Human Error
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THE DEADLY CRASH of the spaceship designed to carry wealthy Virgin Galactic customers into space can be pinned on pilot error, the National Transportation Safety Board said this morning.
What’s more concerning is not what the pilot did during the doomed October 31 test run last year, but the grave error that Scaled Composites, the aerospace company that designed and was operating SpaceShipTwo, made of its own, according to the NTSB: It never considered that a pilot could make that kind of mistake.
That catastrophic error is a harsh repudiation of the design philosophy behind the two aircraft: Rely on human skill instead of computers. All the systems on WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo are manually operated, to keep everything as basic as possible.
“A simple system is less likely to fail,” chief pilot Dave Mackay told us during a visit to Virgin Galactic’s HQ in Mojave, California a few months before the crash. The pilots are an elite crew with serious bonafides—so it’s easy to see how you overlook the possibility of them screwing up.
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