By Andy Pasztor
Federal Aviation Administration officials repeatedly failed to
act on safety warnings about an experimental rocket ship backed by
billionaire British entrepreneur Richard Branson that crashed in
2014, according to a former agency consultant.
Terry Hardy, who was assigned to the project as a consultant for
more than three years beginning in 2011, said in an interview
Friday that he had told FAA managers that certain features of
SpaceShip Two--along with risk analyses prepared by its
designers--were inadequate because they made the proposed space
tourism craft dangerously vulnerable to pilot error. "Based on the
information I had," Mr. Hardy recalled, the craft "didn't comply
with the agency's hazard analysis regulations."
Some of his concerns and proposed recommendations to resolve
them were raised in meetings with Mr. Branson's design partner, the
Scaled Composites unit of Northrop Grumman Co., but most
disappeared inside the FAA bureaucracy, according to Mr. Hardy.
The FAA has authority to issue experimental launch permits, with
responsibility in these permits to protect public safety and
prevent property damage, injuries or fatalities to people on the
ground. But Congress also charged the FAA's Office of Commercial
Space Transportation with simultaneously promoting the burgeoning
U.S. commercial space industry.
"When you promote the industry, it's also difficult to do the
safety part," according to Mr. Hardy, who added "there are
conflicts that come up." Before working as a consultant, Mr. Hardy
was an employee in the space transportation office and played a
central role in drafting the hazard-assessment rules that
specifically apply to experimental launches. Asked why he left his
consulting role, Mr. Hardy said the accident "was a contributing
cause."
In email responses, an FAA spokesman said the agency is
explicitly "prohibited from regulating crew safety" and is
restricted "to only protecting the safety of the uninvolved public
and property." The agency, it added, "ensures commercial space
transportation is as safe as possible for those Congress mandated
the FAA to protect."
The spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Hardy's concerns or why
he stopped consulting, adding that the agency was reviewing
National Transportation Safety Board recommendations prompted by
the accident. To determine risk to the public, the FAA assesses the
safety and reliability of spacecraft systems since a crash could
injure or kill people on the ground.
The NTSB released safety recommendations on Tuesday after
determining that SpaceShip Two's inadequate design--lacking
fail-safe protections against a pilot mistakenly releasing a
movable tail surface at the wrong time--led to the October 2014
event that broke the spaceplane apart roughly 10 miles high and
killed the co-pilot.
The board also concluded that Scaled Composites made a
fundamental mistake by assuming pilots would always release the
locking mechanism at the correct instant. In their formal report,
investigators criticized FAA managers for failing to provide
adequate guidance to industry about human factors, and for
implementing procedures that restricted the flow of data and
sometimes kept employees from fully understanding engineering
details of the vehicles they were licensing.
Scaled Composites said it "made changes in the wake of the
accident to further enhance safety" and pledged to "continue to
look for additional ways to do so." Virgin Galactic LLC said it
began implementing safety enhancements prior to the NTSB
recommendations.
Other documents released by the board suggest that officials of
Mr. Branson's Virgin Galactic--which has tried since the accident
to distance itself from Scaled Composites and the craft's
design--signed off on questionable features years before the
accident.
A spokesman for Virgin Galactic, which has made technical and
procedural enhancements since the accident, declined to comment on
the design, noting the company "will be focused on executing the
safest program we can."
In a statement, Kevin Mickey, president of Scaled Composites,
reiterated that representatives of his company and Virgin Galactic
years ago "evaluated and discussed alternatives for making" the
craft's design more robust, ending up with the option subsequently
criticized by the NTSB.
In a January interview with the safety board, Mr. Hardy, among
other things, said SpaceShip Two's design improperly "relied on the
pilot making the right decision" instead of ensuring separate
fail-safe features to prevent a potentially catastrophic mistake by
the crew.
According to a summary of that interview released by the NTSB
earlier this week, Mr. Hardy also said that "he had never seen an
applicant [for an FAA launch permit] make the assumption that a
pilot would not make a mistake" as part of a formal hazard
analysis.
In the same interview summary, Mr. Hardy is quoted saying that
after offering suggestions for changes to the FAA, he felt it was
like "spinning my wheels" and concluded that neither his
recommendations nor his work "was improving the safety
process."
The extensive collection of documents and other interview
summaries released by the NTSB underscores that Virgin Galactic,
Scaled Composites and the FAA all recognized the potential for a
catastrophic event caused by what is known as a single-point human
failure. But over the years, the design remained unchanged and the
FAA, without a request from Scaled, issued a waiver in 2013 from
its own regulations.
In his interview with NTSB experts, according to the summary,
Mr. Hardy said he was surprised by FAA's unilateral action. "It
seemed a little odd that the FAA was writing a waiver" without a
request from Scaled Composites, he said in the interview,
particularly because "he had never seen the FAA write a waiver for
a public applicant."
Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com
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