Post by Admin on Nov 1, 2014 22:53:50 GMT
At 10:10 a.m. Pacific Time on Friday, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo dropped from its mothership at an altitude of 45,000 feet over Mojave, Calif. and fired its single hybrid rocket engine for its fourth-ever powered flight. Two minutes into the burn, the craft experienced what Mojave Air and Space Port manager Stu Witt would later call "an in-flight anomaly."
Witt said at a press conference after the disaster that he didn’t see an explosion and he didn’t see anything abnormal in the rocket plume. He knew something was wrong only "when other things weren’t happening," he said. "It wasn’t because something did happen—it was what I was not hearing and not seeing. If there was a huge explosion, I didn’t see it."
The ship apparently dropped out of the sky in silence, with its engine off, and crashed into the desert some 25 miles north of Mojave. The two pilots on board were employees of Scaled Composites, the company that built SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic. One of them managed to parachute to the ground. He was injured badly enough to require a helicopter evacuation to a nearby hospital.
The other pilot apparently died on impact, according to Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood. He said in the press conference that he overflew the crash site shortly after the accident. "The aircraft is in several different pieces," he said. "We found one person who obviously was deceased immediately."
This test flight was the first for a new kind of fuel—a plastic similar to nylon. Previously, SpaceShipTwo had used a synthetic rubber fuel, one that had been giving giving engineers trouble for years as they tried to scale up the successful 3-seat SpaceShipOne prototype, which won the X Prize in 2004, to a much bigger vehicle using the same hybrid rocket design and fuel, and meant to carry tourists to suborbital space.
Witt said at a press conference after the disaster that he didn’t see an explosion and he didn’t see anything abnormal in the rocket plume. He knew something was wrong only "when other things weren’t happening," he said. "It wasn’t because something did happen—it was what I was not hearing and not seeing. If there was a huge explosion, I didn’t see it."
The ship apparently dropped out of the sky in silence, with its engine off, and crashed into the desert some 25 miles north of Mojave. The two pilots on board were employees of Scaled Composites, the company that built SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic. One of them managed to parachute to the ground. He was injured badly enough to require a helicopter evacuation to a nearby hospital.
The other pilot apparently died on impact, according to Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood. He said in the press conference that he overflew the crash site shortly after the accident. "The aircraft is in several different pieces," he said. "We found one person who obviously was deceased immediately."
This test flight was the first for a new kind of fuel—a plastic similar to nylon. Previously, SpaceShipTwo had used a synthetic rubber fuel, one that had been giving giving engineers trouble for years as they tried to scale up the successful 3-seat SpaceShipOne prototype, which won the X Prize in 2004, to a much bigger vehicle using the same hybrid rocket design and fuel, and meant to carry tourists to suborbital space.
