Why did the SS1 do 30 barrell rolls today?

Anyone know?

Tha answer is?

There's a demon who lives just past Mach-1, daring anybody
to try and push the envelope. Heh heh heh!!!

An actuator in the controls overheated, and reset.
After the reset, Melvill was able to stabilize the spaceship.
Talk about a wild ride!

What was the purpose of the actuator, was it moving the rudders?

That's a relief. They can work around that.

S'funny, I thought that was the problem in the June 21 flight... they were supposed to have fixed that.

Melville said it was pilot error.

I wonder . . .

"We got a little bit of a rolling motion going," Melvill said, "but I think it looks good for the crowd to do a roll at the top of the climb."

More seriously, though, the cause of the flight anomaly was unknown. Melvill conceded it was possible he had triggered the problem by inadvertently operating SpaceShipOne's rudder. "That sort of thing can happen at my age," he said.

from Dan Brekke http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,65129,00.html

Burt made a comment saying that he thought the roll was to be lower down "above us". Mike's reply was he did. Watching the streaming vide, it looks like he did a roll before touch down.

Mike also mentioned that he may have initiated the roll on the way up and it looks good for the crowd. Could this roll have been intentional but too early in the flight and got out of control? Just pure speculation on my part.

Regardless, what an incredible achievement. Congratulations to Mike, Burt, and Paul.

Yep, Melvill is taking credit for the roll.
One of the commentators made the comment about the actuator during the webcast.

Buh? He did an intentional roll during the glide phase?

DKH.

Yeah I noticed from the on-flight camera at one point during the glide, about 5 minutes before he lowered the landing gear, that suddenly the world swirled around, and I thought "uh oh what's happening?" but then realised that it was all smooth again, and so it was an intentional single victory roll.

~Dan

Does anyone feel that "pilot-error" might just be a cop-out? It seems highly coincidental that a similar incident happened in the june flight. Are we sure this isn't a design error or something, or is it something that with practice can be corrected for?

Or if it is pilot error (was the other case error too then?), should they think of getting a new pilot? And am I the only one who thinks that if the ground said to abort, he'd try for space anyways? (I might be reading this wrong, or does the pilot have *tons* of say in the go/no-go?)

(no offense to anyone - I like the guy just fine and think scaled is obviously doing a better job than everyone else - I am just trying to find out ways of getting SS1 to fly straight....)

- binarysunrise

Melvill won't be flying the next flight, but not because of the roll yesterday. He wasn't even supposed to fly the 9-29 flight. He was backup for another un-named pilot who was unable to fly because his wife had just given birth.