Virgin Galatic Spaceship Two down in the Mojave.

[MG23]

Originally Posted by joema

However -- to my knowledge there has been only one reentry fatality related to flight control -- the Mike Adams X-15 flight on 15 Nov 1967: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-15_Flight_3-65-97

However, there have been a number of issues with spacecraft with active controls not pointing the right direction during re-entry.

Off the top of my head, Columbia's first flight might well have burned up if they'd let the computer fly the re-entry, because the computer's aerodynamic model was wrong. Columbia's final flight was doing OK despite losing parts of the wing, until the drag exceeded the ability of the RCS to keep it pointed in the right direction. Not sure if you can count the Soyuz that re-entered backwards, since that was due to the service module failing to detach... but Soyuz, like Apollo was built to be aerodynamically stable with the heat shield pointing in the right direction, and could survive an uncontrolled re-entry that way, even if the crew might not be happy about the 10+g deceleration.

I would guess that 'feathering' was used on SS1 because it was much cheaper and faster to develop than an active system. I presume they did a similar cost/benefit analysis before deciding to use it on SS2.