Apparently CalOSHA has issued their report, and it remains unclear what caused the explosion at Scaled last summer. Charles Lurio notes (as I’ve been saying for, well, forever, or at least since I heard about the proposal to go with a nitrous hybrid):

…largely because of its ability to self-detonate – nitrous oxide has every now and then created unhappy surprises whose causes are difficult or impossible to explain. This may turn out to have been the case at Mojave. If in the end no cause for that incident is identifiable, Scaled should perhaps consider an alternative oxidizer for its hybrid; liquid oxygen (LOX) may be less convenient to transport and manage but doesn’t have nitrous’ particular unpredictabilities.

It also performs much better, whether with hybrids or liquids. This is very bad news. If you don’t know what caused an accident, it’s very difficult to know how to prevent it from recurring. Even if it causes a delay in the schedule, I think that they will have to go to some other design, and I also think (as I’ve always thought) that they should subcontract it out to an established propulsion house, such as HMX or XCOR, who are right there on the field.

Maybe when Burt has recovered from his recent health problems, he’ll be in better shape to grasp that nettle than he has been.

The launch seemed to go fine. We looked for it from the house, but I’ve given up on seeing it from here. I think that the roof line is just too high above the trajectory, when it’s heading north up to the ISS. The only launch I’ve seen from here was an Atlas at night, and it was heading due east, so it wasn’t moving away from us as fast. It reminds me, though, that there aren’t going to be very many more opportunities to see it. I suspect that it’s the largest launch vehicle that we’re going to have for a long, long time.

When they made their announcement a couple weeks ago, I was interested to see that the interiors of the two fuselages of White Knight Two and SpaceShipTwo are identical. Virgin implied that they might be selling seats in WK2, either for passengers who just wanted a ride (with parabolas) or for future SS2 passengers. Which had me scratching my head. Had they considered the fact that WK2 is an airplane, not a spaceplane, and that it’s in a different regulatory regime?

Maybe not:

The US Federal Aviation Administration has informed Flight that it will require WK2 to be certified before it is used for anything other than as a launch platform for SS2.

If it’s a launch platform, then it falls under the launch license process by FAA-AST, but if it is used for other purposes, such as crew training, it is in a different category, and has to be certified by FAA-AVR, the much larger part of the agency that deals with aviation.

I’ve long been on the war path to get people to use these terms properly, because they really do mean things.

Certifying an aircraft under (presumably) Part 121 (and perhaps even the more stringent Part 127) for commercial passenger transportation (think of it as the FAA equivalent of NASA’s elusive “man rating”) is a long and expensive process. It can increase the development cost of the vehicle by anywhere from one to two orders of magnitude. As an example, there was a small executive jet was prototyped by Scaled for a couple million a few years ago, but it was estimated that it would cost a couple hundred million to get it certified. Which is one of the reasons that you can’t buy one today. It never happened.

Now Virgin Atlantic Airlines is obviously familiar with FAA processes and procedures, and has an operators certificate. But they’ve never been involved with the development of an aircraft in the way that Virgin Galactic is now. My question is: does their business model account for estimated WK2 certification costs?

Which raises a second question. For this kind of market (informed passenger/adventure travel) is the current FAA certification regime overkill? This is the issue that prevented Zero G from going into operation much sooner–they had a certified aircraft (a Boeing 727) but it wasn’t certified for parabolic flight, and they had to spend years and a lot of money (I have no idea how much, but I imagine millions) to get a special type certification for this flight regime. So while we’ve made good progress in loosening the constraints for space flight, one wonders how much more progress we could have made (and how much less viable WK2 is from a business standpoint) because of our one-size-fits-all aviation regs?

It looks like, over a quarter of a century after Shuttle went into service, they’ve finally solved the ECO sensor problem. Now, of course, the problem is the weather. I’d bet they don’t fly today, just looking at the motion of that front. I wish it would come down here–we need the rain.

The Indian space agency has signed a cooperative agreement with NASA.