Re: More on Virgin Galactic...
Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2021 7:07 am
282,773 feet.
A Convivial Aviation Discussion Forum for Aviators, Aviatrices and for those who think Flying Machines are Magic.
https://ops-normal.org/
282,773 feet.
Akin to dropping below the ILS glide slope! Should have triggered an internal review and openess, rather than this apparent cover up.PHXPhlyer wrote: ↑Thu Sep 02, 2021 3:06 pmFAA says it's investigating problems with Richard Branson's flight to edge of space
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/02/tech/ric ... index.html
"This should have been a come-to-Jesus moment, not the kind of thing you brush under the rug," Todd Ericson, Virgin Galactic's former vice president of safety, who has since resigned from the company, told Schmidle last year.
Neither the FAA nor Virgin Galactic publicly disclosed the issues associated with the 2019 flight or Branson's flight.
The FAA did not respond to requests for additional comment.
PP
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2021/09/01/ ... ce-flight/Virgin Galactic Statement
We dispute the misleading characterizations and conclusions in the New Yorker article published today.
The safety of our crew and passengers is Virgin Galactic’s top priority. Our entire approach to spaceflight is guided by a fundamental commitment to safety at every level, including our spaceflight system, our test flight program and our rigorous pilot training protocol.
Unity 22 was a safe and successful test flight that adhered to our flight procedures and training protocols. When the vehicle encountered high altitude winds which changed the trajectory, the pilots and systems monitored the trajectory to ensure it remained within mission parameters. Our pilots responded appropriately to these changing flight conditions exactly as they were trained and in strict accordance with our established procedures. Although the flights ultimate trajectory deviated from our initial plan, it was a controlled and intentional flight path that allowed Unity 22 to successfully reach space and land safely at our Spaceport in New Mexico. At no time were passengers and crew put in any danger as a result of this change in trajectory.
The Unity 22 flight further reaffirms our technical readiness, our rigorous pilot training program and the inherent safety of our spaceflight system, particularly in light of changing flight conditions. As we move toward commercial service, we are confident we have the right safety culture, policies and processes in place to build and operate a safe and successful business over the long term.
Statement on the FAA
Although the flight’s ultimate trajectory deviated from our initial plan, the Unity 22 flight did not fly outside of the lateral confines of the protected airspace. As a result of the trajectory adjustment, the flight did drop below the altitude of the airspace that is protected for Virgin Galactic missions for a short distance and time (1 minute and 41 seconds) before re-entering restricted airspace that is protected all the way to the ground for Virgin Galactic missions. At no time did the ship travel above any population centers or cause a hazard to the public. FAA representatives were present in the control room during the flight and in post-flight debriefs. We are working in partnership with the FAA to address the airspace for future flights.
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2021/09/01/ ... -stripped/By all appearances, Richard Branson’s 17-years-in-the-making flight to the edge of space went exactly as planned on July 11. Or at least that was the impression left by Virgin Galactic’s webcast of SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity’s flight test from Spaceport America in New Mexico.
But, for the second time in four suborbital flights, VSS Unity experienced a serious anomaly. The ship with its hybrid engine firing wasn’t rising steeply enough as it soared toward space, Nicholas Schmidle reports in The New Yorker:
Although [pilots David] Mackay and [Mike] Masucci attempted to address their trajectory problem, it wasn’t enough. 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. But data retrieved from Flightradar24 shows the vehicle flying outside its designated airspace. An F.A.A. spokesperson confirmed that Virgin Galactic “deviated from its Air Traffic Control clearance” and that an “investigation is ongoing.” A Virgin Galactic spokesperson acknowledged that the company did not initially notify the F.A.A. and that the craft flew outside its designated airspace for a minute and forty-one seconds—flights generally last about fifteen minutes—but said that the company was working with the F.A.A. to update procedures for alerting the agency.…
So, it was a red light. They have those in cars; check the engine or the oil. Well, this one was in a rocket plane and indicated they were off course for reentry and return to the spaceport.
This was a big deal. I once sat in on a meeting, in 2015, during which the pilots on the July 11th mission—Dave Mackay, a former Virgin Atlantic pilot and veteran of the U.K.’s Royal Air Force, and Mike Masucci, a retired Air Force pilot—and others discussed procedures for responding to an entry glide-cone warning. C. J. Sturckow, a former marine and nasa astronaut, said that a yellow light should “scare the ***** out of you,” because “when it turns red it’s gonna be too late”; Masucci was less concerned about the yellow light but said, “Red should scare the crap out of you.” Based on pilot procedures, Mackay and Masucci had basically two options: implement immediate corrective action, or abort the rocket motor. According to multiple sources in the company, the safest way to respond to the warning would have been to abort. (A Virgin Galactic spokesperson disputed this contention.)
