Branson: Behind the Mask (7 page)

Branson was riding a populist wave, although there were some who doubted the accuracy of Gore’s award-winning documentary. A number of respected scientists acknowledged the need to cut carbon emissions but accused the politician of exaggeration and even falsification. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change disparaged the imminence of the scenarios which Gore portrayed – of gigantic ice sheets melting fast, seas rising twenty feet to swamp vast areas of land, hurricanes battering coastlines, and the end of the Gulf Stream, causing Europe to plunge into an ice age. Even if Gore’s predictions were correct, said his critics, they would be manifested only in many thousands of years. Similarly, some experts criticised Stern’s prediction of certain environmental catastrophe as ‘tendentious’ and ‘propagandist’. He was guilty, wrote one analyst, of ‘statistical sophistry’ by quoting inaccurate mathematical models and peddling bogus science. Branson ignored these opponents. ‘Man created the problem,’ he told his guests in Kensington, ‘and therefore man should solve the problem.’ His fame guaranteed worldwide coverage of his competition. Hundreds of submissions began arriving at Virgin’s headquarters to be scrutinised by Branson’s experts, who included Crispin Tickell, a former Foreign Office ambassador, and Tim Flannery, an eminent Australian environmentalist. Both had been invited to Necker to brief Branson, and both bestowed upon the tycoon credibility as a global champion.

Placing himself at the forefront of encouraging the use of
renewable energy, in 2007 Branson agreed to testify in Congress. He enjoyed annoying rivals by sermonising that aviation was a dirty business ripe for anti-carbon taxes and criticising those in the airline industry who were unwilling to limit carbon emissions. ‘If I ground my fleet,’ he replied to those who accused him of hypocrisy, ‘another company will just step in to meet the inevitable consumer and business demand.’ He laughed at Jeff Gazzard of the Aviation Environment Federation, who accused him of advocating bogus green initiatives to make passengers feel guilty. Beyond his exhortations, his practical contribution so far had been to persuade the management of Heathrow and Los Angeles International airports to convert their municipal waste to fuel. ‘You’ve got to start somewhere,’ his supporters admonished the cynics. His more serious purpose was to profit from green investments.

In 2007, Virgin Atlantic failed to protect itself against rising oil prices and suffered losses. High oil prices had, in Branson’s opinion, become linked with climate change. ‘Thank God it’s happened,’ he said. ‘A high oil price is what we needed to actually wake up the world to deal with climate change.’ Convinced he could earn millions of pounds by producing a substitute for jet fuel, he adopted Vinod Khosla’s ideology that businessmen could justifiably profit from ventures favourable to the environment. Accordingly, Virgin Fuels metamorphosed into the Virgin Green Fund. Investors were invited to pledge £300 million to ‘harness entrepreneurship to achieve market-driven solutions to climate change’. Convinced by Khosla that cellulosic ethanol would be commercially viable by 2009, Virgin Green’s principal investment was in renewable fuels. The fund’s authenticity was partially dependent on Senator Hillary Clinton’s new sponsorship of government subsidies for producing biofuels from cellulose derived from woodchips, grass and other organic materials. Khosla, like Clinton and Branson, still ignored critics
who blamed ethanol production from corn for damaging the environment.

However, the opponents, including Biofuel Watch, had persuaded the United Nations to commission a Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food to investigate the consequences of the billionaires’ investment. The rush for biofuels, the expert reported, was ‘a crime against humanity’. To satisfy the increased demand for corn, American farmers were ploughing up pasture and had stopped growing soya beans. As soya prices rose, peasants in the Amazonian rainforests were being evicted from their land, trees felled and synthetic fertilisers spread to grow soya. With less forest, the carbon in the atmosphere would increase and the biodiversity of the soil would be weakened. In America, the fertilisers used to grow the extra corn were emitting huge amounts of additional nitrous oxide, a more poisonous gas than the carbons produced from conventional petrol.

The billionaires dismissed the critics, and by summer 2007 Branson’s strategy in America was beginning to succeed. Governor Schwarzenegger offered $15 million in assistance to base Virgin America in San Francisco rather than Los Angeles and, with official approval, the glitzy airline was finally launched. Combined with his environmental business, his plan to spread Virgin Hotels across the country and, above all, Virgin Galactic, Branson had won the recognition he sought. Then suddenly his success was threatened.

