I recommend Schmidle’s recent book “Test Gods” if you are interested in Virgin Galactic and test piloting. Schmidle is not an engineer and I would have enjoyed a deeper dive into Virgin Galactic’s design choices, but it is a great book about (among other things) the tensions that emerge when a complex technical project is overseen from a distance by utterly nontechnical, PR-oriented upper management. The company’s communications and business strategies make a lot more sense knowing that the people calling the shots do not comprehend in the slightest how their product works.
For many reasons (some alluded to in this article, many more in the book), SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. Engineering leadership has done what they can to make the vehicle safer (at the cost of performance), but the intractable issue is that any one mistake by a pilot is likely to be fatal (and already has been, in the 2014 accident). Voices like Stucky and Ericson who wanted to acknowledge the inherent danger of the vehicle (which doesn’t mean grounding it) have been ignored and ultimately removed. The company’s business requires the vehicle to be understood to be safe by the public. The chickens will come home to roost.
SpaceShipTwo (and SpaceShipOne) are fascinating to me because they're so _not_ general purpose vehicles, yet are sold and in most cases perceived as such.
SS1 was conceived by one of the most creative designers in aviation as a point solution for the X-Prize contest - the minimal design/implementation to precisely solve that problem in the most cost effective way possible (as detailed in "Test Gods").
This cobbled together, even borderline, solution was reimplemented as a revenue producing, passenger joyride vehicle, without a lot of (apparent) deep understanding of the real problem and the quirks of their existing "solution".
Pretty much, SS2 is Branson and droogs saying, "SS1 is great, just blow it up and start printing money".
> SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this.
This comment reminded me of another story from a previous aerospace era (blimp cruise liners aka airships), the summary of which is:
> A British Lord wanted to build the best airship in the world – and so he had two rival design teams battle it out to win the juicy government contract. Competition is supposed to bring the best out of people, but run in the wrong way it can cause people (and the things they make) to fall apart in the most horrifying ways.
Agreed about the chickens and it will have a broader negative impact than the $SPCE stock price.
Fundamentally I think it’s a culture problem. Collaborative engineering that identifies problems, views them as opportunities, doesn’t finger-point, and works each problem. Versus a sales and marketing organization with hard deadlines and a 100% focus on perception and revenue targets.
We don’t need an Apollo 1 in the private space industry. But if it happens, there will be a hard reset in terms of regulatory oversight and safety protocols which will cost us several years. Perhaps it’s needed.
Honestly, Virgin Galactic should be shut down until they can take safety seriously. Space flight is risky, but they’re taking unnecessary risks above and beyond a reasonable minimum. That they’ve already killed 1 pilot out of so few launches indicates that something is seriously wrong there.
This may be a smidgen off-topic, but any good books to recommend about either the Apollo program or SpaceX that do delve a little deeper into engineering challenges and design choices?
Brilliant well written article. Not without bias, but you can see through the words on the page and into the immense pressure that team at Virgin Galactic must have been under to get their boss into space and to beat Bezos, all for the inflated ego of one man. Branson did put his life on the line to achieve that accolade though, which was a gutsy move.
> “ A private program can’t afford to lose anybody,” Branson said.
Worth noting that Virgin Galactic is currently the only private space program to have killed anyone so far. This quote is from before the fatal 2014 crash, but the FAA makes it pretty clear that a virgin galactic had a cavalier attitude towards crew safety[0] back then too. Combined with this article, that paints a picture of Virgin Galactic as a genuinely unsafe company that is going to kill a lot of people if it’s not stopped. Manual processes, no safeties, high pilot work loads, and rockets do not mix well.
0 - This was caused by a design that explicitly assumed that highly trained test pilots were incapable of making mistakes. The design required manual activation, had no failsafes, and the pilots were not told that activation at too low a speed would cause the vehicle to break apart. A breathtakingly bad design for a spacecraft.
> “I don’t know how we didn’t lose the vehicle and kill three people,” Todd Ericson, a retired Air Force Colonel and Virgin Galactic’s then vice-president of safety and test, told me in a 2020 interview.
I'm pretty impressed by this guy. Not only did he quit his VP job when he saw these safety problems, but he went around giving interviews about them. It strikes me that very few people would have done the same.
> Not only did he quit his VP job when he saw these safety problems
Agree, great guy, putting his ethics ahead of his career
> but he went around giving interviews about them
Hmmm, gets a bit murky here. If he wanted to save lives, there's a very clear path to alerting the FAA. But he didn't do that. This sounds a bit more like he was trying to save his career. Which brings in question why he quit in the first place, and how voluntary that was to begin with.
> And now they were accelerating to Mach 3, with a red light glowing in the cockpit. Fortunately for Branson and the three other crew members in the back, the pilots got the ship into space and landed safely
It seems like we’re missing the crucial step of how it all turned out OK. 2 paragraphs earlier they’re saying how red lights ought to ‘scare the shit out of you’ and ‘it’s too late once it turns red’.
