 Hey what's up everybody? Welcome to tomorrow. Today we need to talk about the National Transportation Safety Board's investigation results into the fatal crash of Virgin Galactic's Spaceship II vehicle on a test flight last year. And that's what we're going to be talking about for this year's space pod for August 4th, 2015. So first off, the National Transportation Safety Board has started releasing some of the results from their investigation into Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites test flight of the Spaceship II vehicle last year, where unfortunately the vehicle broke apart and Mike Alsbury lost his life in that crash. They have concluded that it was pilot error and that Mike Alsbury did unlock the feathering system that would be able to slow the vehicle when it reenters the atmosphere after it reaches its highest arc. Because the feathering system was released early, it resulted in the spacecraft breaking apart. The other pilot, Peter Siebold, did survive, although with injuries, and the National Transportation Safety Board has concluded that this was mainly due, this pilot error was due to the fact that there wasn't good enough training at Virgin Galactic's Scaled Composites or the Spaceship Company, whoever it is that you want to put responsibility for pilot training on. The NTSB also confirmed that there were some major changes to the Spaceship II vehicle before this particular test flight, unlike the minor tweaks that company officials had been talking about up until that point. The major change was switching the type of fuels for their hybrid rocket motor from nitrous oxide and rubber to nitrous oxide and nylon. Not only that, but the engine nozzle was actually shortened and you can clearly see the difference between the firing from the fatal accident and an earlier firing with a longer nozzle, but the changes were a lot more than just changing the fuel or shortening the engine nozzle. There were actually more fuel tanks and pressurized tanks added into this entire setup. In order to burn the nylon fuel, they added helium and methane tanks, pressurized helium and methane, to help the nitrous oxide burn that nylon fuel. The first three powered flights did not use any additional pressurized gases in order to burn the nitrous oxide and rubber. These modifications not only altered the weight and complexity of the system, but it also changed the way the air flowed over the spacecraft in flight. Because of this change in the way the air flowed over the spacecraft, there was an oscillation or a flutter in the tail wings that were adding extra vibrations that may have contributed to Mike Allsbury accidentally releasing the feather unlocking system before he was supposed to. These vibrations and these conditions were not experienced on any previous test flights because of these modifications, so it's not exactly the pilot's fault that this happened. I mean, they were in conditions that they were not familiar with and there might have been enough jerking around in that cockpit. You might not have even meant to. You might have just bumped the mechanism that released the feather unlock system, so there were quite a few more changes to Spaceship 2 than either of the companies originally let on. It's going to be interesting to see how they proceed from here and whether or not they're going to be more forthcoming with their engine development, especially any changes they make. There's still more information that the National Transportation Safety Board is releasing regarding to this investigation, but one of the recommendations that they have made that Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites haven't really touched on a whole lot yet is they need to get some sort of external organization to do a review of their review and to make sure that the recommendations that the NTSB has given to Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites are actually met and that in the future for the next version of this that they're building that all of the different safety procedures will be met and they won't have problems like this again in the future. So let me know what you think about these changes that Virgin Galactic made to Spaceship 2 that look like at least caused some of the conditions that led to this fatal crash. So let me know if you have any confidence still in Virgin Galactic or if you think that any of their customers still have any confidence in them and whether or not you think they'll ever be able to start flying tourists into suborbital space or almost suborbital space. Thank you very much for watching this video. My name is Michael Clark and if you are willing and able please help us to continue making space news videos like this by contributing to our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash space pod. Thanks again for watching and hopefully you know a little bit more today than you did yesterday thanks to tomorrow. Keep moving onwards and upwards everybody and I will see you in the future.