How Will the Virgin Galactic Tragedy Affect Space Tourism?Yahoo! Travel
Sid Lipsey October 31, 2014
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashed Friday. (Photo: AP)The crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo is an undeniable tragedy. The space tourism rocket exploded and crashed in the Mojave Desert during a test flight Friday, reportedly killing one of its pilots and seriously injuring the other.
It’s the latest setback for Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson’s long-delayed plans to bring space travel to civilians. He’d hoped to begin flights next year, but the program has missed several target dates already. Now, this accident has thrown the latest, fast-approaching deadline into doubt.
"We do not expect Virgin Galactic to fly in 2015 at all," Space.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik tells Yahoo Travel. He notes that with SpaceShipTwo in pieces in the Mojave Desert and another spacecraft not even halfway through construction, Virgin Galactic is without a space vehicle and will be for some time. “They’re going to halt construction until they figure out what went wrong,” Malik predicts.
Wreckage of SpaceShipTwo (Photo: AP)But if Virgin Galactic does get flying again, will prospective space tourists — who’d already started forking over $250,000 per person for seats on Virgin Galactic’s first space flights — be scared off by the crash?
"Virgin has a lot of customers — like 700 or so — waiting to go to space," Malik tells Yahoo Travel, noting that celebrities from Beyoncé to Lady Gaga are among the rumored ticket holders. "I think for people on the fence, this might give them pause."
Virgin Galactic aimed to take tourists on a two-hour space flight that would include about six minutes of weightlessness in orbit. (Virgin Galactic)With all the eager predictions of everyday folks someday being able to book flights in space as easily as we book flights to Tampa, one unfortunate reality has gone largely ignored: Space travel is dangerous. U.K. air officials weighing plans for spaceports in that country estimate that commercial space flights could be as much as a thousand times more dangerous than commercial airliners.
"I think it’s definitely a wake-up call to maybe some people who didn’t take it seriously," Malik says about the Virgin Galactic accident. "That space flight is a risky endeavor and that when things go wrong, they can go catastrophically wrong."
Virgin Galactic had already known catastrophe before Friday’s tragedy. In 2007, a rocket being tested for SpaceShipTwo exploded, killing three people. Accidents and tragedy are as big a part of the history of manned space flight as accomplishments and triumphs. “In the beginning of the space age, there were failures all the time,” Malik says.
Friday’s crash deals a heartbreaking blow to Richard Branson’s visions of civilian space travel. (Photo: Virgin Galactic)No one really thought Virgin Galactic would be exempt from those failures. In an interview that ran almost a year ago to the day of Friday’s crash, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield made an eerie prediction about Branson’s ambitious space program. ”Eventually they’ll crash one,” he told the Guardian. “Because it’s hard. They’re discovering how hard. They wanted to fly years ago and faced a lot of obstacles.”
But Hadfield added that Branson’s “a brave entrepreneur and I hope he succeeds. The more people who can see the world this way, the better off we are.”
Space.com’s Malik expects that Virgin Galactic will press forward with its plans to take tourists into space, but only after they accomplish a new task first. “They are on a mission now to figure out what went wrong. In honor of the pilot that was killed.”
https://www.yahoo.com/travel/how-will-the-virgin-galactic-tragedy-affect-space-101442535807.html
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