Yes, the red light is supposed to mean that they failed to boost enough to be able to glide back to their target runway. But... they did anyway? Apparently? Something is missing from this account.
> Eight days after Branson’s flight, an H.R. manager booked time on his calendar, and then fired Stucky over Zoom.
Such a shame. You can bet that this will come back to bite Virgin, and should a serious accident happen and they get sued, Stucky could be a prime witness.
> ... On the morning of the flight, Branson, an outspoken environmentalist, appeared on the “livestream” arriving at the spaceport on a bicycle. But this turned out to be false: Branson did not pedal to work that day; the bike ride was filmed a week earlier and then made to look like it happened that morning. When Reuters called out the company, an anonymous official said, “We regret the error and any confusion it may have caused.”
But this was no "error":
> Branson also told spectators about the bike ride during a post-flight celebration at the spaceport, Reuters said. "It's so awesome to arrive on a bicycle, across this beautiful New Mexico countryside," Branson was quoted as telling the crowd from a stage.
Even without the red light, this incident speaks volumes about what's going in inside this "company."
As long as Branson is at the helm, VG's prospects as a going concern seem dim. You can't merch your way into space with the usual marketing game plan. Mother Nature always calls bullshit.
Good article, but I did not like the way it referred to Scaled Composites as a company "contracting" for Virgin. IIRC Burt Rutan (founder of Scaled Composites) began the whole program (Spaceship One. etc.), but became associated with Branson later, and that eventually led to an acquisition. I suppose that like many others, the acquisition deal required the re-writing of history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites
Scaled Composites was contracting for Virgin Galactic though. Rutan and Scaled did SpaceShipOne for the X Prize, then Branson contracted them to do SpaceShipTwo for Virgin. Also, i don’t follow what you are saying about the acquisition - Scaled was acquired by Northrop Grumman back in 2007, not Virgin Galactic / Branson.
Telling they fired Sturckow when he was pretty outspoken such as this:
In another e-mail, in 2019, he urged his fellow test pilots to be more transparent: “Failure to admit mistakes in flight test is a cancer that must be nipped at the bud.” Stucky, whom I wrote about in the magazine in 2018, had been particularly troubled by Mackay and Masucci’s unwillingness to take responsibility for what he perceived to be their mistakes on the July, 2018, flight.
Too much narrative and too little facts. I don’t care how much the journalist hates space travel, just get to the point. All that rumble means, he personally believes that “a more risky” correction for a red light was taken because the pilot was afraid of Branson being angry. A bit of a silly argument when you are talking about life and death situation.
This highlights why having automated pilots in spaceships is so critical. Software can be tested more thoroughly than humans, and cannot override safety protocols.
If the rules say to abort, the software aborts. Humans get to say "I think we'll be fine", and put lives on the line.
This program used test pilots to test their space ships, killed one of them in the process, and later fired the director of their test flight program under dubious circumstances.
Hope those billionaires won't dare to force for their faces to be put on future postal stamps, I grew up as a kid having Laika [1] on them, I wouldn't want for future postal-stamp collector kids to have to look at the faces of Branson or, God forbid, Bezos.
“On my first time skydiving, there was one cord that opened the parachute, and one that got rid of it. I pulled the wrong cord by mistake. I was falling through the air before an instructor managed to yank my spare ripcord.”
I understand it has pretty good glide characteristics, MUCH better than the space shuttle, allowing for abort at basically any stage of the flight. Also they actually get given parachutes, unlike pre-Challenger STS missions.
[+] [-] bryananderson|4 years ago|reply
For many reasons (some alluded to in this article, many more in the book), SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. Engineering leadership has done what they can to make the vehicle safer (at the cost of performance), but the intractable issue is that any one mistake by a pilot is likely to be fatal (and already has been, in the 2014 accident). Voices like Stucky and Ericson who wanted to acknowledge the inherent danger of the vehicle (which doesn’t mean grounding it) have been ignored and ultimately removed. The company’s business requires the vehicle to be understood to be safe by the public. The chickens will come home to roost.
[+] [-] pinewurst|4 years ago|reply
SS1 was conceived by one of the most creative designers in aviation as a point solution for the X-Prize contest - the minimal design/implementation to precisely solve that problem in the most cost effective way possible (as detailed in "Test Gods").
This cobbled together, even borderline, solution was reimplemented as a revenue producing, passenger joyride vehicle, without a lot of (apparent) deep understanding of the real problem and the quirks of their existing "solution".
Pretty much, SS2 is Branson and droogs saying, "SS1 is great, just blow it up and start printing money".
[+] [-] IggleSniggle|4 years ago|reply
This comment reminded me of another story from a previous aerospace era (blimp cruise liners aka airships), the summary of which is:
> A British Lord wanted to build the best airship in the world – and so he had two rival design teams battle it out to win the juicy government contract. Competition is supposed to bring the best out of people, but run in the wrong way it can cause people (and the things they make) to fall apart in the most horrifying ways.
https://timharford.com/2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-4-the-dea...
