Down to Earth

“THERE'S an old saying in the space world: amateurs talk about technology, professionals talk about 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 will be cold comfort following the failure on October 31st of VSS Enterprise, half of the firm's SpaceShipTwo fleet of spaceplanes, resulting in the death of one pilot and the severe injury of another.

On top of the tragic loss of life, the accident in California will cast a long shadow over the future of space tourism, even before it has properly begun. It follows another recent mark on the record of private spaceflight: just three days before, an unmanned rocket belonging to the firm Orbital Sciences, on a mission to restock the cupboards of the International Space Station, exploded spectacularly shortly after take-off.

The notion of space tourism took hold in 2001 with a $20m flight aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft by Dennis Tito, a millionaire engineer with an adventurous streak. Just half 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 starting regular flights. The company has already taken deposits from around 800 would-be space tourists, including Brad Pitt, Justin Bieber and Stephen Hawking.

This was not Virgin Galactic's first fatal incident. In 2007, the propellant system of a SpaceShipTwo craft exploded on the ground during a flow test, killing three mechanics and injuring three more. This most recent crash will have a more serious impact on the company’s future, however, as it has happened much closer to a time that paying customers expected to be able to board.

After being dogged by technical delays for years, Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic's founder and charismatic frontman, had recently suggested that a SpaceShipTwo craft would carry its first paying customers as soon as February 2015 (in 2013, he told The Economist it would be 2014). That now seems an impossible timeline. In July, a sister craft of the crashed spaceplane was reported to be about half-finished. The other half will have to wait, 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. The 2004 Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act, intended to encourage private space vehicles and services, prohibits the transportation secretary (and thereby the the FAA) from regulating the design or operation 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 insist on vetting private manned spacecraft as thoroughly as it does commercial aircraft. While that may make suborbital travel safer, it would add significant costs and complexity to a nascent industry that has 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, as Mr Whitesides put it, “no doubt that spaceflight entails risks, and it will probably entail risks for centuries to come". To pioneer a new mode of travel is to face those risks, and to reduce them with the benefit of hard-won experience.  /economist