It has been a rough week for commercial space companies:
MOJAVE, Calif. — A winged spaceship designed to take tourists on excursions beyond Earth’s atmosphere exploded during a test flight Friday 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, which fell from the sky about 120 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. Another pilot parachuted out and was flown by helicopter to a hospital, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood. Their names were not released.
The crash area is in the desert north of Mojave Air and Space Port, where the test flight originated. (Associated Press)
You can read more at the link, but this will probably set back commercial space tourism by at least a decade. As we have seen in the development of any space program it is hard to do with many failures. It will be interesting to see if Virgin Galactic can keep getting investment money to support their company after this.
