RICHARD BRANSON SHOULD GIVE UP ON SPACE TOURISM

Michael Alsbury, 39, died at the controls of Virgin's experimental SpaceShipTwo vessel on Friday after the sub-orbital plane exploded at 45,000ft shortly after engaging its engines. His co-pilot, Peter Siebold, who was seriously injured, is now 'alert and talking', according to the company. 

In the wake of a fatal explosion aboard one of its spacecraft, Carolynne Campbell-Knight, a rocket propulsion scientist, said Richard Branson's private space line should 'give up' and do something they might be good at like selling mobile phones - they should stay out of the space business.' She claimed she had contacted those involved in the project in around 2009 or 2010 to raise her concerns about the use of nitrous oxide, which she said can 'go bang in a very unpredictable way'. But she stressed it was not yet clear what caused the latest incident, adding: 'There’s any number of things that could have brought it down.'

Mrs Campbell-Knight is one of a number of space flight experts who have accused Virgin Galactic of ignoring warnings over its safety procedures in the wake of a fatal explosion aboard one of its spacecraft. She said: 'This explosion is not a surprise. None whatsoever, I am sorry to say. It is exactly what I was expecting. It was Russian roulette which test flight blew up.' Senior engineers and propulsion scientists say they spent years telling Richard Branson's private space line its procedures are 'outdated', needlessly secretive, and could lead to people getting killed. And, in a further sign of upheaval at Virgin Galactic, it was also revealed yesterday that top engineers in charge of safety, aerodynamics and the propulsion system have all recently quit the company. Many of the warnings stem from a 2007 disaster where an engine part exploded at a test facility in the Mojave Desert, killing three employees of Virgin Galactic's partner company.

Some have accused Richard Branson's project of ignoring industry standards and refusing to share its procedures in its eagerness to perfect commercial space flight. One expert called the design and testing process a 'Russian roulette' which was bound to kill someone. The executive director of the IAASS also said that Virgin Galactic refused to let scientists from outside the company review its procedures, and snubbed industry gatherings. Tomasso Sgobba, a former head of safety for the European Space Agency, said: 'They operated in secrecy, which is difficult to understand. 'They don’t use modern techniques in putting safety into the design, this was an accident waiting to happen.' 

Geoff Daly, a concerned rocket scientist, also revealed that he wrote to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board urging them to do something about his safety concerns over SpaceShipTwo. Writing in July 2013, he said even the company's own engineers privately doubted that their venture was safe. At the time Virgin Galactic had said they were just five months away from taking their first passengers, including children, into space. He said: 'Sir Richard Branson, his two children, Justin Bieber and one other will be the first passengers to fly into space during this coming December 2013, and everyone realises there is a problem, even the engineers... have said so off the record.' 

The disaster came in the wake of three top engineers at Virgin Galactic quitting since late 2013. Jon Turnipseed, formerly the vice-president of safety, reportedly left just before Christmas. Speaking to the BBC's Today show yesterday, Tom Bower said: 'All the engineers in California working on the project I've spoken to said it was very dangerous, just a few weeks ago the last of many of the Virgin Galactic engineers walked out of the factory and said he'd never work there again.'He added: 'The most important issue was in 2007 - three engineers were killed in an explosion when a rocket exploded on the ground rocket explosion on the ground. 'Ever since then it has become apparent that the science used to create this rocket is completely unreliable.' 

Speaking today at his Mojave Spaceport, Virgin founder Richard Branson denied that the company had ignored warnings. 'We aren’t going to push on blindly. To do so would be an insult to all those affected by this tragedy. We are going to learn from what went wrong, discover how we can improve safety and performance and then move forwards together. 'We owe it to our test pilots to find out exactly what went wrong and once we find out what went wrong, if we can overcome it, we’ll make absolutely certain that the dream lives on.'

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