Virgin Galactic flights grounded over Branson spaceflight 'mishap'

I have some experience with the aviation authorities, and they are generally competent. And I would say maybe even slightly too nitpicky, just like the general public is very nitpicky about every aircraft accident or incident. It is possible that they just didn't know about the issue it.

Did you know, for example, that every bird collision, no matter how small the bird was, has to be registered as a flight incident and investigated? Or that every TCAS warning is a flight incident too, even if everyone knew exactly what was going on and there was no real danger? And I do not think it's wrong, you hit a bird every blue moon and you get extra hour or a few hours of paperwork, it's okay with me. The point is they're very detailed.

> FAA representatives were in the control room

Control room doesn't see everything the cockpit sees. Particularly not in a pilot-centered vehicle design like Virgin Galactic's. Having a representative in the room, moreover, doesn't mean it's someone qualified to look for problems. Even if they are, it's a big room with lots going on.

Yes, in the article it mentions specifically that FAA agents were in the control room and had access to the pilots warnings.

So then it seems more like responding to an article than the facts they saw on the ground

Edit: I'm being downvoted to -3 for reading the article and making an anodyne comment answering a question about it. Cool.

Hah. I have a love/hate relationship with the FAA. Funny story: a building was something like a foot over spec, about a mile off the end of a regional airport and the FAA found out. I do not envy the builder.

I've known some FAA people and they're some of the more interesting types I've come across.

The FAA's purview is vast, but the number of space flights is not. They have the resources to monitor those directly, at least.

It says "over". Well it does now anyway.

I think the originally submitted HN title was something like “flights grounded after New Yorker article” instead of the article’s title.

I also doubt that the FAA investigation would have much to do with the major narrative of the article.

From their perspective, the flight went off course for 2 mins, and they're looking for the proximate cause. They're looking for a specific safety issue, not any underlying generalized sense of a rotten safety culture at the company.

The acute problem might lead directly to a bigger general issue, if there's some direct evidence of fudged risk analysis or some specific, similar, overtly wrong behavior.

But more likely, it'll just be: we misjudged how it would handle that specific wind and were blown off course. Or something similar.

ETA: Has it even been established that the warning light/entry angle was the cause of or directly related to the airspace violation?

Other than the new yorker author's assumption?

Can second this. A couple decades ago the FAA was pretty tyrannical in their approach to compliance. Among other things they'd commonly stick inspectors at random airports and run through everyone's paperwork as they came in, handing out incredibly harsh punishments to anyone out of compliance. This garnered a lot of distrust from the community and lead to people devising ways of avoiding them as well as a general sentiment of hiding errors so they wouldn't get aggressively sanctioned.

Unusually for federal agencies, the FAA actually reversed course on this behavior and generally just tries to come down on egregious cases. People are encouraged to report on safety slips and near-misses using NASA as an unbiased intermediary. They've been known to be lenient towards minor negligence (ie. unintentional mistakes, airspace/runway incursions, etc) if the pilot recognized it and reported on it for the sake of providing stats for policy decisions.

All that said, more recently where the FAA has stopped, insurance has picked up. Insurance companies have been quick to jump on the availability of more sophisticated flight recording/tracking and the prevalence of social media to enforce their own views on aviation safety. Rates have been skyrocketing and it's becoming much harder to insure anything that isn't a simple fixed tricycle gear utility category certified 2-4 seater.

That honor system didn't seem to work very well on Boeing.

Oh wow, never knew that. Huh.

If that was the case then they should be investigating Virgin for not reporting the issues rather than the actual failures themselves.

If they cannot properly plot their route, then what else did they get wrong? This could easily cause them to rain dead billionaires all over someone's house.

> Leaving your flight corridor twenty miles up cannot cause risk to the general public.

As long as they're able to get back into their flight corridor before they're at an altitude where others fly.

I don't have any knowledge about Virgin Galactic's trajectory, but in general rocket trajectories are chosen such that no matter where the rocket fails along its flight, it will either fall entirely within the published keep-out zone (and cause no harm to humans, since the zone is cleared before launch), or are going fast enough to break apart during reentry and will not cause harm to humans (since the majority of the vehicle is just particles in the air, or very small pieces.)

Obviously Virgin Galactic's vehicle can't be terminated since it's crewed, so I'd expect that the keep-out zone is designed so that at any point thrust can be cut and the vehicle will remain within its allowed airspace. Again, I have no knowledge about the flight corridor they are using, but if we imagine it's a two-level volume with a large (but low-altitude) cylinder, and a small (but high-altitude cylinder), it's possible that the trajectory extends beyond the small, high-altitude cylinder while still above the ceiling of the large, low-altitude cylinder.

If that's the case (and I'm definitely not saying it was!), then if the vehicle velocity has too much of a horizontal component during the engine burn, it will exceed the limits of its allotted airspace unless the engine is shut down (in which case it won't be going fast enough to exceed the limits.)

Again, this is probably not exactly what happened; it's just an example of how an early engine shutdown could prevent them from violating airspace.

>Leaving your flight corridor twenty miles up cannot cause risk to the general public.

To me it seems like there's very straightforward cases where it can (e.g. crashing into an elementary school vs unpopulated desert). That's why most rockets carry flight termination systems.