The story raises, but does not answer, the question of whether Mackay and Masucci didn’t shut down the engine because Branson was aboard. The Virgin Galactic founder had planned to fly on a later flight test, but Branson moved up his flight so he could fly to space before rival Jeff Bezos’ planned suborbital flight aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard on July 11.
If the pilots had shut down the engine early, VSS Unity would not have exceeded the 50-mile boundary of space recognized by the Federal Aviation Administration. Virgin Galactic wouldn’t have been able to conduct another flight before Bezos flew on July 20, leaving Branson as the runner up.
Branson denied he had changed the schedule to beat Bezos to space, a claim that was widely dismissed amid derisive comments that the two billionaires were engaged in a dick measuring contest. A source told Parabolic Arc, which broke the story of plans to move up Branson’s flight, that is exactly why the schedule was changed.
So, Virgin Galactic conducted a flight test and found an anomaly. That’s why we test, right?
Yes. Absolutely. However….
The flight had Virgin Galactic’s billionaire founder aboard. And the company put him on an earlier flight so he could beat a rival billionaire to the edge of space. Branson is known for taking a lot of physical risks; his latest autobiography, Finding My Virginity, includes an appendix with 75 incidents during which he could have died.
So, there’s no question he was fine with risking his life; the question is why Virgin Galactic management thought it was a good idea to risk losing someone so important. Flight tests are inherently risky; they are designed to find flaws and problems before you put a vehicle into commercial service.
Just as concerning is what the article revealed about the firing of Mark Stucky, who had been Virgin Galactic’s lead pilot and director of flight test. Stucky had been the main subject of Schmidle’s book, “Test Gods,” an inside look at Virgin Galactic that was published in May. Virgin Galactic is very concerned with its image and how it reflects on the larger Virgin Group. And it seems Stucky had been a bit too candid about problems at Branson’s space tourism company.
After the publication of my book, in May, Stucky was stripped of his flight duties and excluded from key planning meetings ahead of the July 11th event. He watched Branson’s flight from the runway; it was the first mission for which he had no responsibilities after more than a decade on the program. Eight days after Branson’s flight, an H.R. manager booked time on his calendar, and then fired Stucky over Zoom.
Getting fired is bad enough; getting fired by an H.R. rep is uber humiliating. Someone above Stucky on the org chart couldn’t have done it? The man had worked there 10 years.
Still, it couldn’t have come as a complete surprise; the company had stripped Stucky of his responsibilities two months earlier, and it likely kept him around to prevent his departure from raising questions about Virgin Galactic’s safety culture and Branson’s upcoming flight. His firing got minimal attention in the wake of that launch.
There have been questions about SpaceShipTwo’s safety culture ever since Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites announced the program in 2004. Four people have died in two separate accidents, there have been at least four close calls, and safety officials have come and gone with regularity. The most recent departure was Vice President of Safety Todd Ericson, who lost confidence in the company’s safety culture after VSS Unity‘s near-fatal second suborbital flight n February 2019.
A full accounting of these matters is a subject for another day. Suffice to say, nothing I read in the article surprised me. It highlighted issues with the company that I had known about since before the fatal crash of VSS Enterprise in October 2014 that killed Scaled Composites pilot Mike Alsbury and delayed commercial flights by almost eight years.
Competing? SpaceX is winning the space race, at every level, by the proverbial mile in most categories.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... y-concernsThe billionaire space race is only a race by name. In actuality, there is SpaceX – and everyone else.
Only the company founded by Elon Musk nearly two decades ago has sent an orbital rocket booster into space and landed it safely again. Only SpaceX has landed a rocket the size of a 15-storey building on a drone ship in the middle of the ocean. Only SpaceX has carried both Nasa astronauts and private citizens to the International Space Station. Only SpaceX is producing thousands of its own table-sized communication satellites every year. Only SpaceX has the almost weekly launch cadence necessary to single-handedly double the number of operational satellites in orbit in less than two years. Only SpaceX is launching prototypes of the largest and most powerful rocket ever made, a behemoth called Starship that is destined to carry humans to the moon.
There is more innovation happening in the commercial space sector today than at any time in history and the launch services sector is particularly competitive. Relativity Space is building the world’s first 3D-printed rocket and plans to build rockets on Mars with robots. Virgin Orbit is putting satellites into orbit by launching a rocket from beneath the wing of a jumbo jet. Its sister company, Virgin Galactic, is flying people to the edge of space from an air-launched space plane. RocketLab has developed the first rocket engine fed with an electric pump and is trying to catch it out of the air with a net connected to a helicopter.
