Space

A failure may have occurred in the rocket's engine

The detail in the image is far greater than anything even the Hubble could achieve

If someone had been around to see it, this is what our Solar System probably looked like when it was only a million years old (for the record, it’s nearly 4.6 billion now, and counting). This image was taken by the giant ALMA telescope, located in the high desert of northern Chile, which sees in radio wavelengths. The detail here is far greater than anything even the Hubble could achieve.

The glowing disk is dust and gas whirling around the young star, known as HL Tauri, located about 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. The dark gaps are almost certainly places where the gravity of newly forming planets has swept the dust clean — exactly as Earth, Mars and the other planets in our mature Solar System did long ago. It’s a strong clue that our theories of how planets form are very much on the right track.

Nasa is using more 3D video

Lightweight debris from last week’s in-flight breakup of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane has been found as far away as 30 to 35 miles from the main crash site, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board said Monday night.

The dispersal of debris testifies to the thoroughness of the plane’s disintegration, after an anomaly that occurred on Friday during a flight test high above California’s Mojave Desert. SpaceShipTwo’s wing-feathering system — a mechanism that’s designed to slow the craft down during its descent — has emerged as a focus of the NTSB’s investigation.

Experts on human performance have been added to…

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Jeffrey Kluger is Editor at Large for TIME.

Every disaster can be equal parts tragedy and travesty. Both are avoidable.

Am I the first person to discover that the ecosystem of Twitter can be a little bit toxic? Those 140 characters, it seems, don’t always lend themselves to nuanced and reasoned discussion, and so the discussion that does take place is often—how best to put this?—discourteous.

All right, maybe that’s not news to anyone. But I’ve discovered that ugly truth anew in the past few days, in the wake of my Oct. 31 piece arguing that that day’s crash of Sir Richard Branson’s SpaceShipTwo—which took the life of test pilot Michael Alsbury, a 39-year-old married father of two—could be laid directly at the feet of Branson himself. I accused Branson of too much hucksterism and too much hubris. I meant what I said, and I stand by it.

Many of the tweets that opinion elicited are best left in the Twitter muck, particularly this thoughtful take, and this one and this one, which would be so much better if the author had taken the time to spell-check schmuck. There was, too, a response from Chris Sacca, a deservedly well-regarded investor in Uber, Kickstarter, Instagram and more and a man with an impressive 1.49 million Twitter followers: “Brave pioneer died conducting research. Go f*ck yourself, Time.” (Asterisk not provided in original.)

O.K., let’s all take a deep breath and try to collect ourselves. All disasters can be equal parts tragedy and travesty if we don’t keep our heads about us, but that doesn’t mean they have to remain that way. I’m happy to concede that my phrasing was provocative, and I indeed conceded it on CBS This Morning the day after the crash. But that doesn’t mean it was misplaced. Let’s start with that hubris thing.

As I mentioned in my earlier piece, I attended the Mojave Desert jamboree that Virgin Galactic threw last year for a few hundred of its paying passengers and got a look at SpaceShipTwo up close. What struck me the most was a bit of company artwork stenciled on the fuselage of the ship, as well as on all of the press materials distributed that day and even on the very lanyards that held the credentials of all of the attendees.

It was a series of silhouettes that represented a sort of walking tour of the key mile markers of human spaceflight. First was an Icarus-looking figure with large feathered wings; next came the Wright Brothers’ plane, then what appeared to be Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis. Those were followed by an X-1 (the first plane to break the sound barrier), a 747, the Apollo lunar module, and then SpaceShipOne (the forerunner of SpaceShipTwo, and the first private craft to achieve suborbital flight). Finally came SpaceShipTwo itself, mated to its larger carrier craft.

So of the eight greatest pivot points in the long history of human aviation, Branson claims a connection to two—one of which (SpaceShipTwo) has never even done the thing that it was built to do, which is to get to space. Yes, logos are just semiotics—but semiotics count, especially when they seem to define the company’s culture.

As recently as Sept. 27, according to Mail Online, Branson was predicting that success for SpaceShipTwo was just months away, despite the fact that the company has been in operation since 2004 and has continually missed such self-imposed deadlines; had just switched from a rubber-based to a plastic-based fuel that had not even been tested in flight until last week; and still holds only an experimental—not operational—permit from the FAA. But never mind.

“I would very much hope that before Christmas, Virgin Galactic has visited space,” Branson told Mail Online. “And then we’ll move the whole program to New Mexico where myself and my son will be the first people to go up from the Spaceport in the spring of next year.”

These are less the words of a pioneer than those of an entrepreneur who has to keep the enthusiasm around his enterprise high, partly because he’s answerable to a lot of other people with a lot of money on the line: There is, for example, the $218.5 million the taxpayers of New Mexico have ponied up to build that spaceport near the appropriately named town of Truth or Consequences. There’s the estimated $300 million that’s been poured into Virgin Galactic by the Abu Dhabi–based firm Aabar Investments. And most troubling of all, there are the $20,000 deposits Virgin’s estimated 800 customers have put down to hold their reservations for their eventual flight.

