Written by Nejc trošt
Photo: Nejc trošt in Mark Greenberg, Scaled Composites
The interview was made with Brian Binnie, 435. astronaut, test pilot
I am honoured to have the opportunity to speak to one of the pioneers of commercial space travel. Thank you for taking your time for this interview. Why did you become a pilot and what were you doing before you started working for Scaled Composites?
I always wanted to fly. I don’t know whether it was due to the influence of my father or mother, but I grew up fascinated by aeroplanes and birds and anything along those lines. I would draw, make and fly model aeroplanes As far back as I can remember that’s what I wanted to do, there was no doubt about it, and aviation was kind of what I fixated on initially. I went to school and got a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering, as well as a Masters in Fluid Mechanics and Thermal Dynamics. I then joined the Navy as I thought that Navy flying on the aircraft carriers would be exciting and I did that for 20 years. I also went through test pilot school. After my time in the Navy I came to Mojave and joined Rotary Rocket Inc. We built the Rotary Rocket and flew it for two years. I became friends with Burt Rutan along the way and he invited me to Scaled Composites. I arrived about a day after they signed the contract for the SpaceShipOneprogramme. It all worked out very well and the timing was good.What is your relation with Burt Rutan at the moment and how do you collaborate?
We met on the golf course as we both enjoy the sport and the competition and we also like each other’s company. He appreciated the work I was doing at the Rotary Rocket Inc. and thought he would be able to find an opportunity for me at Scaled Composites. While I was there I got what we call programme management work for the company and I dovetailed that with the flying as a test pilot.
Why do you think Scaled Composites is always a step ahead of other aerospace companieswhich are trying to develop new revolutionary technologies for commercial spacetravel?
I think that Scaled Composites is very unique in the sense that we have as a business, what other bigger companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman do as RND. Most of the bigger companies internal expenses or overhead expenses derive from their research to develop follow-up products. At Scaled Composites we get people to pay us to do that. It’s been successful because Burt had this idea that instead of taking the classical approach of handing the customer the writ report or PowerPoint presentation about what a new vehicle or new technology might be able to accomplish, he thought: “you know, with the same amount of money that NASA would spend on a study, I can build it.” The customer can then watch it fly and write a flight test report on it and that’s much more satisfying, not only for the customer but for Scaled Composites as a company. He had that vision, he had the interest to do it and I think he has been successful. The name “Scaled Composites” came from his concept that instead of building a full size protocol he could build, at a cheaper price, something a little bit smaller but that still enables you to understand how the end product might work. That’s how the name came about and he has made a business out of it for the last 30 years. Big companies are generally looking for a product that they can sell to a lot of people so they focus on production quality, documentation and tooling with the idea that once you get something you like, you can build a thousand of them. We have never done that. We just build one-of-a-kind, proof of concept type vehicles, so we can do it without a lot of paperwork or the sort of details and difficulties associated with the production.
You know Burt Rutan very well. Where does he get his creative inspiration from? Nature? How does he manage to combine the beauty of his aeroplanes and spaceship designs with functionality?
He became involved in aviation at a very early age too. He has an older brother and I think they were always in competition with each other. Burt’s way of demonstrating his independence from his brother was to develop his own area of expertise through conceptualizing different aeroplanes. He was unencumbered as a boy, he was never afraid of building something from scratch, flying it and crashing it. He would then look through the flight records and see what broke and why he couldn’t control it and he would learn from that. It was always a great learning experience for him and he became very adventurous in terms of what he thought he was capable of doing. There is a saying; form follows function in a lot of design processes, but I think sometimes Burt had it the other way around. He could see shapes and liked nice sloppy lines and would build out of composite materials just to create those shapes. His attempts were not always successful but the forms looked appealing to him and he would build them anyway and see how they worked.
Can you briefly describe how SpaceShipOne works and what is the difference between SS1 and SpaceShipTwo?
