US regulators granted the operator of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo a licence even though they had spotted failings in its assessment of the potential for human error to cause a catastrophic crash, an investigative hearing has heard.
The Federal Aviation Administration’s actions came to light as the National Transportation Safety Board presented the findings of its investigation into why the suborbital rocket crashed during a test flight on October 31 last year, killing the co-pilot.
The rocket was intended to provide suborbital near-space flights through an arm of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. It crashed during ascent when the co-pilot Michael Alsbury wrongly unlocked at 0.8 times the speed of sound (0.8 Mach) a “feathering”, or braking, mechanism, meant to slow the craft during descent. The stress of then passing the sound barrier during the “boost phase” pushed open the mechanism, causing the rocket to break up.