What Does the SpaceShipTwo Crash Mean for Virgin Galactic?

Virgin Galactic's spaceship crashed yesterday, and at least one person is dead. That's a horrible thing. So what now? The company has roughly 1,000 customers waiting to go into space, and while this will surely spook some of them, the dream of commercial space tourism will go forward. But this is certainly a setback.

First things first. SpaceShipTwo was Virgin Galactic's only spaceship. They don't have another one, and even if they did, a fatal explosion doesn't exactly inspire confidence in a technology that was supposed to be just months away from taking its first civilians on short suborbital space trips.

"SpaceShipTwo was a spaceship, not a series of spaceships. They never built a fleet," Marco Caceres, a space industry analyst at the Teal Group Corporation, told me.

"It's time for Virgin to go back to the engineering stuff that's not that sexy or interesting to the average person," he said. "[Virgin CEO] Richard Branson is a businessman, so he likes to talk about customers, but at this point, they have to go back to the drawing board."

Last month, Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides said at an event in New York City that he hoped to take Branson into space (not orbital space, but microgravity, float-around-the-cabin space nonetheless) this year.

"We're completing our final testing phase this fall, hoping to have a Christmas surprise for Richard," he said at the event.

That's obviously not going to happen now. What's more, Virgin Galactic has been promising to take people to space imminently for more than 10 years now. Some people had already started asking for refunds before Friday's crash.

"It'll definitely have a short term toning down effect on space tourism, which I won't say is all hype, but it was very optimistic for Branson to think he was going to be launching lots and lots of these paid tourists next year," Caceres said. "This will be delayed one to four years. It's not quite there yet, but I think it's still coming."

One of those optimistic tourists is Craig Horsley, a New Yorker who lived in Manhattan until recently—because he got rid of his apartment there and moved to Queens in order to afford the $250,000 price tag. At the Virgin Galactic event last month, Horsley spoke to me at length about his motivations for going to space.

"I realize I'm paying like $1,500 a minute to go up into space. I took a home equity line of credit on my apartment," he told me. "I thought about waiting for Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to go up there, but Branson is the one going first."

I asked him if he was nervous about the risks. "I'm a total idiot. I don't get nervous about things, I just do them. I'm nervous about things that require my own effort, but I'll just be sitting there and floating," he said. "Honestly I was more nervous about doing the wire transfer than I am about going up into space."

When I contacted Horsley yesterday, he said he wasn't yet ready to comment on the news. But a couple people I tracked down on Twitter who have signed up for the flight expressed their condolences to the dead pilot and said that, unfortunately, test flight disasters are to be expected.

Caceres agrees with that sentiment, and it's one that Whitesides echoed in a press conference Friday.

"The future rests in many ways on hard, hard days like this," he said. "But we believe we owe it to the folks who were flying these vehicles, as well as the folks who have been working so hard on them, to understand this and to move forward, which is what we'll do."

Ultimately, Friday's disaster will always be looked back on as a tragedy—but, ultimately, it may just be a blip on the road to a burgeoning space tourism industry. Caceres noted that many people died during the testing of rocket and jet engines in the 1950s and 1960s, and whether it's Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, or some other company, tourists will eventually be taking regular trips to space.

Perhaps it's time we get a little less gung-ho about it, however. Though SpaceShipTwo had flown a total of 55 times, it launched its rocket engine only three times before Friday's crash. Richard Branson hoped that people would fly aboard his space plane next year, meanwhile, his team was mixing new concentrations of rocket fuel just a couple months before that was going to start. Kevin Mickey, president of Scaled Composites (the company operating the flight) said the new fuel mixture had been tested many times and was not the cause of the crash.

"They hadn't settled on a fuel mix they were comfortable with, and this and the Antares Rocket accident is evidence that you need to test fly them more than two to three times before you start taking up paid cargo," Caceres said. "This is obviously the risk of the game, and if it had been paying customers or Richard Branson, it'd be a huge setback."

"As it is, Branson has a list of customers that aren't getting any younger. He doesn't want to start feeling the pressure to move faster," he added. "But, well, he should forget about them and focus on the engineering."