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It's been 16 months since SpaceShipTwo crashed into the Mojave Desert and killed the vehicle's co-pilot Michael Alsbury. On Friday, Virgin Galactic sought to move on from that accident and put the company firmly back on a path toward delivering tourists to the edge of space by unveiling a new version of its spacecraft named VSS Unity.
"I'm really proud of the entire team," said George Whitesides, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, in an interview with Ars. "It's a bunch of folks who came to this company to open space up, and they're not going to be deterred by the accident. They've been working really hard for a year and a half to finish this vehicle."
The new spacecraft is in many ways the same as the original SpaceShipTwo, dubbed Enterprise, Whitesides said. It has the same basic airframe and propulsion systems. The biggest change is to the feather locking system, used to aid in the descent of the spacecraft. During the fatal flight on Oct. 31, 2014, Alsbury prematurely deployed the system while still making a powered ascent. Unity now includes a mechanical pin to prevent the feather lever from moving when the vehicle is flying in an unsafe flight regime.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Sunday February 21 2016, @01:48PM
Better link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSS_Enterprise_crash [wikipedia.org]
The ARS link is to an article posted right after the crash so the article is mainly speculation on exploding engines, whereas it was pretty quickly proven to be an aerodynamic problem. The ARS article isn't bad, its just long obsolete.
Everyone piles hate on to the engine, which is interesting. The fact that the engine hasn't blown up yet, or that failures so far have involved other systems, doesn't necessarily prove its a good engine system. It is interesting how everyone hate that engine system. You'd think the aero issue time would be a great opportunity to slap in a better engine system, but...
I am a little confused about the pin-in-place solution. If you want to lock the parts in place during boost, simply don't unlock them after motor firing as they did in the fatal crash. Of course after a trip thru the journalist filter, maybe thats exactly what they're doing, plus or minus something like the feather unlock lever can't be moved until after engine shutoff due to a new pin.
My guess is they always unlocked but this time there was just the wrong vibration or buffeting or weird wind or whatever such that it swung, and all the other flights it was just smooth enough or different vibration freq or whatever. So just don't unlock the feather control during boost, then call it good... On the other hand if the O2 failed during boost they might live if they auto feathered down, so having to manual feather means if they pass out on boost, they'll lawn dart into the desert, which sucks. Or more likely break up when they hit mach 7 on the way down, etc.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 21 2016, @07:53PM