Randy Chase’s inquiry into the explosion of Virgin Galactic’s rocket in Mojave in July 2007 gave Branson good reason to be concerned. Sending famous multimillionaires into space was the lynchpin of his plan for self-enrichment through self-promotion in America. ‘A little information in the hands of the less educated people’, a Scaled Composites executive had warned, ‘could be dangerous to our survival. Some hostile people would want to close the operation down.’

One of the least scientifically educated people in Mojave was Randy Chase himself. Ignorant about rocket motors and nitrous oxide, he was cast into a scientific wilderness among engineers keen to steer the investigator away from any conclusion which might damage Mojave’s most prominent customer. Virgin Galactic’s fate, everyone knew, rested on Chase’s decision. Was the explosion an accident, or was it caused by the conduct of Burt Rutan’s team, or was the Virgin Galactic motor inherently defective or even dangerous? At the end of his investigation, would Chase recommend that Scaled be prosecuted for a crime?

Sitting in the Voyager diner by Mojave airport’s runway, Chase heard the party line from Rutan’s employees.

‘We want to put eight men into space,’ he was told. ‘You don’t want to stop that, do you?’

‘I don’t,’ agreed Chase.

During other conversations, Chase sensed the jealousy among Rutan’s rivals vying for the same prize as Branson. Rutan’s glory excited suspicion along the runway. ‘It’s like an arms
race,’ Chase concluded. ‘It’s all about money and prestige.’

During his first hours in Mojave, he had spurned the offer of help from George Whittinghill, one of Scaled’s experts. ‘He called about nitrous oxide. He seemed to be chasing money,’ Chase claimed, believing Whittinghill wanted to be hired by the government. Chase accepted the judgement of others that ‘Whittinghill is a horse’s arse who doesn’t listen to anyone else.’ Some believed this was grossly unfair on Whittinghill, but Chase decided that he would rely on Scaled’s other engineers. ‘I’m getting good co-operation,’ he reported to his headquarters, ‘so I’ve decided not to call in outside experts.’ The engineers potentially responsible for the explosion had sought to secure Chase’s trust. Their expertise would guide the investigator through the evidence as he judged their own conduct.

‘Why did the explosion happen?’ someone asked Chase. ‘Did someone fire a bullet through the chamber?’ Chase mocked the fantasy, but he did grasp that there were suspicions about the safety of the fuel and distrust among some of Scaled’s consultants in Virgin Galactic’s rocket.

The motor used by Virgin Galactic was called a ‘hybrid’. In simple terms, nitrous oxide, commonly called ‘laughing gas’, was pumped into a metal cylinder lined with rubber and ignited. The burning rubber created the high pressure that propelled the spaceship towards the stars. Rutan had chosen the hybrid motor because it was cheap and simple. There was no throttle. After just a twenty-second burst the rocket would be speeding at 2,000 mph – three times the speed of sound – taking a further forty-five seconds to reach space. Since Virgin Galactic was not going into orbit – which would require the spaceship to fly at seven times the speed of sound – a hybrid motor was suitably cheap for tourism.

The complication was the craft’s size and weight. Rutan’s expertise was in designing aircraft, not rockets. He assumed that he could stretch his original spaceship and increase the rocket
motor’s size in order for SpaceShipTwo to carry eight people rather than two. Lengthening it was easy, but no one had ever used such a big hybrid motor. His engineers were working in the unknown, especially when it came to keeping the weight down. Achieving the right balance between creating sufficient room for passengers and using the smallest possible motor requiring less fuel was complicated.

To reduce Virgin Galactic’s weight, Rutan was using composites rather than metal for the motor’s enlarged tank. ‘You need to take great care with composites,’ an expert had told him. The engineer voiced his scepticism about the glue Scaled was using, but Rutan’s response was defensive. He was a fast-paced man who disliked being questioned about what were later referred to as ‘the deficiencies in the long process’. The consultant engineer’s concerns ranged from ‘poor cleaning’ to ‘no precision in the measurement of the connections’. Rutan, the engineer noted, had a ‘blurry overall vision’ about burning rubber.

Rutan had no fears about hybrid engines. The safety of using nitrous oxide to burn rubber was endorsed by the US government’s guidelines. There was no need, he decided, to question the science, although the law-makers had not anticipated applying their rules to an enlarged hybrid motor. Critically, Randy Chase was similarly reassured after he was shown the official rules issued by the Federal Aviation Administration and an implied waiver allowing Virgin Galactic to fly.