And then there’s Blue Origin, which dominated world headlines for days this week with its launch of the Star Trek actor William Shatner – briefly – into space.
If there were any rocket company expected to be at a comparable level of technological achievement to SpaceX, it is Blue Origin. The company was founded by the former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in 2000, just two years before SpaceX set up shop in California. In 2015, Blue Origin became the first company to send a rocket above the Kármán Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space, and land it again. While this is not as challenging as bringing a rocket back from orbit – as Musk has taunted Bezos in the past – it was still a major milestone in the history of private space exploration. And unlike Musk, Bezos actually knows what it’s like to ride on his own rocket.
Bezos founded Blue Origin with visionary goals. Inspired by the late Princeton futurist Gerard K O’Neill, Bezos dreams of moving heavy industry off of Earth and into space to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He wants to lay the foundation for an extra-terrestrial economy where thousands of people are living and working in space. His company is building a rocket as powerful as the one that carried Apollo astronauts to the moon and has partnered with leading defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to develop a lunar lander that could bring humans back to the lunar surface. It has designed and built one of the most powerful rocket engines ever made and inked contracts with the United Launch Alliance to supply the engine for its next generation Vulcan rocket.
There’s no doubt that Bezos has plenty of vision. The question is: why can’t the second richest man in the world execute on it?
Over the past few years, Blue Origin’s master plan has begun unraveling. Earlier this year, Nasa awarded its lunar lander contract to SpaceX, leaving Blue Origin in the lurch. It’s now suing the US government to reconsider the award. It’s seen an exodus of top engineering talent following the lost contract, which has only exacerbated its already considerable delays. Blue Origin has struggled to hit its stride producing its powerful BE-4 rocket engine and as a result the maiden launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket has slipped to late 2022. This will make the first flight of the engine a full five years behind schedule.
Meanwhile, the first flight of the company’s fabled New Glenn rocket, a heavy launch vehicle capable of hoisting nearly 100,000 pounds into low Earth orbit, has also been pushed to late 2022 at the earliest. It was originally meant to fly for the first time last year. Bezos didn’t even get the glory of being the first billionaire to ride his own rocket into space. Just two weeks before Bezos flew to the edge of space this summer, Richard Branson completed a suborbital flight in his own spaceplane with Virgin Galactic.
How did this happen? Blue Origin employs thousands of the world’s top rocket engineers. The company also has access to a virtually unlimited supply of money. Bezos, who is worth just south of $200bn, spends $1bn a year out of his own pocket to fund Blue Origin. By all measures, Blue Origin should be one of the most successful space companies in the world.
“Blue Origin has all the ingredients for success and to become something truly fantastic,” said Ally Abrams, the former head of Blue Origin employee communications who recently wrote a whistleblower essay detailing safety concerns and rampant sexism at the company. “The engineers really believed that and they try every day to make that a reality despite the leadership’s interventions.”
According to Abrams, Blue Origin’s troubles have both a technical and cultural dimension. On the technical side, Abrams said the company suffers from an immense amount of technical debt–engineering challenges that build up as a result of choosing a quick solution rather than the best solution – and a relentless focus on speed that undermined its ability to properly address problems with its launch vehicles. She explained the exodus of top talent from Blue Origin as engineers who “got tired of putting Band-Aids on problems”.
“Technical debt is a problem most companies have but at Blue it’s just on an incredible scale,” Abrams said. “It really failed to transition from an R&D company to a production company.”
Abrams partially attributes the mounting technical debt to Blue Origin’s increasing focus on speed, an irony for a company whose motto is Gradatim Ferociter, the Latin rendering of “step by step, ferociously”. She traces the mounting pressure to move fast to 2017, when it was clear the company was failing to keep pace with its rivals at SpaceX. She said Bezos’s growing impatience with the pace of development was palpable, as was the “jealousy he seemed to have for the other billionaires who seemed to be making more progress than him”.
“The schedule was always a huge joke within the company,” Abrams said. “We’d put out the dates externally and employees would laugh because they knew that just wasn’t possible.”
Plenty of engineers didn’t feel comfortable raising safety and quality concerns for fear of retaliation, which is a very scary thing when you’re working on a high risk, experimental vehicle.
In her essay, Abrams described a company where executives show “consistently inappropriate” behavior toward women and where “dissent is actively stifled”. According to Abrams, Blue Origin’s cultural problems started at the top and flowed down throughout the company. She said Blue Origin’s CEO, Bob Smith, who was tapped by Bezos to lead the company in 2017, repeatedly failed to listen to his employees’ concerns about the safety of the company’s vehicles and its toxic workplace culture.
“Bob Smith is one of the most incapable leaders I have ever encountered,” Abrams said. “Passion withers in his presence. Plenty of engineers didn’t feel comfortable raising safety and quality concerns for fear of retaliation, which is a very scary thing when you’re working on a high-risk, experimental vehicle.”
