Virgin Galactic “ignored” repeated warnings in the years leading up to the deadly crash of its spacecraft in California, a rocket science safety expert said on Sunday, as investigators hunted for clues to the accident.
After a second full day of investigation, US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) acting chairman Christopher Hart told reporters that a lock-unlock lever on the spaceship had been moved prematurely, but added that the cause of the crash was still unknown.
Carolynne Campbell, a rocket propulsion expert with the Netherlands-based International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety, said she could not speculate on the cause of Friday’s crash without “all the data.”
Photo: Reuters
However, she said multiple warnings about the spacecraft’s motor and the fuel used to power it had been issued to Virgin since 2007, when three engineers died testing a rocket on the ground.
“Based on the work we’ve done, including me writing a paper on the handling of nitrous oxide, we were concerned about what was going on at Virgin Galactic,” she said.
“I sent copies of the paper to various people at Virgin Galactic in 2009, and they were ignored,” she said.
Campbell said she outlined concerns to Virgin Galactic in a subsequent telephone conversation, but her warning again went unheeded.
“I warned them... that the rocket motor was potentially dangerous,” she said.
Campbell’s warnings related to nitrous oxide, reportedly used as a fuel component in the doomed craft along with a new substance derived from nylon plastic grains.
After the major setback to British tycoon Richard Branson’s plans, Virgin Galactic released a statement late on Sunday in which it said it was “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,” it said.
A team of NTSB investigators has been deployed to the Mojave Desert to probe the crash, in which pilot Michael Alsbury was killed and copilot Pete Siebold was seriously injured.
“We are a long way from finding cause,” Hart told reporters in Mojave on Sunday evening.
However, he added that a camera in the cockpit showed a lock-unlock lever used to activate a process in the spaceship’s tail section had been moved by the copilot while the vehicle was traveling at a speed just above Mach 1.0.
The lever was not supposed to be moved until reaching a speed of Mach 1.4, Hart said.
“I am not stating this was the cause of this mishap. We have months and months of investigation to determine what the cause was,” he said.
Hart added that investigators had found almost all important parts of the space vehicle, including fuel tanks, the oxidizer tank and engine, which were all intact.
Branson said safety had always been Virgin’s paramount concern.
“Safety has always been our number one priority,” he said, adding that the company would not “push on blindly” with its ambitious space program until the causes of the accident had been determined.
Virgin Galactic chief executive George Whitesides questioned the safety claims, telling the Financial Times in an interview on Sunday that differences of opinion were common in the world of space flight development.
“In the space community, you will be able to find people who have favorite technologies of different types. One group will say their type of technology is better than another,” he was quoted as saying.
“We pay a lot of attention to the several hundred engineers that we have on staff, and other expert consultants we’ve talked with about our technologies,” he said.
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