This is where Branson dramatically parts company with all of the legends his acolytes in the Twitterverse and elsewhere like to invoke—especially the Wright brothers. Orville and Wilbur, it’s worth remembering, risked only their own hides on their first flights—and they never, ever presumed to take their highly experimental plane commercial no matter how confident they were in its reliability.

What’s more, they were genuinely attempting to accomplish something that had never been done before—powered flight—as opposed to simply coming up with a new way to fly a manned suborbital mission that was first checked off humanity’s bucket list on May 5, 1961, when Alan Shepard pulled it off. And if you’re going to make the argument that Branson is trying to democratize (the go-to word) spaceflight, making it available to everyone as opposed to just the elite, I would argue that you have to be pretty darned elite to be able to plunk down $250,000 for a 15-minute vacation—which factors out to a cool $16,666 per minute.

Second to the Wrights when it comes to easy and inapt comparisons are the heroes of NASA’s early days, who—argue the enthusiasts—lost plenty of pilots themselves and never would have gotten anywhere if they hadn’t taken bold risks. “You’ve read The Right Stuff, right?”@Kazanjy challenged me in a tweet. Yes, @Kazanjy, I have. And more relevant to our conversation, I wrote Apollo 13. I’ve also reported and written extensively about multiple space disasters over the years, including the loss of the shuttles Challenger and Columbia and the Mir space station accident in 1997.

The Challenger explosion in particular, as history has shown, was the direct result of the same get-it-done, fly-it-now, meet-the-deadline urgency the Virgin Galactic brass are applying to the SpaceShipTwo engineers. This doesn’t mean Branson has been cavalier with the lives of his pilots any more than NASA was, or that he isn’t genuinely heartbroken at the loss of one of them. It does mean that both he and the space agency of the Challenger era were pushing their staffs to keep unrealistic promises they themselves had made: a workable vehicle that could go commercial as soon as spring, in Branson’s case; and a shuttle that could fly payloads cheaply with a quick turnaround time, in NASA’s case. Something similar was true of the Apollo 1 launchpad fire that cost the lives of three astronauts in 1967, as NASA raced to meet the deadline President Kennedy set of having Americans on the moon by 1970.

What Apollo 13 showed was that even when the pressure is off—when the moon race is won and the hardware has been proven and you can finally begin flying missions that are less about just getting home in one piece and more about doing some actual science—you still can’t take anything for granted.

The reason the Apollo 13 astronauts, who had exhaustively prepared for every conceivable thing that could go wrong with their spacecraft, never rehearsed for the one that did, was that no one ever conceived of a quadruple failure of multiply redundant hardware. And if anyone did conceive of it, there was no point in preparing for it, because it would be like preparing for what to do if you drive your car over a cliff. You do nothing; you just die.

The Apollo 13 crew survived, but in the case of Virgin Galactic, a man has indeed been lost. It’s a hard and tragic truth that that death, unlike the Apollo 13 breakdown, was foreseeable. So too is the risk of a ship full of paying tourists suffering the same fate if Branson’s enterprise ever gets off the ground. It shouldn’t.

Nov. 3, 1957: The Soviet Union sends the first living creature into orbit

It was a Space Race victory that would have broken Sarah McLachlan’s heart. On this day, Nov. 3, in 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first-ever living animal into orbit: a dog named Laika. The flight was meant to test the safety of space travel for humans, but it was a guaranteed suicide mission for the dog, since technology hadn’t advanced as far as the return trip.

Laika was a stray, picked up from the Moscow streets just over a week before the rocket was set to launch. She was promoted to cosmonaut based partly on her size (small) and demeanor (calm), according to the Associated Press. All of the 36 dogs the Soviets sent into space — before Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth — were strays, chosen for their scrappiness. (Other dogs had gone into space before Laika, but only for sub-orbital launches.) The mission was another in a series of coups for the Soviet Union, which was then leading the way in space exploration while the United States lagged. Just a month earlier, they had launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite. When Laika’s vessel, Sputnik 2, shot into orbit, the U.S. fell even further behind.

News media alternated between mockery and pity for the dog sent into space. According to a 1957 TIME report on how the press was covering the event, “headlines yelped such barbaric new words as pupnik and pooch-nik, sputpup and woofnik,” before ultimately settling on “Muttnik.”

“The Chicago American noted: ‘The Russian sputpup isn’t the first dog in the sky. That honor belongs to the dog star. But we’re getting too Sirius,’” the piece adds.

Other headline-writers treated Laika with more compassion. According to another story in the same issue, the Brits were especially full of feeling for the dog — and outrage toward the Russians. “THE DOG WILL DIE, WE CAN’T SAVE IT, wailed London’s mass-minded Daily Mirror,” the story declares. The Soviet embassy in London was forced to switch from celebration mode to damage control.

“The Russians love dogs,” a Soviet official protested, per TIME. “This has been done not for the sake of cruelty but for the benefit of humanity.”

Nearly a half-century later, Russian officials found themselves handling PR fallout once again after it was revealed that reports of Laika’s humane death were greatly exaggerated.

