I recommend Schmidle’s recent book “Test Gods” if you are interested in Virgin Galactic and test piloting. Schmidle is not an engineer and I would have enjoyed a deeper dive into Virgin Galactic’s design choices, but it is a great book about (among other things) the tensions that emerge when a complex technical project is overseen from a distance by utterly nontechnical, PR-oriented upper management. The company’s communications and business strategies make a lot more sense knowing that the people calling the shots do not comprehend in the slightest how their product works.
For many reasons (some alluded to in this article, many more in the book), SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. Engineering leadership has done what they can to make the vehicle safer (at the cost of performance), but the intractable issue is that any one mistake by a pilot is likely to be fatal (and already has been, in the 2014 accident). Voices like Stucky and Ericson who wanted to acknowledge the inherent danger of the vehicle (which doesn’t mean grounding it) have been ignored and ultimately removed. The company’s business requires the vehicle to be understood to be safe by the public. The chickens will come home to roost.
For many reasons (some alluded to in this article, many more in the book), SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. Engineering leadership has done what they can to make the vehicle safer (at the cost of performance), but the intractable issue is that any one mistake by a pilot is likely to be fatal (and already has been, in the 2014 accident). Voices like Stucky and Ericson who wanted to acknowledge the inherent danger of the vehicle (which doesn’t mean grounding it) have been ignored and ultimately removed. The company’s business requires the vehicle to be understood to be safe by the public. The chickens will come home to roost.