Virgin Galactic unveils new spaceship 16 months after deadly crash

On Friday, Virgin Galactic plans to unveil its new SpaceShipTwo, a six-passenger, two-pilot winged space aircraft created to take thrill-seekers, researchers and commercial customers on five-minute hops into suborbital space, reaching altitudes of about 100km.

The company said the new vehicle is very similar to its predecessor so it will “benefit from incredibly useful data from 55 successful test flights as well as the brutal but important lessons from one tragic flight test accident”.

The crash investigation found that co-pilot Michael Alsbury prematurely unlocked the so-called feathering system that is meant to slow and stabilize the craft as it re-enters the atmosphere.

According to a statement that the Virgin Galactic gave about the rollout, the company is getting ready to “celebrate the hard work our engineers and technicians have poured into making each of SpaceShipTwo’s parts”.

Such is the case of the private spaceflight company Virgin Galactic plans to renew its space travel endeavors with the unveiling a new spaceship on Friday. SpaceShipTwo will be subject to extensive on-the-ground testing before it’s carried aloft, unpowered, for further testing.

He said that “hopefully” they are “nearly at the end of a 10-year programme” to get Virgin Galactic this far.

Virgin Galactic chief executive George Whitesides said: “We seek to open space to people from all walks of life, and today’s milestone is a big step toward that goal”.

Virgin stands alone in its focus on space tourism for the ultra-wealthy (tickets are now going for $250,000 a pop), which makes their risky choices all the more questionable. Virgin Galactic is hope to avoid its past mistakes with the SpaceShipTwo.

“The actual accident itself was caused by a control being moved when it shouldn’t have”, said Dave Mackay, the chief pilot for Galactic. Of course, it’ll do that in tests long before those rich individuals who’ve signed up to take one of the first commercial space flights.

The pilot was injured but successfully deployed his parachute, while the co-pilot was killed. The craft takes the place of the company’s first ship, also named SpaceShipTwo, which was destroyed October 31, 2014, when a co-pilot conducting tests improperly activated the craft’s descent mechanism as it flew above the Earth, killing him and injuring the pilot.

First, the new spacecraft would need to go through a series of rigorous tests, the company said, laying out in detail how even before the vehicle was assembled, the company “poked, prodded, stretched, squeezed, bent and twisted everything to be used to build these vehicles”. A mothership, the four-engine jet WhiteKnightTwo, flies passengers the first 50,000 feet before the eight-person SpaceShipTwo continues the journey to Earth’s boundary with space. The new changes will be truly evaluated when test flights of SpaceShipTwo begins sometime this year.

Mr Branson’s rivals in the privately funded space race include SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.