Without any technical advice, Chase did not examine what Rutan’s critics before the accident had called ‘an aggressive schedule’. One engineer raised questions as to whether Scaled’s staff were sufficiently experienced and properly paid. ‘They’ve got inadequate supervision,’ he said, believing that aircraft designers like Rutan did not properly understand rocket motors. ‘Burt Rutan is driving his staff with a mandate for speed.’ After the explosion, many had become angry. Scaled, the engineers claimed, was
a corporation in a hurry. Chase ignored those observations. All he wanted was an uncomplicated explanation for the explosion.

Following standard procedure, he relied on individual interviews with the engineers. One by one during August 2007 they arrived, accompanied by Scaled’s lawyers, at an office in Mojave. Despite his technical ignorance, Chase felt he had detected a smokescreen. ‘They’re scared about losing their jobs,’ he concluded. ‘All the witnesses are concerned not to say the wrong thing. They’re not talking straight. They don’t want to cause their employer any problems, especially a potential law suit for damages.’ The same reticence embraced the families of the three dead engineers. In return for compensation, all had signed confidentiality agreements. Even Al Cebriain, the consultant engineer, was inhibited about revealing what he saw before the explosion.

‘We don’t want you talking,’ the lawyers acting for Scaled had told Cebriain.

‘You’re imposing damage control over the investigation,’ Cebriain replied. Scaled, it had been announced just six days before the accident, was to be sold in its entirety to Northrop Grumman, the aerospace giant, and Rutan understandably wanted no problems. Scaled’s lawyers were acting accordingly.

‘They’re all cautious,’ Chase reported to his chief in Fresno. ‘They’re telling me what they want me to know, and that’s limited.’ On reflection, Chase interpreted their caution as personal and not professional evasion. ‘They’re scoffing at me,’ he sighed. ‘They think that I’m an idiot because I was born and raised on a farm.’

The danger for Branson and Rutan would be if Chase judged Scaled’s negligence to be criminal. That conclusion would trigger a more comprehensive investigation by Bakersfield’s sheriff and the local district attorney. A forensic examination of the hybrid motor, Scaled’s directors feared, might undermine Virgin Galactic’s reputation. Their good fortune was Chase’s limitations. After clocking up nearly a thousand hours at Mojave,
the inspector surrendered. He would not pursue his effort to understand the scientific causes of the explosion, excluding any investigation into Scaled’s use of nitrous oxide to burn rubber. Questions about the integrity of the rocket’s motor, he decided, were irrelevant. ‘Finding out whether a hybrid rocket is safe doesn’t matter,’ he reported to his chief. ‘All that matters is if Scaled took the proper precautions to protect its employees or if their carelessness caused the deaths.’

His conclusion was guided by Scaled’s engineers. On several occasions he heard an expert say that ‘the fuel was contaminated’. To Chase, contamination meant that Scaled’s employees had allowed desert dust to mix with the gas or enter the equipment. ‘Their leather gloves are dirty,’ he noticed, believing that the cause of the explosion was ‘a mundane thing of life’.

Some of the experts, including Cebriain, believed that contamination had somehow subverted the rocket’s reliability, but not through dirty gloves. Chase could have properly understood the cause if he had scrutinised a video in slow motion, but he missed that opportunity. The recording of the test showed flames bursting through the top of the tank of nitrous oxide gas. In a cold-flow test, there should have been no fire. The question posed by Scaled’s critics was why one had erupted. In the post-mortem completed after Chase had submitted his report, Rutan’s engineers would discover that the composite liner inside the tank – made of a petroleum glue – had dissolved and contaminated the vapours and nitrous oxide. As the contaminated vapour and gas passed through the valve, there was friction. Friction causes heat, and that heat triggered the gas to explode. The tank was found 800 feet from the explosion site, while the valve was found 300 feet away in the opposite direction.

Scaled’s engineers were shocked by their discovery. None could understand why a similar explosion had not occurred earlier. If the public became aware that errors in the design
and manufacture may have caused the explosion, confidence in Virgin Galactic might collapse. Public debate about Virgin Galactic’s safety was prevented because Rutan and Branson’s executives declined to discuss the incident with critics in the space community. The public were unaware that the composite liners inside the tank would later be replaced with metal. With the slow-motion evidence yet to be minutely scrutinised by Scaled’s engineers, Chase was deflected from doubting the stability of the hybrid, and his primitive opinion that dirty gloves had contaminated the nitrous oxide was reinforced.

