Maintenance snag may delay Virgin Galactic
As Unity spaceship is cleared for flight after glitch repair, issue with Eve mothership could ground craft
Virgin Galactic’s Unity spaceship is ready to fly, but the mothership VMS Eve may first need some maintenance before the passenger rocket can hitch another ride part way to space.
Engineers have fully repaired a glitch in the Unity passenger rocket that forced its two pilots to abort their last attempt to shoot to the edge of space in December, the company said during a first-quarter earnings conference call with investors Monday afternoon. But following a test flight last week with the mothership Eve, technicians found a maintenance issue that could briefly ground that vehicle, potentially delaying Unity’s next effort to reach suborbit.
Virgin Galactic uses Eve to carry Unity on its underbelly to about 50,000 feet, at which point the spaceship breaks away from Eve and fires up its rocket motors to shoot into space at 50 miles up.
The company had already scheduled a four-month period starting in the fall for upgrades and maintenance on Eve, which has flown nearly 300 times since its first flight in 2008, said Mike Moses, president of Virgin Galactic space missions and safety. But the issue that appeared last week may need to be addressed sooner rather than later.
The company didn’t identify the issue. But engineers are assessing it now, and the
company plans to announce next week whether the needed modifications will be done immediately or postponed until the fall.
“We did three flights with the VMS Eve over the past two weeks,” Moses told investors. “Following the last postflight inspection, we found a wear-and-tear issue that we’re analyzing to see if anything more needs to be done now.”
If maintenance can’t be postponed, it could impact Unity’s test-flight schedule, Moses said.
The passenger rocket, however, is fully ready to fly, following upgrades to reduce electromagnetic interference on the spaceship that forced the pilots to abort their last f light in December. That interference caused the spaceship’s computer system to reboot just after Unity broke away from Eve. That, in turn, triggered a safety mechanism that automatically shut down Unity’s rocket motors, at which point the pilots glided the spaceship back down to Earth.
That incident has set Virgin Galactic’s test-flight program back by several months.
Had the December flight succeeded, the company planned to conduct a second motor-powered test flight to space in February with a team of technicians in the passenger cabin, followed by a third flight with company founder Sir Richard Branson in late March.
Successful completion of all those flights will open the gates to commercial service, whereby Virgin Galactic plans to regularly fly paying passengers in Unity’s six-seat cabin for a 90-minute round-trip to suborbit from Spaceport America in southern New Mexico. About 600 customers who already reserved seats have been waiting for years for the tourist flights to begin.
In February, however, the company said it would postpone Unity’s next test flight until May — and the following two flights with team members and then with Branson until the summer — to fully address the electromagnetic interference issue.
That’s now been corrected, with the interference reduced to a minimum at about 90% below the levels that caused the computer problem in December, Moses said.
The upcoming test flights may well proceed as scheduled, depending on whether maintenance on the mothership can wait until the fall. But the company must first finish assessing the issues with Eve before announcing the next Unity flight, said Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier.
“It’s too early to say yet whether we need to do the maintenance now,” Colglazier told investors. “... We’re looking forward to coming back next week to give an update.”
Still, the issues with both Eve and Unity are a normal part of the test-flight program, which aims to fully identify all technical concerns and completely address them before initiating commercial service, Colglazier said.
“We’re in flight tests, and this is what you should expect to see in a flight-test program,” he said.
Even if the test flights stay on schedule, commercial service for paying passengers won’t begin until early 2022, after completing the four-month maintenance period scheduled for the fall for Eve, Unity and a second passenger rocket that the company rolled out in March.
The company does expect to fly a four-member team from the Italian Air Force to space in early fall before the maintenance period begins. That’s part of Virgin Galactic’s business plan to offer services to institutional customers for experiments in micro gravity and to provide professional training in space for future astronauts.
The company is focused on safety before all else, to ensure that all its vehicles are fully ready to fly customers safely and reliably before allowing passenger service to begin. But it needs to launch commercial service to start generating revenue.
It’s still well positioned financially, with $617 million in cash and cash equivalents as of March 31, said Chief Financial Officer Doug Ahrens.
But with no revenue flow, Virgin Galactic continues to bleed liquidity every quarter. The company reported another $130 million net loss for the three-month period from January-March.
And with continued delays in the flight-test program, Virgin Galactic’s stock price has plummeted in recent months from a high of more than $62 per share on the New York Stock Exchange in February to $17.95 a share as of close of business on Monday.