Business, Space

Virgin Galactic

34 Comments

…is grounded. I wonder if they’ll take away their allowance, too?

Honestly, this seems kind of dumb. A SpaceShipTwo that is out of fuel is no more of a risk to public safety than a business jet. In fact, it’s less, if the jet goes down full of fuel.

[Late-evening update]

My assumption when I wrote the original post was that the concern was uninvolved public on the ground. It didn’t occur to me that it could be incurring on other airspace that might be unaware of it, and into which it was not supposed to go. My bad.

34 thoughts on “Virgin Galactic”

  1. Is it one of many dumb things we get because we have lousy President?

    Who is worse Biden or Newsom?
    Newsom seems “responsive” and Biden is the dead man not walking.
    Biden a politician that Dem didn’t ever want to vote for. Newsom is the typical crap that Dems will vote for.
    At their best, failures, and both are having “problems”.

    1. They were blown off course, and received a warning light as a result. They in no way ignored the light, rather they responded in a way that maintained safety and accomplished the mission.

    2. Critical safety? Are you worried about a mid-air? Do you know the immediate action a pilot should take? Pilot the craft back on course, which they did.

  3. If they were above FL600 they were in Glass-E Airspace.

    The requirements for Class-E are:

    Class E Airspace Requirements

    You do not need to be in contact with Air Traffic Control to enter Class Echo airspace.

    There are no specific equipment requirements.

    Basic VFR minimums are 3sm visibility, 500′ below clouds, 1,000′ above clouds, 2,000′ horizontal from clouds. When you are flying above 10,000′ msl the minimums become 5sm visibility, 1,000′ below clouds, 1,000′ above clouds, 1SM horizontal from clouds.

    Again, don’t sweat every detail of the VFR minimums, just REMEMBER the numbers 91.155 (that’s where you look it up in the FAR/AIM during your checkride).

    Remember 3-152’s or Three – One Fifty Two’s (like 3 Cessna’s) 3-152s stands for 3sm, 1,000′ above, 500′ below, 2,000′ Horizontal.

  4. Flight-ER-Doc:

    You are correct but the thing probably has an Experimental Certificate which states the operating area. We have Part 21 in Australia, too, pretty much the same as the US.

    1. If I remember correctly, the main rule for experimental is can’t be flown over populated areas. But, it’s complicated because there’s three subcategories of experimental (flight test, probably what they’re under, amateur built, and exhibition) and the rules are different for all of them.

    2. At least with aircraft, an experimental certificate means it can’t be flown for hire. They plan on flying this system for hire, but AFAIK neither WhiteKnightTwo nor SpaceShipTwo are certified under the normal regulations, so they’re getting special treatment. By certified, I mean both aircraft and all of their systems (engines, avionics, structures, etc.) must meet extensive FAA requirements. Hell, it can cost tens of millions of dollars to certify a four seat private plane under the existing regulations.

    3. Why did the rest of the world commit general aviation suicide along with the US, adopting our ruinous safety regime?

      1. I have no idea. Back in the mid 1970s, the US general aviation companies produced about 10,000 planes a year, with general aviation being everything except military and airline planes. Those planes ranged from two seat trainers through business jets. The latest number I’ve seen was that in 2019, a total of 1,771 general aviation planes were produced in the US. There is no economy of scale any more. A company like Lycoming or Continental might only build maybe 2,000 new piston engines a year. That’s why even the smallest new engine, an O-200, costs at least $20,000 and one of the most popular engines, the IO-360, is closer to $40,000. The cost spiral is inevitable when the volumes are so low, and high prices further depress sales. I think the whole industry is in a death spiral except for high end turbine powered aircraft, but without small planes, who will be able to fly them?

        1. One small modification to the numbers is that over the years the number of homebuilt aircraft has increased.

          Just one brand – Vans, have these stats:

          “In December 2017 the company reported that its 10,000th aircraft had flown, an RV-7 built in Martinsburg, West Virginia”

          From Vans:

          “On average, 1.5 RVs are completed and flown for the first time each day.”

