Mojave, California: 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 an interview 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.
Hadfield warned of the dangers in an interview with the Guardian last year. “Eventually they’ll crash one,” he said. “Because it’s hard. They’re discovering how hard.”
But Hadfield said he hoped the project would succeed. “They wanted to fly years ago and faced a lot of obstacles, but he’s a brave entrepreneur and I hope he succeeds. The more people who can see the world this way, the better off we are.”
Despite this, more than 800 people have paid or put down deposits for a two-hour trip into space inside the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, including a list of celebrities.
On the proposed trip, the spaceship is launched from a twin-engined carrier aircraft called WhiteKnight, then fires its rocket motor to catapult it to about 62 miles (100km) high, giving passengers a view of the planet against the blackness of space and five minutes of weightlessness. Those who have already paid a deposit include Jolie, Brad Pitt, Stephen Hawking and Katy Perry. Tickets were first priced at $200,000 before being raised to $250,000 last year.
Richard Branson has insisted he would fly on Virgin Galactic’s inaugural flight with his children, despite the relatively untested technology. “The biggest worry I had was re-entry,” he has admitted. “Nasa has lost about 3 per cent of everyone who’s gone into space, and re-entry has been their biggest problem. For a government-owned company, you can just about get away with losing 3 per cent of your clients. For a private company you can’t really lose anybody.”