Virgin Galactic Dumps Scaled Composites For Spaceship Two

PvtVoid writes Virgin Galactic, following an aggressive schedule to build a replacement for the Spaceship Two which crashed in October, is doing so without partner Scaled Composites, according to the Los Angeles Times. Kevin Mickey, the president of Scaled Composites, confirmed this week that his company would no longer be involved in testing. He said Scaled would still work as a consultant to Virgin Galactic.

Comments

Let's hope ...

[janoc]

That this isn't going to come back to them in the form of another smouldering crater, except with paying passengers this time.

Delays and problems notwithstanding, dumping a company that has essentially designed and developed the entire thing and handing the project to someone else who doesn't have the know-how about this particular system sounds really unwise, especially after the enormous amount of resources that were spent already. Probably the wealthy investors started to push on Branson and Rutan didn't want to compromise on something, so they decided to bypass them. Or Scaled isn't trusted to not mess something up again as it wasn't a first serious safety-related incident there.

One way or another, this isn't really a confidence inspiring move from an engineering point of view - I cannot imagine the motivation and morale of the people building the craft after being told that no, they won't be allowed to be involved in the testing, except as consultants.

Re:Let's hope ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if this is as big of a deal as it sounds, especially given some of the comments made.

I suspect this is being done as more of a reorganization-for-liability-reasons sort of thing.

It's pretty rare for an aircraft's flight test pilots to be a part of the organization OTHER than the one owning the aircraft.

For commercial airliners built for multiple customers, the company designing/building the aircraft usually has at least a few test articles that they have full ownership of. These get tested with their own pilots.

For aircraft designed/built/integrated under contract for a specific customer, frequently from the beginning, the airframe is owned by the customer and not by the manufacturer. So for liability reasons (well, at least I'm assuming liability reasons), even if the manufacturer is doing 90% of the work of flight testing (planning the test, determining the testing schedule and functional test elements, etc.), the actual pilot-in-control for the flight test will be an employee of the customer.

For example, where I work, 90% of the flight test work and 99% of the development/manufacturing/integration work is done by us or our subcontractors. However for nearly all test flights, the pilot in control is a DCMA employee. I'm assuming, again, that this is for some sort of liability management reasons. It's probably less painful paperwork if your own guy crashes "your" aircraft than if someone else does, even if that someone else was the manufacturer/developer of "your" aircraft.