“There’s an old saying in the space world: amateurs talk about technology, professionals talkabout insurance.” In an interview last year with The Economist, George Whitesides, chief executive of space-tourism firm Virgin Galactic, was placing his company in the latter category. But insurance willbe cold comfort following the failure on October 31st of VSS Enterprise, resulting in the death of onepilot and the severe injury to another.
On top of the tragic loss of life, the accident in California will cast a long shadow over the future ofspace tourism, even before it has properly begun.
The notion of space tourism took hold in 2001 with a $20 million flight aboard a Russianspacecraft by Dennis Tito, a millionaire engineer with an adventurous streak. Just haft a dozen holiday-makers have reached orbit since then, for similarly astronomical price tags. But more recently, companies have begun to plan more affordable “suborbital” flights—briefer ventures just to the edge of space’s vast darkness.Virgin Galactic had, prior to this week’s accident, seemed closest to startingregular flights.The company has already taken deposits from around 800 would-be space tourists, including Stephen Hawking.
After being dogged by technical delays for years, Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic’s founder, had recently suggested that a Space Ship Two craft would carry its first paying customers as soon as February 2015. That now seems an impossible timeline. In July, a sister craft of the crashed space plane was reported to be about half-finished. The other half will have to walt, as authorities of America’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA.) and National Transportation Safety Board work out what went wrong.
In the meantime, the entire space tourism industry will be on tenterhooks (坐立不安).The 2004 Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act, intended to encourage private space vehicles andservices, prohibits the transportation secretary (and thereby the FAA. from regulating the design oroperation of private spacecraft, unless they have resulted in a serious or fatal injury to crew or.passengers.That means that the FAA. could suspend Virgin Galactic’s licence to fly. It could also insiston checking private manned spacecraft as thoroughly as it does commercial aircraft. While that may make suborbital travel safer, it would add significant cost and complexity to an emerging industry thathas until now operated largely as the playground of billionaires and dreamy engineers.
How Virgin Galactic, regulators and the public respond to this most recent tragedy will determine whether and how soon private space travel can transcend that playground. There is no doubt that space flight entails risks, and to pioneer a new mode of travel is to face those risks, and to reduce them with the benefit of hard-won experience.
