The sad news from the Mojave spaceport has rippled across the entrepreneurial space community.

In a weekend update from Scaled Composites:

“The outpouring of support from around the world has been incredible, and we can’t thank you enough for all the support you have given us.

As of this morning (Saturday), three that were injured remain hospitalized. Keith Fritsinger (critical), Gene Gisin (critical), and Jason Kramb (serious).

Glen May’s family has advised us that his funeral is Friday, August 3, in Collierville, TN. They have requested that anyone at Scaled that has special memories of Glen that they would like to share with the family to please email aprildmay@aol.com. Other arrangements are pending, and will be posted when we have them. We’re trying to do what we can to support the families during this tragic time. We will plan to show our respects as a company at the appropriate time, as well.

Several Scaled folks have spent time with Eric Blackwell’s family over the last two days, and will continue to support them in these difficult days. Todd Ivens’ family is enroute to California.

A fund is being established to help the families. We will post the information on our website as soon as it’s available.

The accident investigation has begun. We spent several hours at the site on Friday morning. Late Friday afternoon, California OSHA arrived and has sealed the site for their own investigation. We are working closely with them.

This is an incredibly hard time for all of us. We continue to ask you to keep those people and families who were hurt or have died in your thoughts and prayers.

Sincerely,

The Scaled Composites Family

In addition, I thought I’d share with you some comments that I received in my own research into the tragedy.

“We at UP Aerospace are deeply saddened and our sympathies go out to the families for the loss of the three employees at Scaled Composites. It’s a small world in the space community and so when something like this happens it sends shockwaves throughout everyone,” said Jerry Larson, President of UP Aerospace.

Larson told me that the rocket launch industry has always been a difficult business to be in and does come with many forms of risk, especially during development.

“It’s a very sad and unfortunate that this anomaly resulted in the loss of human life and severe injuries. Anomalies are expected in the development of any new system which is the very reason for extensive testing prior to putting the system into service, but no one ever expects or is prepared for this kind of tragedy,” Larson said. “I firmly believe that this new era of space commercialization will, in fact, change the way we view space travel…it will take time, and will come with setbacks…but will ultimately press on to success.”

From Patrick Bahn, chief executive officer and founder of TGV Rockets, headquartered in Norman, Oklahoma:

“Our hearts are with the team at Scaled Composites and we know that this is the worst kind of day any leader can face…the loss of beloved teammates in the pursuit of the dream. We have the highest hopes that the team at Scaled will learn from this incident, wipe away the tears, and be back to operations soon.”

“It is our hope that the industry share the knowledge of this incident and any other issues, so that we can form an industry association to improve safety practices and that perhaps high-minded individuals can fund a foundation aimed at improving safety within this new industry,” Bahn told SPACE.com.

In a just issued release from the Space Frontier Foundation: “Burt Rutan and his team include some of America’s best aerospace test engineers. Whatever the cause of this tragic event was, they will get to the bottom of it, fix the problem, and then make their spaceship fly,” said James Muncy, co-founder of the Foundation and a space policy consultant in Washington, D.C. “It will be the best possible way to honor their sacrifice.”

Added Rick Tumlinson, fellow co-founder of the Foundation: “Some of us think of space heroes as only those who strap themselves into a rocketship. But people like these, who give their sweat and lives to build those ships, who take their families out to live in the desert and work incredible hours on tedious tasks to make those rockets fly, and who do so because they share the dream of an open frontier in space…they too are true heroes.”

 

 

 

“

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Space & Astronomy, Technology, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.