Accident kills 3, shakes commercial space industry

Three workers were killed and three others were badly injured Thursday afternoon in California while working on a commercial spacecraft Virgin Galactic eventually plans to use to launch paying customers from Spaceport America in Southern New Mexico.

The deaths have shaken the fledgling and tight-knit commercial space industry. Rick Homans, executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, cancelled a planned news conference scheduled for this afternoon in Las Cruces at which the selection of an architect to design Virgin Galactic’s facility at Spaceport America was to be announced.

Officials from the company were scheduled to attend and update the public on the secretive SpaceShip Two program.

The accident occurred Thursday afternoon during testing of a propellant flow system for SpaceShip Two. The media was informed shortly after midnight of the cancellation of today’s Las Cruces news conference.

“In light of the tragedy at Mojave Air and Space Port, we feel that it is important now to turn our complete attention, prayers and thoughts to the families and friends of the workers who lost their lives,” Homans said.

The identities of those who were killed and injured have not been released.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the explosion occurred at a private test site in Mojave, Calif. run by Scaled Composites, the company building SpaceShip Two for Virgin Galactic. That company is run by Burt Rutan, and in June 2004 it successfully launched the first commercial reusable manned rocket – SpaceShip One – into space.

The explosion was apparently caused by an “undetermined operating flaw” that ignited a tank of nitrous oxide, the Times reported. The company works at a small airport in Mojave that is certified as the nation’s first inland spaceport. It is to be used by Virgin Galactic as the temporary launching facility for a fleet of SpaceShip Two vehicles until Spaceport America is complete.

Rutan, at a news conference held late Thursday, said “We just don’t know” what caused the explosion.

“We felt it was completely safe,” the Times quoted him as saying. “We had done a lot of these (tests) with SpaceShip One.”

Rutan’s company has been secretive about the SpaceShip Two project at the direction of Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson. That, according to the Times, caused Rutan to get visibly frustrated during the news conference.

“This whole program for Richard Branson’s company is a program that’s clumsy for us, because it’s announced but not unveiled,” the Times quoted him as saying. “So we have for a year and a half here been not answering any questions at all about the program.”

Despite the accident, he said, SpaceShip Two “won’t be unveiled until it’s ready to fly.” Scaled Composites has never released a timeline for completion of design, testing and first launch, according to the Associated Press, but Branson said earlier this year the space ship would be complete within a year and he expected the first commercial launch in 2009.

Rutan’s comments highlight one of the perils for the commercial space industry. Many employees working for NASA have died in accidents since the beginning of the program, but their deaths have generally been considered to be in the service of the nation.

Some critics of the spaceport project in New Mexico have predicted that such accidents would occur in the commercial space industry and questioned whether, in a state that is already divided over the spending of public money on the commercial spaceport, the necessary political will to make the project successful would remain.