In Chase’s opinion, the negligence was compounded by Scaled’s failure to prevent their employees standing so close to the test site. Pertinently, he was not told that an eyewitness’s mobile telephone had recorded Glenn May and two others darting in front of the fence just before the test started. Since they were so much closer to the explosion, they died. For his own unexplained reasons, Chase firmly believed that all the casualties – the dead as well as the survivors – had been behind the fence. ‘Really, it made no difference,’ he later said. ‘The fence couldn’t protect anyone.’ He failed to take the self-evident truth of his observation to its conclusion: namely, that the co-operation he received from some engineers had been limited.

His report was delivered in October 2007 to OSHA’s enforcement agency. No one was surprised that Chase blamed the deaths on Scaled’s careless safety procedures and nothing more. Over the previous twenty-eight years, despite hundreds of deaths of workers in the oil, mining and other industries, OSHA had not mounted a single criminal prosecution in the county. Since Chase did not highlight any suspicions, his report went no further. Accordingly, there was no reason for the county sheriff, Donny Youngblood, to launch an investigation or even to hold a coroner’s inquest to publicly ascertain the cause of the explosion. The district attorney was also excluded from any involvement.
Conveniently for Rutan, OSHA’s decision automatically prevented the publication of Chase’s report. ‘It’s just another accident,’ Sheriff Youngblood concluded. He felt no reason to cause Rutan more embarrassment.

The suppression of a public debate sparked criticism among a group of British and American engineers. Led by Geoff Daly, a British rocket engineer, and supported by Carolynne Campbell, a designer of small rocket motors, they voiced their worries about a possible cover-up. Since Scaled refused to engage in any debate with their critics, their comments became strident. Sharing a keen interest in the use of nitrous oxide, both Campbell and Daly were alarmed by the description on Virgin Galactic’s website that the combination of the gas and rubber is ‘benign, stable as well as containing none of the toxins found in solid rocket motors’. In their opinion, that description was inaccurate. ‘Nitrous oxide can explode on its own,’ said Campbell. ‘Unlike oxygen, it’s an explosive. And rockets blow up because that’s their nature.’ Virgin Galactic’s motor, she continued, could be toxic. ‘There’s so much soot coming out the back. That’s burning rubber. That could be carcinogenic’

In a letter to California’s district attorney, the two Britons described the dangers Virgin’s space tourists would face because of Rutan’s reliance on nitrous oxide and burning rubber. Had, they asked, consideration been given to prosecuting Scaled for criminal negligence or even manslaughter? The engineers were ignored. The fine imposed by OSHA on Scaled, based on a fixed tariff determined by the number of employees and not the fatalities, was $25,000. The company’s appeal was dismissed. ‘A speeding ticket,’ concluded Stu Witt. ‘Not a corporation-closing penalty.’

Rutan must have been delighted. None of the injured complained. The disaster was forgotten even among those who had bought $200,000 tickets. ‘I’ll be on the first flight with my
parents and family in 2009,’ promised Branson, expressing certainty about the timetable. ‘Tests’, he was later told by Witt, ‘should be like sex – behind closed doors with a minimum number of participants.’

In the weeks after the funerals of the three engineers, the deaths were compared to the fate of the doomed Apollo 1 astronauts in 1967. To re-energise Scaled’s employees, Rutan’s executives appealed to their can-do spirit. Branson was reassured that the rocket motor’s safety was not in doubt. As an insurance, Scaled’s engineers reduced the temperature of the nitrous oxide. However, at lower temperatures the rocket produced less power and the thrust was less smooth. ‘The hybrid could be doomed,’ predicted Campbell and others.

Branson needed to reassure the ticket-holders that his timetable was infallible. Virgin’s flawless publicity machine, primed to spread confidence and fun, invited Virgin Galactic’s passengers to a party in mid-January 2008 at the planetarium in New York’s Museum of Natural History. Nearly a hundred ticket-holders arrived. Some had paid a $20,000 deposit; others had paid the full $200,000. ‘2008 will be the year of the spaceship,’ said Branson on the soundtrack of an animated film showing SpaceShipTwo blasting into space. Take-off, he said with certainty, would be late the following year or definitely in 2010. After that, said the commentator with conviction, the reusable rocket would be taking off twice every day from the spaceport. The film’s description of the split-second acceleration as the rocket roared into space gripped the audience. Within a minute, pushed deep into their seats by the G force, they would be soaring at 3,000 mph (Virgin’s publicity was never consistent about the speed). About twenty seconds later, the rocket motor would stop and the passengers could enjoy four minutes of weightlessness as the craft glided through space before beginning its descent.