Although they had long insisted that Laika expired painlessly after about a week in orbit, an official with Moscow’s Institute for Biological Problems leaked the true story in 2002: She died within hours of takeoff from panic and overheating, according to the BBC. Sputnik 2 continued to orbit the Earth for five months, then burned up when it reentered the atmosphere in April 1958.

One of Laika’s human counterparts in the Soviet space program recalled her as a good dog. He even brought her home to play with his children before she began her space odyssey.

“Laika was quiet and charming,” Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky wrote in a book about Soviet space medicine, as quoted by the AP. “I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live.”

Read TIME’s 1957 take on Laika’s launch, here in the archives: The She-Hound of Heaven

(MOJAVE, Calif.) — Virgin Galactic’s experimental spaceship broke apart in flight over California’s Mojave Desert after a device to slow the craft’s descent prematurely deployed, federal investigators said Sunday.

National Transportation Safety Board Acting Chairman Christopher Hart said that while no cause for Friday’s crash of SpaceShipTwo has been determined, investigators found the “feathering” system — which lifts and rotates the tail to create drag — was activated before the craft reached the appropriate speed.

The system requires a two-step process to deploy. The co-pilot unlocked the system but Hart said the second step occurred “without being commanded.”

Hart said the investigation is months from being completed and pilot error and mechanical failure are among many things being looked at.

The co-pilot Michael Alsbury, 39, was killed. Peter Siebold, 43, who piloted the mission, parachuted to the ground and is receiving treatments at a hospital for serious injuries.

Virgin Galactic — owned by billion Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and Aabar Investments PJS of Abu Dhabi — plans to fly passengers to altitudes more than 62 miles above Earth. The company sells seats on each prospective journey for $250,000.

Branson had hoped to begin flights next year but said Saturday that the project won’t resume until the cause of the accident is determined and the problems fixed.

The feathering is a feature unique to SpaceShipTwo to help it slow as it re-enters the atmosphere. After being unlocked, a lever rotates booms at the rear of the plane up to 90 degrees so they act as a rudder. After decelerating, the booms return to their normal position and the craft glides to Earth.

Hart said the feathers activated at Mach 1.0, the speed of sound, but shouldn’t have deployed until it had at least reached a speed of Mach 1.4, or more than 1,000 mph.

SpaceShipTwo tore apart Friday after the craft detached from the underside of its jet-powered mother ship and fired its rocket engine for a test flight. Initial speculation was that an explosion occurred but Hart said the fuel and oxidizer tanks and rocket engine were found and showed no sign of being burned through or breached.

Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides issued a statement Sunday to tamp down conjecture about the cause of the crash.

“Now is not the time for speculation,” he said. “Now is the time to focus on all those affected by this tragic accident and to work with the experts at the NTSB, to get to the bottom of what happened on that tragic day, and to learn from it so that we can move forward safely with this important mission.”

SpaceShipTwo has been under development for years and, like all space projects, has suffered setbacks. In 2007, an explosion killed three people on the ground and critically injured three others during a ground test in the development of a rocket engine.

Prior to Hart’s announcement, Geoff Daly, an engineer who worked on the space shuttle, renewed criticism of Virgin Galactic’s use of nitrous oxide to power the ship’s engine.

Daly was co-author of a critical report on the 2007 incident at Scaled Composites, the Northrop Grumman-owned designer of SpaceShipTwo. The report was critical of Virgin’s claims that nitrous oxide was safe to use in engines for passenger flight, and it complained that the public was never given a full accounting of what happened.

In a June 2013 letter, Daly asked the FAA to put a hold on an experimental flight permit for SpaceShipTwo to ensure the safety of personnel on the ground and in the spacecraft.

The FAA said it would look into his complaint, according to memos posted online, but Daly said no flights of SpaceShipTwo were halted.

A report by the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health said the 2007 blast occurred three seconds after the start of a cold-flow test of nitrous oxide. The engine was not firing during the test at the Mojave Air and Space Port.

The nitrous oxide is used with fuel to provide propulsion. Engineers had recently changed the fuel system, switching from a rubber-based fuel to one that used plastics. The new fuel had been tested on the ground but not in flight until Friday.

The loss of SpaceShipTwo was the second fiery setback for commercial space travel in less than a week. On Tuesday, an unmanned commercial supply rocket bound for the International Space Station exploded moments after liftoff in Virginia.

But Virgin Galactic has another spacecraft 65% ready

The investigation into the Virgin Galactic spacecraft that crashed and killed one person during a test flight in California on Friday could take a year, a leading U.S. safety official said.

Christopher Hart, the acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said late Saturday Virgin Galactic could still conduct test flights during the investigation of the SpaceShipTwo crash, which also injured one other person, the BBC reports.

A second spacecraft that has been under construction for the past three years is 65% complete, Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides told the Financial Times. The spacecraft could be ready for flight next year, after the company finds out how SpaceShipTwo’s crash came about.

Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson said that he is “determined to find out what went wrong” with the crash. Hart said the debris from the crash was spread over an area of file miles in the Mojave desert.

The surviving pilot, 43-year-old Peter Siebold, is “alert and talking with his family and doctors,” according to Scaled Composites, the aerospace company for which both pilots worked. Investigators will interview him about the crash when his doctors give the green light.

[BBC]