[+] [-] mmaunder|4 years ago|reply
Fundamentally I think it’s a culture problem. Collaborative engineering that identifies problems, views them as opportunities, doesn’t finger-point, and works each problem. Versus a sales and marketing organization with hard deadlines and a 100% focus on perception and revenue targets.
We don’t need an Apollo 1 in the private space industry. But if it happens, there will be a hard reset in terms of regulatory oversight and safety protocols which will cost us several years. Perhaps it’s needed.
[+] [-] ashtonkem|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkagerer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigtones|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ashtonkem|4 years ago|reply
Worth noting that Virgin Galactic is currently the only private space program to have killed anyone so far. This quote is from before the fatal 2014 crash, but the FAA makes it pretty clear that a virgin galactic had a cavalier attitude towards crew safety[0] back then too. Combined with this article, that paints a picture of Virgin Galactic as a genuinely unsafe company that is going to kill a lot of people if it’s not stopped. Manual processes, no safeties, high pilot work loads, and rockets do not mix well.
0 - This was caused by a design that explicitly assumed that highly trained test pilots were incapable of making mistakes. The design required manual activation, had no failsafes, and the pilots were not told that activation at too low a speed would cause the vehicle to break apart. A breathtakingly bad design for a spacecraft.
[+] [-] darkcha0s|4 years ago|reply
I do hope you know that outside its designed flight envelope, almost any space craft / rocket / airplane breaks apart pretty fast.
[+] [-] andi999|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdeck|4 years ago|reply
I'm pretty impressed by this guy. Not only did he quit his VP job when he saw these safety problems, but he went around giving interviews about them. It strikes me that very few people would have done the same.
[+] [-] aerosmile|4 years ago|reply
Agree, great guy, putting his ethics ahead of his career
> but he went around giving interviews about them
Hmmm, gets a bit murky here. If he wanted to save lives, there's a very clear path to alerting the FAA. But he didn't do that. This sounds a bit more like he was trying to save his career. Which brings in question why he quit in the first place, and how voluntary that was to begin with.
[+] [-] jonplackett|4 years ago|reply
It seems like we’re missing the crucial step of how it all turned out OK. 2 paragraphs earlier they’re saying how red lights ought to ‘scare the shit out of you’ and ‘it’s too late once it turns red’.
[+] [-] gwern|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RegW|4 years ago|reply
Pulled over, hood up, wiggled a few leads. Light goes out, hood down, back on the road, job done.
[+] [-] 1024core|4 years ago|reply
Such a shame. You can bet that this will come back to bite Virgin, and should a serious accident happen and they get sued, Stucky could be a prime witness.
Don't burn bridges.
[+] [-] aazaa|4 years ago|reply
But this was no "error":
> Branson also told spectators about the bike ride during a post-flight celebration at the spaceport, Reuters said. "It's so awesome to arrive on a bicycle, across this beautiful New Mexico countryside," Branson was quoted as telling the crowd from a stage.
https://www.space.com/virgin-galactic-richard-branson-bike-r...
Even without the red light, this incident speaks volumes about what's going in inside this "company."
As long as Branson is at the helm, VG's prospects as a going concern seem dim. You can't merch your way into space with the usual marketing game plan. Mother Nature always calls bullshit.
[+] [-] anonymousiam|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rrss|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aero-glide2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vermontdevil|4 years ago|reply
In another e-mail, in 2019, he urged his fellow test pilots to be more transparent: “Failure to admit mistakes in flight test is a cancer that must be nipped at the bud.” Stucky, whom I wrote about in the magazine in 2018, had been particularly troubled by Mackay and Masucci’s unwillingness to take responsibility for what he perceived to be their mistakes on the July, 2018, flight.
[+] [-] beerandt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vermontdevil|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lanevorockz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caconym_|4 years ago|reply
"Get-there-itis", a.k.a. plan continuation bias, is a real thing that's gotten a lot of aviators and their passengers killed.
[+] [-] mabbo|4 years ago|reply
If the rules say to abort, the software aborts. Humans get to say "I think we'll be fine", and put lives on the line.
[+] [-] Mitzz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] bambax|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedberg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/postage-stamp-mongolia-circa...
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tzs|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWk9d_YCQOk
[+] [-] belter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helsinkiandrew|4 years ago|reply
https://thebookofman.com/body/adventure/sir-richard-branson/
“On my first time skydiving, there was one cord that opened the parachute, and one that got rid of it. I pulled the wrong cord by mistake. I was falling through the air before an instructor managed to yank my spare ripcord.”
[+] [-] teekert|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worker767424|4 years ago|reply
Does that mean it can't do a go around?
[+] [-] rozab|4 years ago|reply
The space shuttle was really grim.
[+] [-] zlsa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anotheryou|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] junon|4 years ago|reply
Out of curiosity, is the New Yorker an outlier here in this regard? I almost forgot what it was like to read a real article like this.
[+] [-] fbomb|4 years ago|reply