The Spacecraft That Didn’t Go Anywhere: Virgin Galactic’s Aborted Spacecraft Test Explained

Virgin Galactic’s latest spacecraft test ended abruptly over the weekend, because of technical issues. The space tourism company owned by Richard Branson wanted to do a fist powered test flight of its spacecraft, in New Mexico. But the test flight of the SpaceShipTwo Unity, or VSS Unity, had to be aborted and the craft glided back to earth before it could reach space, because of what the company says is an issue with the rocket motor’s ignition system.

It turns out that once the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo Unity was released from the mothership, the onboard computers that detected and monitored the rocket motor on the craft lost connection. This triggered what is a fail-safe scenario that didn’t allow the ignition of the rocket motor to continue as it otherwise would have. The pilots then headed back to Spaceport America, the launch site, and landed safely. There were no other passengers on board this test flight.

“The ignition sequence for the rocket motor did not complete. Vehicle and crew are in great shape. We have several motors ready at Spaceport America. We will check the vehicle and be back to flight soon,” says Virgin Galactic in a tweet. Later, in a separate tweet, Michael Colglazier, the CEO of Virgin Galactic said that “the flight landed beautifully, with pilots, planes, and spaceship safe, secure, and in excellent shape.” Virgin Galactic says that they have several motors ready just in case the computer glitch indicates a larger problem instead. At this time, there is no clarity on when the next test flight will happen, because the troubleshooting estimates may just be hard to guess at this stage.

This was the third test flight for the SpaceShipTwo Unity, with the previous two flights in late 2018 and early 2019 happening at the test facility in California. Virgin Galactic already has 600 customers who have signed up for commercial space flights and the company hopes to start flying commercial passengers sometime next year. Whether those targets have been changed after this aborted test flight, remains unclear.

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