On the morning of Oct. 31, 2014, about 13 seconds after being released from its WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) launch vehicle, the suborbital spaceplane SpaceShipTwo (SS2) broke up in flight and struck the desert near Koehn Dry Lake, California, U.S., after its reentry device was unlocked by the copilot, causing inadvertent deployment at transonic speed. The pilot was severely injured but was able to descend to the ground by parachute, and the copilot was fatally injured. There were no injuries on the ground. The experimental spaceplane was destroyed, and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) conducted its first investigation of a commercial spacecraft accident.
The accident occurred on the fourth powered flight of SS2, within a test program also including 30 glide flights, operated by Scaled Composites (Scaled) under a special airworthiness certificate from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in a development program that was several years behind schedule. The acciden…
