surveillance industry, and would ultimately provide a path toward sustainable space presence including in-situ resource utilization and permanently orbiting semi-self-sustainable space habitats. Flying suborbital arcs for wealthy people with a poor grasp of risk/reward ratios is not a viable industry and certainly not one that should be permitted to put the rest of the public at substantial risk.
Stranger