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van%27s_Aircraft

          has a chart at the bottom and you can see that they really got going in the mid 90’s.

          And that’s just one brand. There are many other successful brands out there. Super Cub,s Sonerai, Kitfox, Titan.

          So while I don’t disagree with you about a falloff in general aviation, you can’t just go by the Cessna and Piper numbers.

          The economy and standard of living has increased to the point where people of middle class means can outfit a space for airplane production and build their own airplane.

          1. Homebuilts are definitely a major part of the general aviation market but I was specifically talking about certified aircraft. Both Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic should be very grateful the FAA doesn’t require them to certify their systems to commercial aircraft standards. It would likely cost billions over and above what they spent to develop their systems.

          2. “Homebuilts are definitely a major part of the general aviation market but I was specifically talking about certified aircraft. ”

            Yes but my point is that homebuilts are another choice for prospective airplane owners which may account, in part, for the decrease in certified manufacturing and sales:

            decreased demand due to the Homebuilt (EAB – Experimental Amateur Built) option.

            Many find this option a better choice as you have more freedom regarding what you put in the airplane, and things are much much cheaper.

          3. Single engine light planes are much less complicated than modern cars and should be in a similar price range if mass produced. The price difference is a major part of the home built preferences. If a 2021 equivalent to a 172 could be purchased new for under $40k, and competition was equivalent, home built production would drop considerably.

  5. Depending how fast they were travelling at the time, they may well have entered some airspace where other aircraft may well have been routed. The FAA takes a dim view of deviating from your approved path without permission….there may well be other airplanes in the space you are now occupying. I don’t know the details, but depending on how high they were, this may well have posed a separation risk for other airplanes…possibly a serious safety risk.

    Again, I am only guessing here. But I am a pilot, so I may understand the safety issues better than non pilots.

  7. You all should read the linked article by Nicholas Schmidle in the New Yorker, and then follow the link in that article to a prior article Schmidle on Mark “Forger” Stucky. I was aghast at what I found in both articles.

    Mark was the F-106 pilot on my tow-launch demonstration program at NASA/Armstrong (Dryden at the time). He was a very competent test pilot – willing to take some risk, but by no means a cowboy. I liked and respected him very much, and was glad to see him running the flight test program at VG. But then I read of incidents that had occurred during rocket powered flights of SpaceShip 2 that were very close calls, and saw that they occurred while I was Chief Engineer at FAA/AST. I had never heard of them until reading these articles, which is a very serious matter. There was a lot being hidden from us. Even worse, there was a lot being hidden from Mark and his team.

    After the SpaceShip 2 mid-air breakup, in which Mark lost his best friend, VG hired a retired Boeing executive to do a review of what happened. The results of that review were never shared with Mark or his team, or anyone else – least of all FAA/AST. I’m not aware of anyone in the office even hearing of it. (Of course, NTSB was not much better. It “investigated” the crash, and in particular it investigated why AST had issued a waiver to the experimental permit. Everyone who had anything to do with the waiver was interviewed, except me – and I was the person who wrote it.)

    One thing that breakup taught us was that the debris model used to calculate expectation of casualties (Ec) was insanely wrong. Debris from that accident was found 50 miles from the instantaneous impact point (IIP, though I like to call it TOPOTEPWNDWH [The One Place On The Entire Planet Where No Debris Will Hit]). Given the air traffic patterns we looked at around Space Port America, there damn well was good reason to put restrictions on the trajectory. And after having read of some of the frightening lapses of safety culture in these article, I am absolutely with AST in grounding VG until they get their act together. And firing Mark Stucky for advocating normal flight safety practice tells me that they are light-years away from a together act.

    Look, I am generally the first to criticize AST’s approach to public safety, and regard it as a major impediment to the commercial space transportation industry. But there is context to that criticism.

    The restrictions on Blue Origin launches are ridiculous, because of their remote location, flight profile, and modest debris footprint. The same is true of Falcon launches from the Cape – not with respect to safety of flight over countries around the world, where AST does a pretty good job, but with public safety in the vicinity of the Cape. If Apollo Saturn V launches had been commercial, they would never have received launch licenses under FAA’s approach.

