Freefall Was From More Than 50,000 Feet With No Pressure Suit

Virgin Galactic pilot Peter Siebold was wearing a parachute, but no pressure suit, when SpaceShipTwo began to come apart during a test flight last Friday. NTSB Spokesman Eric Weiss said Tuesday "we don't know how he got out."

Siebold was released from the hospital Monday, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times.

According to the report, Siebold survived a freefall from more than 10 miles in altitude in temperatures reaching 70 degrees below zero.

It is not known when Siebold actually deployed his parachute. Avionics engineer Ken Brown, who was photographing the event, said he believes the spacecraft was as high as 60,000 feet when it began to disintegrate. Brown said Siebold may have made a decision to freefall as far possible to quickly exit the very cold temperatures at that altitude, and may not have opened the parachute until he reached about 20,000 feet.

The design of SpaceShipTwo prevented the use of bulky pressure suits. Designer Burt Rutan said that he wanted small hatches to preserve the strength of the pressure vessel of the composite-construction spacecraft, according to veteran test pilot Paul Tackabury, who sat on the board of directors of Scaled Composites until it was sold to Northrop Grumman. Pilots wear thin jumpsuits when flying the spacecraft.

Tackabury said that Siebold's survival is extraordinary. "You don't just jump out of an aircraft at Mach 1 at over 50,000 feet without a space suit," he told the paper.

FMI: www.scaled.com, www.ntsb.gov