Engineers say Virgin accident was avoidable, if they had been heard
Engineers say if their complaints had been acted on there would have been no crash
The loss of an experimental spaceship that broke up over the Mojave Desert, killing one pilot and seriously injuring another, has renewed criticism of the way the craft's designer and Virgin Galactic handled a deadly explosion seven years ago.
Space enthusiasts watching Virgin Galactic's race to send tourists on sub-orbital flights have complained for years about a 2007 explosion that killed three people on the ground and critically injured three others during a ground test in the development of a rocket engine for the same vehicle that crashed on Friday.
"Now we've got another person killed, another person seriously injured. So we've got a lot that has hurt the industry," said Geoff Daly, an engineer who has complained to several United States agencies over the use of nitrous oxide in the craft's engine.
SpaceShipTwo tore apart last Friday after the craft detached from the underside of its jet-powered mothership and fired its rocket engine for a test flight.
Authorities have not given any indication on the cause of the accident. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators were on the scene at the weekend and the agency could take up to a year to issue a final report.
Daly was co-author of a critical report on the 2007 incident at Scaled Composites, the Northrop Grumman-owned designer of SpaceShipTwo.