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 Mark Sirangelo, who leads the space division of privately held
Sierra Nevada Corp, told industry executives Thursday that he
expected the industry to learn from the accidents and urged a
measured response by lawmakers.
Sirangelo noted there have been 454 failures out of a total 5,332
launches since the 1950s, and failure rates had remained steady at 7
to 9 percent since the 1970s.
"Launch failures and issues are part of what we do," Sirangelo told
an event hosted by the Washington Space Business Roundtable. "We're
going to learn from it and get better."
Last week's incidents have raised questions about the commercial
space industry, and will likely trigger congressional hearings and
bids to increase oversight, according to industry executives,
congressional aides and analysts.
But they cautioned that ongoing pressure on U.S. budgets left NASA
little choice but to proceed with commercial approaches to ferrying
cargo and crew to the space station.
 The U.S. Air Force is also working to certify privately held Space
Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, to launch big military and spy
satellites, ending the virtual monopoly now held by United Launch
Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co.
"As long as we have sequestration budget cuts in place, it’s hard to
see commercial approaches going away, since that’s one way of
dealing with the budget crunch,” said one congressional aide who was
not authorized to speak publicly.
On Oct. 28, an unmanned Orbital Sciences Antares rocket exploded
seconds after liftoff from Virginia, destroying a cargo ship bound
for the International Space Station for NASA.
On Friday, a pilot with Scaled Composites, a unit of Northrop
Grumman, died and another was injured during a test flight of
SpaceShipTwo. The suborbital space plane, owned by Virgin Galactic,
an offshoot of Richard Branson's London-based Virgin Group, was
destroyed in the crash.
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Sirangelo said the accidents were tragic but should be viewed in the
context of the overall space business, and not as an indictment of
new ventures being developed by the commercial sector. He said the
airplane industry had also suffered great losses during its first
decade.
"This is catalyst. Things happen that make us better," Sirangelo
said. "We don't get better cars if we don't realize that cars have
crashes and then we improve them."
He said the commercial space business was already subject to strict
oversight, but industry should respond by being "even more open".
"What we need to do ... instead of running away from it, is confront
it, explain it, and be open and honest - maybe even more open than
we have been in letting people understand what happened."
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Ken Wills)
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