What Went Wrong With Space Travel Last Week?

Space is hard. It's a refrain we're hearing quite a bit in the wake of a pair of accidents involving private space firms.

Space is hard. It's a refrain we're hearing quite a bit in the wake of a terrible week for private spaceflight.

Just days after an Orbital Sciences rocket carrying supplies for the International Space Station (ISS) exploded above a launch pad in eastern Virginia, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight above California's Mojave Desert, killing one pilot and seriously injuring the other.

Is spaceflight so hard, so inherently risky that we can't do it more safely and without accidents like those of the past weekor at least in such a way that catastrophic failures and loss of life happen much less frequently?

As news of the Orbital and Virgin Galactic accidents spread, many in the space community defaulted to the familiar, resigned reaction to such events. Space exploration isdespite all of the science and expertise behind it, despite all of our wonderful accomplishments over the past six decadesstill ultimately about pushing the envelope to pretty much the furthest extremes we humans have ever dared.

There's a natural instinct to forgive those involved in spacefaring attempts that go wrong. It stems in part from a desire to push back fast against the blowback from a high-profile accident. A Challenger disaster, to cite perhaps the most prominent example, can depress the public's willingness to keep challenging space, potentially setting back humanity's desire to keep building, innovating, and dreaming in our efforts to throw off the shackles of our Earthly home.

Who Is to Blame? But not everybody has been so accepting of the perils of space flight in the days following these latest incidents. That's been especially true with regards to the SpaceShipTwo test flight conducted by Virgin Galactic partner Scaled Composites, which cost the life of co-pilot Michael Alsbury.

The journalist Joel Glenn Brenner, who is writing a book about the development of SpaceShipOne, the Ansari X Prize-winning predecessor to the vehicle that crashed last week, spoke of "technical difficulties" with SpaceShipTwo that were allegedly known and discussed "behind closed doors" by an outwardly optimistic Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites.

International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS) rocket propulsion scientist Carolynne Campbell-Knight went on record with the U.K.'s Daily Mail saying she'd warned Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson that using nitrous oxide in the fuel mix for the company's suborbital vehicle was like playing "Russian Roulette [as to] which test flight blew up."

Three Scaled Composites employees died in a 2007 explosion while testing a new rocket fuel mix using nitrous oxide, so these aren't exactly the ravings of mindless critics.

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What Went Wrong With Space Travel Last Week?