Almost exactly one year after a fatal explosion that claimed the lives of three Scaled Composites workers, Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn has made an extraordinary safety claim about the as-yet-unflown SpaceShipTwo vehicle during an interview with The Independent.
“Q: New technology involves risk, space travel most certainly does. How can you manage the dangers?
WW: We’re trying to take the riskiest things out of the equation. Ground-based rocketry involves firing a massive explosion under somebody to leave the planet – we’ve eliminated that. So you’re launching in a very safe environment. We’ve hopefully eliminated some of the risks of re-entry, which is another of the most dangerous aspects.
We believe that this will be thousands of times safer than any previous human flights into space.”
The claim came during the same week that George Nield, head of the FAA unit that regulates commercial human space flight, warned space tourism companies to get serious about the risks faced by their wealthy clients.
“‘What’s going on now represents a very different level of risk,’ Nield told the Space Frontier Foundation’s annual meeting in Washington DC. If you have to draw parallels, he said, look to the early supersonic jets, such as the F-104 Starfighter, dubbed the Widowmaker, which took the lives of 110 pilots of the Luftwaffe alone,” New Scientist reports.
The starkly contrasting claims come as Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites prepare to roll-out the WhiteKnightTwo, the aircraft that will carry SpaceShipTwo aloft for its suborbital flights. Richard Branson and designer Burt Rutan will preside over the ceremony on Monday, July 28, at the Scaled Composites production facility in Mojave, Calif. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to attend along with many wealthy individuals who have put down deposits on future flights.
The star-studded media event will likely drown out questions about the fatal explosion that occurred nearly one year earlier at the same facility. Scale Composites employees Eric Blackwell, Todd Ivens and Glen May were killed in the July 26 blast, which also injured three other workers.
The State of California fined the company $28,000 for alleged safety violations; Scaled Composites has appealed the ruling. As near as I can tell, neither the Northrop Grumman-owned company nor Virgin Galactic has offered a full explanation of what precisely caused the explosion, which occurred during a routine engine test.
The company held a memorial service on Thursday for their fallen colleagues which included the unveiling of a bronze plague with “the smiling faces of Blackwell, Ivens, May, along with excerpts from John Gillespie Magee’s poem, ‘High Flight.’”
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