During the
historic spaceflight of Sir Richard Branson in July, near the end of the burn of the VSS
Unity spacecraft's engine, a red light appeared on a console. This alerted the crew to an "entry glide-cone warning." Pilots Dave Mackay and Mike Masucci faced a split-second decision: kill the rocket motor or take immediate action to address their trajectory problem.
This scenario is outlined in a new report by Nicholas Schmidle, a writer with more insight into Virgin Galactic than any other journalist,
in The New Yorker. For his recently published book
Test Gods, Schmidle had unparalleled access to Virgin Galactic and its pilots.
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"I once sat in on a meeting, in 2015, during which the pilots on the July 11th mission and others discussed procedures for responding to an entry glide-cone warning," Schmidle wrote in his story, published Wednesday. "C. J. Sturckow, a former marine and NASA astronaut, said that a yellow light should 'scare the sh-- out of you,' because 'when it turns red it's gonna be too late.'"
As they accelerated to Mach 3 in July, the pilots knew that, if they cut the motor, VSS
Unity would not climb above 80 km and the founder of Virgin Galactic, Branson, would not beat Jeff Bezos to space. Cutting the motor would be an embarrassment for the company and its founder. They did not abort; instead, they attempted to get the vehicle back on a safe upward trajectory so that it would be in position to safely glide back to the runway in New Mexico.
The pilots succeeded, and Branson's flight landed safely. However, in doing so,
Unity flew outside of its designated airspace for 1 minute 42 seconds. That may not sound like much time, but it's more than 10 percent of its flight after being dropped from a carrier aircraft. A Virgin Galactic spokesperson acknowledged that the company did not initially notify the Federal Aviation Administration, which is investigating the deviation, Schmidle reports.