Well, they are both similar in design and like many of Burt’s aircraft designs; they are both canard configured vehicles. The front wing is really the canard part of the design and the tails are really the main wings. Canards, unlike regular aeroplanes, balance themselves in pitch like a sea saw and the most important feature of the canard is that the back wing, or in this case the spaceship tails, must continue to lift after the front wing stalls. You always want the front wing to stall first so that the vehicle will pitch down, gain the speed and fly away. This represents a nice safety enhancement feature of Burt’s aeroplanes and is the same with SpaceShipOne given the whole articulating wing tail for the re-entry that naturally stabilizes the craft when it starts to hit the atmosphere; the feathering mechanism as we call it. We also developed a hybrid rocket motor to boost it up in the first place. The performance of the hybrid we picked wasn’t necessarily the best in the world but we didn’t need a lot of performance. What we really wanted was something that is safe, reliable, didn’t require a lot of fancy handling procedures or turbo boost pumps and all of those complexities. That was our approach: to build the simplest spaceship you can imagine. We built it and instead of launching it from the ground, we thought that an air launch would be safer and provide more operational flexibility. If you separate from the carry plane and you can’t light the rocket motor, or if you don’t like it you can shut it down and you glide back to land, which is what you intended to do anyway. That was the whole concept and we thought it worked very well. SpaceShipTwo is based on the same idea and principles but is bigger in size.
What was your main concern and what were you thinking about during the famous X-Prize winning flight in 2004?
Well… clearly there were several concerns. In the flight prior to mine, the ship had exhibited a directional departure error as it was leaving the atmosphere and since all the video from the flight was being screened down on the ground for the big jumbo drama, people could see it and it was played over and over again in the news which meant that a lot of people thought that we didn’t understand the vehicle or how to fly it or control it, and that what we were doing was dangerous and not ready for promotion as a commercial concept. We had Sir Richard Branson wanting to sign up for the next generation vehicle, but only if we could demonstrate to him that we knew how to control it. So… we still wanted to get 100 km of altitude on my flight and we needed to perform with precision so that we would leave the atmosphere in a very stable manner. That was a big deal for me as I hadn’t flown the vehicle for almost 10 months and I didn’t have as much currency as Mike did and there were all those people watching. There were cameras everywhere. They were in the cockpit; they were even in the dressing rooms when we were getting in the flight suits. Any number of things could have gone wrong that day and I was concerned that if something did go wrong, I might not be able to control it. It was a great relief when it all ended successfully!
Is there any flight computer, namely the fly-by-wire flight control system inside SpaceShipOne and Two which assists your flight commands for better flight stability?
It is just like for conventional aeroplanes here... it’s stick and rudders with the electric trims. Flight stabilization with computers means more complexity and more systems that could fail. It is another system that requires software development to get it to work right. We didn’t have the time and the money for that. Maybe we should be thinking in this direction for the future. The trick of flying out of the atmosphere was a pretty good one because when you are starting at 40.000 ft the air is already fairly thin and the forces on the structure are limited, unlike on the ground launch where there is much more aerodynamic force. So we avoided a lot of that just by taking the vehicle out of the atmosphere first.
You have gained approximately 5000 flight hours on many different combat and experimental aeroplanes. You are used to the accelerations and stress which are present on such flights. How do you think people without any aviation experience will handle such psycho-physical conditions on the suborbital flights? Is it possible that people will feel unwell like on zero gravity parabola flights?
I think that preventing people from getting too nervous is one of the biggest challenges we face. It takes about an hour to climb to the altitude and in that time you have to keep them occupied and thinking positive. We have a plan to providesufficient training, either on centrifuge training or acrobatic aircraft flights, through putting people in the Spaceship mock-up and exposing them to zero g’s and some of the re-entry type g’s in that aircraft so they get a feel for it. But when it comes to the rocket motor boost … you can’t simulate that, you can just sort of tell them that it’s going to be noisy, there is going to be a lot of vibration and things happen really fast. You have nothing in your DNA to tell you whether it’s good or bad. You will just have to sort of trust us in that manner. If you find that you are still breathing after 10 seconds, then you are doing great. The boost flight won’t affect people so much as this happens on zero gravity parabola flights. People will not get sick from this, although they will be scared, but I think that’s ok. Alongside being scared there is also a lot of excitement. After 10 or 15 seconds the initial acceleration will be behind them and they will see the vehicle is pitching up. They will be able to look outside and see the sky starting to turn. They will see the curvature of the earth and earth’s fragile atmosphere. For a minute and a half it’s just a very exciting ride and then the magic feeling comes when you shut the motor down. That transition happens very quickly and it’s like stepping into an entirely different dimension. The noise goes away, the shaking and vibrations go away and you become weightless. At the same time you have a tremendous view; you will never have viewed anything from this perspective before. You can see for 500 miles in every direction; it’s stunning and it’s marvellous…
Do you think it’s possible to prepare passengers for this unique experience through the architecture of passenger terminals / spaceport designs on the ground?
