It feels like a nightmare scenario for airplane passengers: You take a look out the window in between mini-pretzel bites to see an engine cloaked in flames, shedding pieces of metal mid-flight from 10,000 feet in the air.
“We had a good ignition, but after a couple seconds of stable flight, the rocket basically shut itself down, ending the mission,” Virgin Orbit communications officer Kendall Russell wrote in an email to WIRED.
Despite this, scientific failure is rarely talked about openly, which was why when University of Arizona astrophysicist Erika Hamden used her TED 2019 talk last week to share how her work has been characterized by setback after setback, it felt like a radical act.