Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo - Spacecraft for tourists explodes on test flight Friday Oct 31,2014

 

A winged spaceship designed to take tourists on excursions beyond Earth’s atmosphere exploded during a test flight Friday Oct 31,2014 over the Mojave Desert, killing a pilot in the second fiery setback for commercial space travel in less than a week.

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo blew apart after being released from a carrier aircraft at high altitude, according to Ken Brown, a photographer who witnessed the explosion.

One pilot was found dead inside the spacecraft and another parachuted out and was flown by helicopter to a hospital, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said.

The crash area was about 193 km north of downtown Los Angeles and 32 km from the Mojave Air and Space Port, where the flight originated. 

Friday’s flight marked the 55th for SpaceShipTwo, which was intended to be the first of a fleet of craft. This was only the fourth flight to include a brief rocket firing. During other flights, the craft either was not released from its mothership or functioned as a glider after release. 

At 60—feet (18—meters) long, SpaceShipTwo featured two large windows for each of up to six passengers, one on the side and one overhead. 

The accident’s cause was not immediately known, nor was the altitude at which the explosion occurred.

 Note
British billionaire Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, has been the front-runner in the fledgling race to give large numbers of paying civilians a suborbital ride that would let them experience weightlessness and see the Earth from the edge of space.