LOS ANGELES — Federal investigators have a sense of what went wrong before an experimental spaceship designed to ferry tourists beyond the Earth’s atmosphere broke apart during a test. But they don’t know why the craft shifted its shape prior to the crash.
A National Transportation Safety Board team worked Monday at the Mojave Desert site where Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo fell to the ground. The accident killed the co-pilot and badly injured the pilot, who parachuted out Friday.
Late Sunday, acting NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart said cockpit video showed that the co-pilot unlocked SpaceShipTwo’s unique “feathering” system earlier than planned. The system works somewhat like the wing flaps that airplanes use to slow for landing — except that SpaceShipTwo’s twin tails rotate up at a far more extreme angle, to a position that creates strong resistance and slows the descent. But while the co-pilot unlocked the system before planned, that action alone should not have been enough to change the craft’s configuration. Activating the feathering system requires the pulling of a lever, not unlike a gun fires only when the trigger is pulled, not just because the safety has been disengaged.