    But SpaceShip 2 is demonstrating itself to be a different animal, able to depart from its nominal flight profile, and able to produce a much wider debris footprint than anything else I’ve seen. None of that would be grounds to heavily restrict VG, if it weren’t for the fact that their safety culture evidently sucks, big time. I know I’m leaning on the evidence of a journalist who I don’t know, but I do know Mark Stucky. And if his firing was as described, that is a very bad sign.

    3. Thanks Michael. I also always thought returning boosters robotically to the Cape would be the kind of AST headache that’d keep me up at night.

    4. Thanks for the in-depth analysis Mike, but I have a quibble. An in-flight breakup of a composite aircraft will inevitably create lots of small debris with light area loading, ie, fluffy stuff. Of course some of that will drift for miles, but it’s inconsequential to Ec calculations.

      The major lumps that hit hard to smash people and other valuable things will be dispersed over a much smaller area, with sizes following a power law distribution and the area gaussian with long tails.

      1. Doug, I also have a quibble. I have a lot of respect for your propulsion development experience, but you’re incorrect about the failure modes of composite aircraft. The SS2 that killed Mike Alsbury came down in plenty of substantively large chunks. Further, there were many instances of debris that landed on the road. Of course a sparsely populated and traveled stretch, but a place where the uninvolved public could have been – obviously the Ec for that flight was larger than predicted. http://www.parabolicarc.com/2019/10/31/five-years-ago-spaceshiptwo-vss-enterprise-crashed-mojave-desert/

  8. In other news Firefly exploded after a late call to supersonic. Perhaps a propellant pumping issue or an underperforming engine that finally failed catastrophically. The Great Orbital Ghoul claims another. Don’t give up. That’s what telemetry is all about. Second tries.

    2. There was a big fireball, but something kept right on going, trailing a large smoke or exhaust plume like it was a solid or an upper stage under power. Perhaps it was the payload, but the rocket wasn’t far past maxQ and I don’t think a payload would act like it was under power.

      It took the rocket a very long time to go supersonic, so I’m wondering if engines were underperforming, making the flight run much longer to first stage cutoff than anticipated. If there was a premature second-stage ignition, perhaps some part of the control software for separation was keying off time or altitude.

      1. Premature ignition of 2nd Stage is a possibility I hadn’t considered! 2nd stage was still attached at time of explosion as far as I could tell. But the root cause of failure in this scenario was an underperforming first stage followed up with an impatient 2nd Stage if it was running only on a timer. Timer scenario seems unlikely. Bad engine/pump performance coupled with a software bug that in combo (but not separately) was fatal seems like a real possibility.

  9. To see what actually happened to Firefly Alpha: Video of launch
    (Kudos to Jack Beyer of NASASpaceflight for the videography.)

    That carbon composite structure underwent a fantastic unscheduled dynamic test and amazingly survived tremendous stresses. They can now possibly reduce weight and cost as it appears to have been overdesigned (as one would expect for a first-off.)

    1. Ah, so the piece of debris that kept on going was not from the pointy end. I’m guessing maybe it was a COPV tank that was uncorked?

  10. “MadRocketSci
    September 2, 2021 At 6:41 PM
    Why did the rest of the world commit general aviation suicide along with the US, adopting our ruinous safety regime?”

    Most of the rest of the world had done that long before the US which is why their general aviation industries are so anemic.
    Believe it or not the FAA is the world’s most reasonable civil aviation bureaucracy.
    The Europeans do not even have the equivalent of Part 21 Experimental categories. You can’t fly a prototype until it is approved by EASA. You can’t sell one until the design is certified. It used to be that the German glider industry could sell around 10 to 20 early production gliders before full certification but that has been abolished. They are toys fer chissakes. Expensive dangerous toys, who cares except the operator.

  11. To better understand the general aviation situation read J. Storrs Hall “where’s my flying car?”. He learned to fly and ended up owning a Beech Bonanza as part of his research.

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