The important part of the experience is to ensure the background elements are correct. Some people will like to be alone in order to get themselves into the right frame of mind, whilst others will like to be with their families. There is a broad mix of possible feelings that people will experience when preparing themselves. The proper ground facilities have to recognize and accommodate to these different emotions. At the beginning of commercial space travel, it will cater predominantly to wealthy individuals who are spending a lot of money and are probably used to being pampered and to state of the art facilities, restaurants, accommodation etc. I think that in order to properly pull this off spaceport will have to cater for these kinds of people.
Who will be the pilots and what will be the required training?
Well… our goal is to make the next generation vehicle one where pilots with common skills, good stick and rudder skills and an interest and ability to be trained can step in and fly them. The first pilots will come from the airlines and they may have a military background but I don’t think that will be a necessary requirement. All the FAA requires at this moment to fly the SpaceShip is the glider license. I think at the end of the day, somebody with good intuition, good flying sense and a willingness to learn is going to be able to fly this vehicle.
Do you plan to fly it again? What about the maiden flight of SpaceShipTwo in the future?
Well… yeah... that’s why I am here…he, he… but we’ll see who gets the maiden flight. We have the simulator up already and if we have coded it correctly the new vehicle should fly very nicely. The mother ship “Eve”, which is named after Richard Branson’s mother, is already flying and it also fulfilled our expectations and predictions. The SpaceShipOne was a very difficult vehicle to fly. Your normal intuition in aviation did not work well with that aeroplane. It had lots of features that weren’t very pleasant and they could really beat you if you weren’t careful.
How well are Scaled Composites and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic collaborating with each other?
Really very well. The most difficult part of the relationship is legislation as we are burdened by the State department to control the kind of information that flows between the What is your opinion on the first commercial spaceport that is under construction by Virgin now in
Do you think it will work as a self-promotional object for future space travel?
SpaceShipTwo will fly to a suborbital altitude of approximately 110km which is still not enough to escape earth’s gravity and that is also why there is only 5 minutes of zero gravity during the flight. Is it possible to modify this spaceship in the future to go to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) or even on to other planets?
Who do you think is the Lindbergh of today’s aviation or space travel? Maybe Sir Richard Branson can be compared to Henry Ford…hehe…
What is your biggest concern regarding future commercial space travel?
When do you think tickets to space will drop to the price of today’s business class commercial air travel?
Slovenian rocket pioneer, engineer Herman PotoÄnikNoordung, in his book written in 1928 titled “The problem of travelling in space”, explains how rockets with small lifting wings could be used for fast commercial air travel in lower parabola flight. Can you use Suborbital spaceships for that type of travelling instead of going so high into space?
Last question: what are your wishes and maybe a message to those people who still don’t believe in commercial space travel and what is happening here at Mojave Spaceport?
I believe the natural orientation of the human spirit is to be free and when you are free you get to do things that you enjoy and give you pleasure. For some people that may be sitting on the beach, climbing a mountain, walking through the forest and for others it is flying or looking at the stars and saying:”how can I get there and understand them better and see them for myself?” I have found that people that are passionate about space and space travel are unable to help themselves in this pursuit. It is part of their makeup. If they are successful they can provide dividends for everybody. Eventually statistics say that the earth will be bombarded in its history by asteroids and the only way that the human race can possibly survive one of these incidences is if we have learned how to migrate to other planets. The only people interested in doing that are those who look upwards. There is still lot to learn. It is good for kids as it is something you can engage them in and it’s exciting. The education required to understand and build rockets is phenomenal. You need engineering and physics, thermodynamics and chemistry, and you need to understand economics. It’s a very trans-disciplinary area. With regards to those that want to pursue it, I say: “give them a chance, let them and encourage them!” We have not really done that for the most part and it’s about time to try it!