Space flights don't really get a flight plan per se. Instead they just use various special use airspace - that is, in a sense, they fly uncontrolled but within an area reserved for that purpose. One of the appeals of Spaceport America is that it is already surrounded by restricted airspace for the White Sands Missile Range, but the Spaceport itself is located near the western edge of WSMR. The WSMR's main restricted areas are always hot and have a general reputation for being difficult to enter (although ZAB does apparently give permission to airliners in the flight levels from time to time), but the Spaceport itself is located under restricted airspace that's only hot by NOTAM. I've flown around the area a number of times. It's actually a relatively busy area for general aviation, by New Mexico standards, because TorC municipal (KTCS) is a fairly popular airport with both paved and dirt runways and a lot of light aircraft like to go sightseeing over Elephant Butte reservoir. Back when I first got my ticket flying down to TorC and around the lake was a standard cross country solo.

The flight was issued a TFR covering an area generally west of the existing R-5111, and additionally of course all of R-5111 (A,B,C,D) was activated (this is a normal White Sands Missile Range restricted area). I drew the TFR here since the FAA version with the drawing is gone: https://jbcrawford.us/f/HIGE-ivkmLprESd.jpg. I'm having a hard time finding any information on SpaceShipTwo's flight path from the Spaceport (I could find info on the typical flight plan from Mojave), but it's presumably to the north given the position of the Spaceport and its runway alignment.

Given what I understand of the flight path for SpaceShipTwo, the major concern would be overrunning the special use airspace at the north end. That's inherently a bit risky because at low altitude a lot of GA traffic follows the Rio Grande, up at the flight levels it's probably not so big of a concern because a lot of commercial traffic has to go around further north (R-5107 C, the high altitude part of R-5107, is active continuously weekdays even though the WSMR north "call-up area" is rarely used). But because of the huge implications of a safety incident with commercial traffic the FAA is pretty careful about class A airspace.

That's all getting into the weeds, but more to the point: what happens at "20 miles up" is not really the concern, that's actually outside of class A airspace and you can go back to VFR if you're up that high and, you know, can. The problem is that SpaceShipTwo returns via an unpowered glide, at pretty extreme performance, and so doesn't have much ability to maneuver for a lot of the return path. Being outside of envelope on the way up could cause it to come back down, later, through class A airspace with no TFR. If that's far enough north it could indeed be in a fairly busy corridor for commercial aircraft (coming around the top of R-5107 C&H) which is a dangerous situation indeed.

There were no other flights nearby. Sounds like much ado about nothing.

Apparently you can, unless the New Yorker writes about it.

I'm not sure if your comment is missing a '/s'?

There will always be somebody who have more, even when you are a billionaire, somebody who is smarter, faster, better looking, what is the point of being grumpy about it. It won't make your job less terrible. But actually spending time to think about how to make it less terrible will.

He flies more frequently on his private jet

It's very well possible to support space research and private development while at the same time wanting flights of this kind stopped. All Branson will achieve is shutting down of space research and private development with his ill conceived contraption. This has gone too far already, and there is zero output here from an applicable technology point of view other than in the 'things we shouldn't be doing' department.

Blue Origin is on more solid footing and they in turn are toddlers compared to SpaceX.

Would I ban them if Branson wasn't there? Absolutely. Unless it's a one way trip. What does the human race get out of Branson's vanity project? He wants to be able to send bunch of rich folks to the edge of space for a fee. All for kicks. Are helicopter rides not cool enough anymore? Fuck all of them.

Forgetting about fuel in the rocket for just a second, what about the vessel that them to launch altitude?

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that no matter what magic dust is used to propel the rocket, there's a co2 cost. If not in the burn, then in the production of the fuel.

For anyone living on Earth the result would be mindfizzlingly spectacular. One hundred and twenty-eight stars would appear to go supernova simultaneously, burning with such ferocity they would be visible even in daylight.

And the hundred and twenty-eight supernovae would spell out a message.

And this would be the message:

‘COKE ADDS LIFE!’

For five whole weeks, wherever you were on Earth, the huge tattoo would be branded across the day and night skies. Honeymooners in Hawaii would stand on the peak of Mauna Kca, gazing at sunsets stamped with the slogan. Commuters in London, stuck in traffic jams, would peer through the grey drizzle and gape at the Cola constellation. The few primitive tribes still untouched by civilization in the jungles of South America would look up at the heavens, and certainly not think about drinking Pepsi.

The coat of this single, three-word ad in star writing across the universe would amount to the entire military budget of the USA for the whole of history.

So, ridiculous though it was, it was still a marginally more sensible way of blowing trillions of Dollarpounds.

And, the Coke executives were assured by the advertising executives at Saachi, Saachi, Saachi, Saachi, Saachi and Saachi, it would put an end to the Cola war forever. Guaranteed.

Pepsi would be buried.

Almost nothing relevant to humans who live about 80 years and evolved on Earth. If humans lived millions of years and there were other life supporting planets then space travel might be interesting...assuming one could even navigate between star systems.

Again and again I see the pattern of real world tech aspirations being driven by science fiction fantasy. The thing is though that real world tech is constrained by reality while fiction is not.

No, you will not be riding in driverless cars on mars in 2100.