Friday’s unveiling at the Mojave Air and Space Port sets the stage for a round of test flights for the spaceship.
Advertisement
After being thoroughly tested, SpaceShipTwo will carry two pilots and six passengers to the edge of space, about 62 miles above the surface of the earth. The co-pilot unlocked the feather early at a speed of Mach 0.8 instead of the intended speed of 1.4, triggering what Investigator-in-Charge Lorenda Ward called “catastrophic structural failure”.
A ticket to ride on SpaceShipTwo costs $250,000, and the company has sold about 700 tickets to date. The first SpaceShipTwo broke apart on October 31, 2014 in which wreckage fell to the Mojave Desert floor.
Sir Richard told Good Morning Britain: “Obviously it was a horrendous day when it happened and I must admit we had moments where I questioned if we should carry on”.
He said that “hopefully” they are “nearly at the end of a 10-year programme” to get Virgin Galactic this far.
Ahead of Friday’s unveil, Virgin Galactic pledged meticulous testing of new safety requirements for VSS Unity.
Branson’s Virgin Group and Aabar Investments, run by the government of Abu Dhabi, have together invested more than £350m in Virgin Galactic, which is already diversifying from space tourism into cargo, building a space launcher, LauncherOne, for small satellites.
Virgin Galactic owner Richard Branson said the spacecraft comes with “new bells and whistles” in a promotional video, though the company was vague about how the new plane’s technology differs from SpaceShipTwo. Later, he went on, “We’d like to join the race for space exploration”.
On Thursday, the company said that because of the crash, the new spaceship will not “blast off and head straight to space” anytime soon.
The Spaceship Company President Doug Shane said: “Building a talented team for our assembly facility in Mojave is perhaps what I take the most pride in”. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin also plans to fly tourists to space. That accident has hung over the program ever since, but the company said it had learned “brutal but important lessons from one tragic test flight accident”.
As Virgin Galactic explains in a statement, SpaceShipTwo will first embark on a rigorous testing period and “will remain on the ground for a while after her unveiling”.
Advertisement
“So we’re not going to hurry it, it will go step by step and when our test pilots say we’re ready, then I’ll go up and that will be the start of bringing other people up as well”.
