It’s supposed to start at 9 AM PDT. Reportedly it will be live streamed by ABC-TV in Bakersfield.
[Post-briefing update]
OK, not much info. Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the NTSB said they’d just arrived, didn’t have any substantive info, would have another presser this afternoon after initial data gathering. Lead investigator will be a Lorenda Ward, with a team of 13-15 people. Didn’t know if vehicle had a black box, what altitude it occurred, but expects to get lots of telemetry/video because it was a test flight. That’s it until next presser. Follow @ntsb or go to ntsb.gov for schedule of future press conferences.
[Update at 09:32 PDT]
Channel 23 is still streaming from the Witt Center, Branson may be about to make a statement.
[Update a while later]
Leonard David has a transcript of Branson’s statement. As Miles O’Brien noted on Twitter, he seems to have lost some of his swagger.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Michael Belfiore: SpaceShipTwo and why space matters.
Well, alrighty then. A press conference to announce that they’ll have further press conferences this afternoon, once they know something.
Not be be snarky, but why is the NTSB involved when the vehicle doesn’t actually transport anything between two points? You get in, you ride, and you end up right where you started, like a treadmill or NASCAR track. I don’t think the NTSB handles escalator accidents, but those at least transport people to a different floor. So clearly this is an example of yet another government agency overstepping its mandate.
There. Now this post is 100 percent better. 🙂
The NTSB has more experience and expertise than, I think, everyone else in the world combined when it comes to figuring out what went wrong when a winged flying thingy crashes. The FAA, which absolutely has regulatory authority over SS2, has a standing deal with NTSB to have the latter handle all the winged flying thingy crash investigations. And you seem to be suggesting that the NTSB should be wholly excluded from this investigation because the acronym they chose for their name doesn’t precisely match the mission? Should the NTSB also be excluded from the crashes of flight training aircraft, aerobatic stunt planes, and the like?
There is perhaps a legitimate question as to how the NTSB should be involved in a reusable suborbital launch vehicle crash investigation, whether they automatically get lead authority or whether that’s something the FAA and the vehicle’s operator have to work out. But they should absolutely be involved. And realistically, whatever their legal authority, they should almost certainly be the ones leading the investigation.
There have to be ‘black boxes’, right?
Never mind the regulations. If I owned and operated an experimental space plane, I’d jolly well have them on my own initiative, so I could find out what happened if something went wrong.
You’d want them even if everything went perfectly. That’s why you run the test flight; data is Gold.
The days of test pilots simply writing notes on a kneeboard are long over. As a high-performance flight test aircraft, SS2 almost certainly had data acquisition equipment gathering a lot of information It’s likely that some of the data were transmitted in real time as telemetry while more data points were recorded with onboard equipment. I don’t know if they had rugged flight data recorders like the ones carried on airliners or not. Odds are they did but I don’t know. It’s possible that solid state memory in nonhardened equipment might still be readable. I hope so. Whatever happened, it happened very quickly. Odds are the surviving test pilot knows very little about the cause.
I think the FAA requires a black box on all commercial aircraft that are at least turbocharged, carry six or more passengers, and require two flight crew, and since VG wanted Spaceship Two to be certified as a commercial aircraft, it’s bound to have the recorders.
If you are operating a spaceship, experimental or otherwise, and you want to know what happens when things go wrong, you install high-bandwidth real-time telemetry and record the data on the ground. Even the most robust “black box” can be destroyed by the very high energies involved in a space launch system failure, and depending on the trajectory even an intact black box may be irretrievably lost in deep water and/or low orbit. Telemetry to a ground station, while somewhat of a hassle to arrange in the first place, is much more reliable.
There will almost certainly have been data loggers on SS2 as well, but not necessarily hardened to “black box” standards