INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Earth.It was both a success and a failure.The success was that after Huby founded The Exploration Company in Europe, she managed to move
nimbly with the "Mission Possible" spacecraft such that it cost less than $25 million to build and reached space in less than three years
The vehicle ticked off a number of successes in spaceflight before making a controlled descent through the atmosphere.But at 26 km above the
planet, as the spacecraft slowed to Mach one, The Exploration Company lost contact
Huby was not sure how this loss would be received in Europe, where failures in spaceflight have not been traditionally well-tolerated."What
was interesting is the feedback I got in Europe," Huby said in an interview this week at the company's offices in Houston
"The German Space Agency, the French space agency, the European Space Agency said, OK, that's a great achievement
For the time and money we spent, performing 80 percent of that mission was a good investment."After the spacecraft was lost on June 24, the
company established an independent investigation team
Huby said it is "99 percent" confirmed there was a problem with the deployment of the parachutes, either the drogue chutes or the main
The fault was not with the provider of the parachutes themselves, US-based Airborne Systems, but the company's mechanism, she said.To save
time and money, The Exploration Company did not conduct any drop tests
Such a campaign would have added millions of dollars to a program that was trying to be lean, plus a year of schedule to a mission
attempting to move fast."We made a mistake, basically, to underestimate the risks," she said
In retrospect, Huby added, the company could have done more testing on the ground.Now the firm faces a big decision: How to proceed from
One option is building another small spacecraft, similar to Mission Possible, for testing purposes
But there is limited commonality in the parachute system for this vehicle and the larger Nyx spacecraft the company is building for
So if the Mission Possible parachutes were to work, that would not guarantee success for Nyx.