Abrams’ whistleblower essay was co-signed by 20 anonymous current and former Blue Origin employees. Many of its allegations were denied by the company.
A statement from Blue Origin said the company had dismissed Abrams for “repeated warnings for issues involving federal export control regulations”, that the company has no tolerance for harassment or discrimination, and that it believes its New Shepard rocket is “the safest space vehicle ever designed or built”.
“It is particularly difficult and painful, for me, to hear claims being levied that attempt to characterize our entire team in a way that doesn’t align with the character and capability that I see at Blue Origin every day,” Smith wrote in an internal email to Blue Origin employees earlier this month. “As always, I welcome and encourage any member of Team Blue to speak directly with me if they have any concerns on any topic at any time.”
Still, Blue Origin employees continue to speak out. Earlier this week, an investigation by the Washington Post echoed the issues raised by Abrams and painted a picture of an organization riddled with distrust of its leadership, sexism and insufficient concern for the safety of its launch vehicles.
Looking to the future, the question for Blue Origin is whether it can overhaul its culture to deliver on its mission. Many observers, including Abrams, are skeptical. But perhaps a change is imminent. Earlier this year, Bezos stepped down from his role as the CEO of Amazon and committed himself to spending more time focused on Blue Origin. Whether Bezos can reinvigorate the company’s culture with his grand vision for human space exploration and a sense of common purpose remains to be seen.
https://parabolicarc.com/2023/05/25/vir ... ight-test/With a successful flight on Thursday (May 25), Virgin Galactic (NYSE: SPCE) completed SpaceShipTwo’s 13-year-long flight test program, paving the way for the start of commercial suborbital crewed flights in late June.
The final test lasted 22 minutes and saw the VSS Unity spacecraft fly 54.2 miles (87.2 km) over the New Mexico desert with two pilots in the cockpit and four company employees in the passenger cabin, according to Virgin Galactic. The rocket plane was dropped over the desert by the twin-fuselage WhiteKnightTwo VMS Eve mothership. VSS Unity then glided to a landing at Spaceport America.
Mission commander Mike Masucci and pilot CJ Sturckow flew VSS Unity. Chief Astronaut Instructor Beth Moses made her third suborbital flight to evaluate the passenger experience. She was joined in the passenger cabin by three rookies, including Astronaut Instructor Luke Mays, Flight Sciences Engineer Chris Huie, and New Mexico native Jamila Gilbert.
Jameel Janjua served as the commander of the VMS Eve carrier aircraft that air-launched the spacecraft, and Nicola Pecile was in the pilot seat.
Virgin Galactic plans to fly Italian Air Force pilots Col. Walter Villadei and Lt. Col. Angelo Landolfi, and the Italian National Research Council’s Pantaleone Carlucci on the company’s first commercial crew flight at the end of June, which is now possible thanks to this successful test. Moses will join them in the passenger cabin on the research mission.
Virgin Galactic has previously earned revenue from flying microgravity experiments in the cabin without any researchers aboard. The Italian flight will be the first time that paying passengers will be aboard the spaceship.
In the third quarter, Virgin Galactic will begin to fly the first of around 800 ticket holders, some of whom put down deposits beginning in 2005. Seats originally sold for $200,000, but Virgin Galactic raised the price to $250,000 in 2013, and then to $450,000 in 2022.
Company officials have said they expect VSS Unity to fly on a monthly basis with up to four passengers per flight. The advanced Delta-class SpaceShipTwo vehicles, which are set to begin commercial flights in 2026, are being designed to fly on a weekly basis with six passengers.
VSS Unity‘s last powered flight test was on July 11, 2021. It carried company Founder Richard Branson, Moses, and two company employees to test the astronaut experience.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded VSS Unity for more than a month because the spacecraft veered outside of its assigned airspace during the flight. Virgin Galactic then took the space plane and its VMS Eve mothership out of service for a series of modifications. VSS Unity completed a glide flight on April 26 to test the modifications.
The completion of the flight test program was a long time coming. Virgin Galactic Founder Richard Branson announced plans for SpaceShipTwo in September 2004, with plans to begin flying passengers on suborbital flights as early as 2007. More than a decade of delays, marred by two fatal accidents that killed four people, followed.
WhiteKnightTwo kicked off the flight test program with a maiden flight on Dec. 21, 2008. It carried the first SpaceShipTwo, VSS Enterprise, on its first captive carry flight on Oct. 20, 2010. VSS Enterprise had its first powered flight on April 29, 2013. The rocket plane was destroyed on its fourth powered flight on Oct. 31, 2014.