The tragic explosion of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo over the southern California desert on Friday could perhaps have been avoided if the space tourism company had heeded warnings from senior aerospace engineers that the craft was unsafe.

A report in The Telegraph cites a rocket propulsion expert at the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety:

This explosion is not a surprise. None whatsoever, I am sorry to say. It is exactly what I was expecting. It was Russian roulette which test flight blew up.

Carolynne Campbell said she first warned Virgin Galactic of the dangers associated with the company’s engine design after a fuel tank explosion in 2007 killed three employees of Scaled Composites, the Northrop Grumman Corp. (NYSE: NOC) subsidiary that designed and built the spacecraft for Virgin Galactic.

Even the biographer of Virgin Galactic’s billionaire founder, Sir Richard Branson, expressed his reservations about the project:

What happened yesterday was very sad for the pilot obviously but it was predictable and inevitable. All the engineers in California working on the project I’ve spoken to said it was very dangerous.

Branson denies that the company ignored safety warnings. “To be honest I find it slightly irresponsible that people who know nothing about what they are saying can be saying things before the NTSB makes their comments.” He also promised to continue:

We are going to learn from what went wrong, discover how we can improve safety and performance and then move forwards together. We owe it to our test pilots to find out exactly what went wrong and once we find out what went wrong, if we can overcome it, we’ll make absolutely certain that the dream lives on.

U.S. National Transportation Safety Board investigators arrived at the scene of the crash on Saturday.

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