Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2015

ASTRONAUTICS metics, electronics megastores, and the list could be much longer. After having for de- cades invested heavily in air, sea and land ventures, Branson decided that his new fron- tier will be the “space” and in order to reach it, in 2004 he founded Virgin Galactic, an aerospace company whose goal is to pro- vide private suborbital flights by means of small spaceplanes with rocket motors, able to accommodate 6 passengers besides the two pilots. To achieve this ambitious goal, Sir Richard had long established a close co- operation with Scaled Composites, LLC, an aerospace company located in Mojave, Cal- ifornia (now run by Northrop Grumman Corporation), contracted to design, build and test Virgin Galactic's spacecrafts. The joint venture proved so successful that already their first spaceplane prototype, cal- led SpaceShipOne, won in 2004 the Ansari X Prize and the $10 million awarded by the X Prize Foundation to the first non-govern- mental organization to launch a manned vehicle into space and back twice in the span of two weeks. (It is worth reminding that “space” typically begins at an altitude of about 100 km where, in actual fact, there is still a tenuous Earth's atmosphere.) In 2009, Virgin Galactic officially unveiled an improved version of the spaceplane, Space- ShipTwo (SS2), whose development had suf- fered a serious setback a couple of years be- fore as a result of a tragic ground accident occurred during a flow test between tanks of nitrous oxide, a gas used as fuel by Scaled Composites in the rocket propulsion system. Without even rocket motor ignition, the fuel exploded killing three technicians and seri- ously injuring three others. Since then, Virgin Galactic has been warned several times by engineers and aerospace in- dustry experts about the dangers of the fuels used for SpaceShipTwo, but it appears that these warnings were disregarded on not suf- ficiently taken into account. In fact, the com- pany continued along the same course, on account of all the certifications and authori- sations obtained from various US agencies S paceShipTwo gliding to- wards Earth dur- ing a test flight. This aircraft, 12.8 metres wide and 18.3 metres long, was destroyed during its 35th test. [Virgin Ga- lactic]