WINTER PARK, Fla. – A central Florida couple remains committed to flying to space aboard Virgin Galactic despite the company's recent fatal test flight in California.
Winter Park residents Sharon and Marc Hagle told Local 6 News partner Florida Today, they were devastated by the Oct. 31 accident that destroyed SpaceShipTwo, killing co-pilot Michael Alsbury and injured pilot Peter Siebold.
But the Hagles said they understand that "with every great adventure, there are risks," and expressed support for the team attempting to get the first commercial space-line into service.
"We are not discouraged," Sharon Hagle said in a statement. "We celebrate our pilots' courage. They will be etched forever in our minds as heroes who took the risk for all of us and future generations."
In 2007, the Hagles were early buyers of $200,000 tickets to fly on Virgin Galactic. More than 700 people have signed up. Tickets now cost $250,000.
The real estate developers discussed their excitement about the project last year, when both were 64, not long after SpaceShipTwo's first rocket-powered test flight that April.
Virgin Galactic then hoped test flights might reach space by the end of 2013, enabling commercial flights this year of customers on suborbital rides offering a view of the planet and about five minutes of weightlessness.
But technical issues caused delays, including a change in the type of fuel the spaceship burns. Sir Richard Branson, who founded the company 10 years ago, had recently said he hoped to be on the first official flight from New Mexico by next March.
The accident has set those plans back indefinitely, leaving the company without a spaceship. A second is two-thirds complete. The company also is now the focus of a National Transportation Safety Board-led investigation that could take up to a year.
Investigators' early findings from video and telemetry data revealed that after SpaceShipTwo dropped from a mother ship and fired its rocket engine, co-pilot Alsbury unlocked the twin tail booms known as "feathers" sooner than procedures typically called for.
He moved a handle into its unlock position as the ship was reaching the speed of sound, or about 760 mph, rather than at Mach 1.4, in excess of 1,000 mph, the NTSB said.
Alsbury did not activate a second lever to deploy the booms, which are designed to rotate upward and position the ship for its fall back through the atmosphere, but the booms did begin to feather. SpaceShipTwo lost control and broke apart a few seconds later — 13 seconds into its fourth powered flight, roughly 50,000 feet up.
When interviewed by investigators the pilot, Siebold, 43, said he was unaware the feathering system had been unlocked, the National Transportation Safety Board said this week.
After being ripped from the aircraft, Siebold was able to unbuckle from his seat and a parachute automatically deployed, according to the NTSB. Alsbury, a 39-year-old married father of two children, reportedly was found in his seat.
Both were employed by Scaled Composites, designer of the eight-seat SpaceShipTwo and its smaller predecessor, SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 won the $10 million Ansari X Prize.
The NTSB this week completed its work in the Mojave Desert, where wreckage from SpaceShipTwo spanned a 5-mile area. The recovered pieces were stored "in a secure location."
A day after the accident, Branson said Virgin Galactic was determined to press ahead, and he expected few of the company's future astronauts to cancel their reservations.
"We do understand the risks involved, and we're not going to push on blindly," he told reporters in Mojave. "We're going to learn from what went wrong, discover how we can improve safety and performance, and then move forward together."
A loss of support from longtime ticket-holders like the Hagles would spell trouble for the company.
But even though they expected to fly much sooner, the Hagles have been staunch Virgin Galactic supporters, traveling to company-sponsored events around the world and getting to know Branson on a first-name basis. They are also active in a Virgin-affiliated nonprofit called Galactic Unite that promotes science and math education.