Branson’s ambitious space-travel project plagued by problems and delays
Founder of Virgin Galactic believed in 2004 that commercial space travel was just three years away but string of failures has plunged future into doubt
It launched amid much fanfare, but Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic commercial space-travel programme has been plagued with problems and delays. After a string of failures, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield last year said that the difficulties of aerospace engineering meant it was inevitable that at some point a Virgin Galactic craft would crash.
The first test ship, SpaceShipOne, had been filled with “single-point failures”. “There were things you probably would’ve done differently if you’re going to carry Angelina Jolie,” Virgin Galactic engineer Matt Stinemetze said in aninterview with Wired magazine in March 2013. “If one bolt falls off and you die, that’s a single point of failure.”
By 2004, Branson thought Virgin Galactic was three years away from launching people into space and opened a reservations website, which crashed because of the amount of interest. But three years later the programme was delayed after the detonation of a tank of nitrous oxide destroyed a test stand, killing three people and seriously injuring three others. In 2011, the newly designed test ship, SpaceShipTwo, malfunctioned during re-entry, though its pilots managed to correct the problem.
Virgin Galactic’s future was again in doubt last year, when it threatened to pull support from a publicly financed $209m (£130m) spaceport in southern New Mexico because of a dispute over liability. Critics accused the former governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, of jumping onto the deal without safeguards for the public investment. “Virgin has all the power in this arrangement. We don’t see it as a wise investment,” said Paul Gessing of the conservative-leaning Rio Grande Foundation.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/31/branson-virgin-galactic-space-travel-failures
