The recent unfortunate incident with the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo has opened up the old debate about why commercial space travel is no simple matter. In this article Zaf Gandhi highlights why full-scale realisation of commercial space travel may have more in common with a game of cricket than we might think.

Cometh the hour

If we step back in time to the 1950s, we find a notable pioneer of modern day jetliner, called the Comet. It was manufactured by the de Havilland Company at its Hatfield Aerodrome facility in Hertfordshire, UK.

The DH 106 Comet was the first production commercial jetliner; promising to revolutionise the air travel. However, a year after entering commercial service the Comet’s fortunes began to unravel. Three of the aircraft in airline service broke up during operational flight with passengers onboard.

The accidents were well-publicised and culminated into all sorts of speculation from pilot error, flutter and even sabotage. However, the real cause of the failures of this pioneer of modern day commercial and maritime aviation was later found to be due to catastrophic metal fatigue in the airframes.

Unknown phenomenon

The naturally occurring phenomenon of metal fatigue was not well understood by engineers and scientists at the time. Hence, in spite of the Comet being subjected to what was then the most rigorous testing of any contemporary airliner, pressurisation and the dynamic stresses involved were not sufficiently understood at the time of the aircraft's development, nor was the concept of metal fatigue. While these lessons could be applied to future aircraft designs and manufacture, corrections could be only retroactively applied to the Comet; which by its very nature is usually a costly and non-optimal exercise.

Fast forward to October 2014, we witness the demise of another pioneer – only this time it is attempting commercial space travel. Despite the unfortunate loss of one pilot and severe injury to another, the incident occurred during a test flight.

Rule-books, universal laws and chance

In his attempts to provide answers to the origins of the universe and, therefore, our place in it, Professor Brian Cox OBE (Manchester University) famously describes the analogy between the universal laws and the laws of cricket.

In his analogy, he postulates how infinitely small and seemingly unimportant factors or events can amplify over time and even become significant enough to create colossal effects or impacts elsewhere.

In this way, the outcome of a cricket match is compared to the universal outcomes; and the interplay between governing universal laws (what is known or believed to be understood) and chance (what is unknown or not predetermined).

In challenges confronting science and engineering, the same interplay between the known and unknown variables and determinants still exists. How pilot error can modify the flight manual rule-book; or how our knowledge is still insufficient about human and mechanical stress dynamics of repeatable and replicable commercial space travel; or even how our knowledge of the universe is still limited to about a hundred or so elements, when potentially there could be hundreds more.

Similarly, commercial space travel has still to overcome a multitude of challenges and realise a whole gambit of opportunities that come from such catapulted advancement in human knowledge and technological capability.

Looking ahead

To put this into broader perspective, SpaceShipTwo had reportedly achieved a maximum altitude of about 22 km to date, which is roughly twice that of a commercial airliner. However, according to Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), which is an international standard setting and record-keeping body for aeronautics and astronautics, the Karman Line defines the edge of space at an altitude of 100 kilometres (62 miles) above the Earth's sea level.

The space missions to date have been mainly focussed on exploration, research, communications and reconnaissance. The repeatable and replicable requirements for space tourism are much more rigorous and challenging, in order to ensure safety and comfort of passengers and crew, as well as people on the ground.

Hence, pilots and support personnel of such missions will always need an air-tight rule-book to minimise “chance” (or the unknowns) even when all the laws/rules governing commercial space flight are known. And such an undertaking inevitably requires a significant amount of experience, time, money and resources.

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Related resources:

- The enigma of commercial supersonics demystifies
- ZEHRA – A bold innovation or a commercial enigma?
- Excellis voices support for the UK Aerospace Technology Institute (ATI)

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