In February 2016, sixteen months after the unexpectedly violent demise of SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic (VG) unveiled its latest vehicle, VSS Unity, in a ceremony at the company’s factory in Mojave, California. Attendees included families, customers and investors, including, we can assume, at least some of VG’s first 100 “future astronauts” — people who have paid $200,000 for a ticket that promises them six minutes in zero gravity, bobbing 110km above Earth, where they might gaze down upon the awesome curvature of our home planet.

After the crash in 2014, tickets were suspended. “For 12 hours after the accident we were very much trying to decide whether it was worth the risk of continuing,” VG’s CEO Richard Branson recently told The Guardian.

“I’m not the sort of person who gives up on things. The first time we crossed the Atlantic in the balloon it crashed, and we went on and did the Pacific. First time we crossed the Atlantic in a boat it sank, and we went on and got the record. So, generally speaking, we will pick ourselves up, brush ourselves down and carry on. But in the first 12 hours we did not know if any of the accident was our fault or whether it was a technical issue that couldn’t be rectified.”

Cause of the crash

A nine-month investigation by the US National Transportation Safety Board eventually revealed that a lethal combination of human error and inadequate safety procedures were behind the crash, and the death of test co-pilot Michael Alsbury.

The feathering system the vehicle had been fitted with, designed by American aerospace engineer Burt Ratan to reduce the vehicle’s speed and stabilize its descent on return to Earth, had been unlocked too soon, at Mach 0.92 instead of the intended speed of Mach 1.4, causing the vehicle to disintegrate in seconds.

I can’t remember anything about what happened but I must have come to during the fall

Alsbury died, while Peter Siebold, pilot-in-command, survived, plummeting a 10-mile fall while slipping in and out consciousness, trying to activate the parachute that would eventually save him.

It is not known if Siebold pulled the cord himself, or if it unfurled automatically. “I must have lost consciousness at first,” he later told reporters. “I can’t remember anything about what happened but I must have come to during the fall. I remember waving to the chase plane and giving them the thumbs-up to tell them I was OK. I know it’s a miracle I survived.”

It was nothing short of a miracle, given the conditions he endured: minus 60°C temperature; a lack of oxygen and barotrauma — an injury caused by a sudden change in pressure.

Tragic history

The death of test pilots is not an uncommon feature in space flight history, which has — up till this point — been largely governmental or military. NASA, for example, reported a 3% fatality rate during their manned tests.

Since the discontinuation of the space shuttle programme in 2011, they’ve more or less given up, diverting their resources into unmanned expeditions, like the New Horizons probe. Branson is aware that VG is working under a different and more exacting set of criteria and expectation.

“For a government-owned company, you can just about get away with losing 3% of your clients. For a private company you can’t really lose anybody.”

Unity’s improvements

So, how does Unity improve on its ill-fated predecessor? Details of the changes made to VG’s newest craft will be kept in-house for now, says space policy consultant and entrepreneur, James Muncy, but it’s safe to assume that extreme care will have been taken to improve the vehicle, in every aspect.

“All aerospace vehicles, when you make the second flight article, include lots of little changes based on things you learned during manufacturing or flight testing the first copy. Human beings aren’t perfect, and we get better over time by learning and applying those learnings.

“A client of mine says ‘the first copy of every design is a dog’, i.e it doesn’t achieve the full potential of the design — it doesn’t go as fast as it should, or as high as it should, or whatever. But the second copy is much better. So, I don’t know what changes they made, because they aren’t necessarily easily visible to a non-expert observer. But I suspect they made a lot of small improvements, perhaps some to make the job of the crew easier.”

Unity is an adaption of Rutan’s design for SpaceShipOne, a vehicle carried into the air by a mothership, the twin-fuselage WhiteKnightTwo. Rutan’s feathering system remains an integral part of the design, but has been adapted to ensure the crew’s safety. Is the lock that’s been fitted a guarantee against a repeat of SpaceShipTwo’s crash?

“Scaled Composites both designed and manufactured Spaceship Two,” says Muncy. “The design change made by the Spaceship Company is a safeguard against the same pilot mistake happening again.”

Galactic relaunch

According to journalist Andrew Anthony, who attended Unity’s unveiling, the event in the Mojave was more of an exercise in post-crash PR than anything else.

“Inside the hangar we hear speeches from Virgin Galactic bigwigs, trumpeting what a fabulous achievement the new aircraft is. But it’s essentially the same as the one that crashed, with a few minor alterations, including a safety lock to prevent the premature initiation of the feathering system that led to the crash,” he wrote.

“This event in the desert is not the launch of a new aircraft – more testing is required before it leaves the ground. It’s not even a product launch, because the new product is largely the same as the old one. But it could be seen as a relaunch of Virgin Galactic – a chance to announce to the world that everything is fine and back on track.”

It’s a fair assessment, and makes sense considering the rapid progress of VG’s peers and competitors. Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur behind Space X’s private space cargo company has recently announced plans to send humans into space, while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the head honcho at Blue Origin, also recently announced similar plans, touting 2017 as a launch date (although the first passengers are expected to be staff rather than public ticket-holders).

Does VG’s unique feathering system give the company an edge over its peers?

“In a word, no,” says Muncy. “ SpaceX is an orbital spaceflight company, and VG is not in competition with them. VG is a suborbital human spaceflight company and, soon, a very small payload orbital company. Blue Origin is both a suborbital and (in the future) orbital company. Feathering is just a design approach to suborbital reentry that Burt Rutan used on Spaceship One and Spaceship Two. Blue uses a symmetrical vertical-takeoff-landing design, so they don’t need it. Likewise SpaceX.”

Virgin’s future

The crash was both a public tragedy and a blow to VG’s advance, but Unity bodes well for Branson and co. Public interest in their progress certainly remains high — and understandably so, given the insider glimpses that have come out of the VG camp this year.

VG have marketed the destination of their journey as the pinnacle of space flight

VG have marketed the destination of their journey as the pinnacle of space flight, but Dave Mackay, VG’s chief test pilot, believes “the journey there” will be the thing passengers are truly wowed by, describing the ascent as akin to “putting your foot down in a performance car if the acceleration could go on for over a minute. At first there is silence, and then the engines fire up and you blast off, and it really gets going.”

It’s a tantalizing image, agrees Muncy, but pragmatism is key.

“If you had asked me in 2004 which was going to happen first, regular commercial operation of suborbital or orbital spaceflight, I would have said suborbital by years. Blue may take people up commercially this year,” he said.

“But Boeing and SpaceX will fly people to orbit next year. Blue is regularly flying their vehicle. But Virgin is still down, and XCOR hasn’t finished making their Lynx. We will see how big the market is when the vehicles are flying and people come back and say ‘again!’”

VG tickets will be on sale again soon, a snip (not) at $300,000. “We’ll slowly but steadily start bringing the price down as we build more spaceships and more spaceports around the world,” Branson has promised.

He’s inspired by the belief that space travel will make life here on Earth a better place, quoting Frank White’s The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution — a book that examines and extols the profound and often positive psychological effects that space travel has had on explorers recent and past.

His long-term vision is to open space to all, to make space travel a possibility for people who’ve done “relatively well” in life; though this writer is hard-pressed to guess what ‘relative’ is to a billionaire.

“If we can make it environmentally friendly, if we can make it affordable and if we can make it safe, then in time, your children and my grandchildren will all have the chance to go to space.”