The US Federal Aviation Administration has allowed the company to resume the use of spaceships
WASHINGTON, September 30. /TASS/. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) The United States has completed an investigation into the incident with the deviation from the course of the Virgin Galactic Unity-22 spacecraft during a suborbital flight on July 11 and allowed it to resume the use of spaceships. This is stated in a statement issued on Wednesday by the department.
"Today, the FAA has completed an investigation of an emergency situation that occurred during the flight of the Unity-22 Virgin Galactic spacecraft on July 11," the text says.
It concludes that the ship did deviate from the course during the flight, but Virgin Galactic did not properly inform the management about this incident. "The FAA has required Virgin Galactic to make changes to how it communicates with the FAA during flights in order to ensure the safety of people," the document says. "Virgin Galactic has made the necessary changes and can resume flights," the statement says.
Earlier, the US aviation regulator banned flights of Virgin Galactic spaceships during the investigation of the incident on July 11, which threatened the ship with an emergency landing. As The New Yorker magazine reported, during the descent, Unity-22 deviated from the trajectory that lay within the framework of the special airspace allocated by the FAA for this flight. The incident could have occurred due to the fact that during takeoff, the spacecraft's engines were running a few seconds longer than planned.
Representatives of the company admitted that Unity-22 for more than a minute and a half did not decline along a predetermined trajectory. At the same time, according to Virgin Galactic, the deviation of the ship from the course was provoked by winds in the upper atmosphere. The test pilots acted according to the instructions, and such incidents are worked out during the preparation for flights, the company stressed.
Virgin Galactic is one of the companies that are going to carry out regular tourist flights into space. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX have the same plans.