Virgin vows to continue space project

03 Nov 2014  2035 | Business & Trade Fairs

Virgin Galactic has vowed to continue with its space tourism project, despite the catastrophic failure of its shuttle on Friday.

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight
The SpaceShipTwo shuttle suffered what Virgin called a “serious anomaly” during a flight, killing the co-pilot and showering debris on the US desert below.

George Whitesides, CEO of Virgin Galactic, said that his company’s the mission to put paying passengers into space would continue.

“Space is hard and today was a tough day. We are going to be supporting the investigation as we figure out what happened today. We’re going to get through it,” Whitesides said.

“The future rests in many ways on hard days like this, but we believe we owe it to the team, that has been working so hard on this endeavour, to understand this and to move forward. And that is what we’ll do,” he added.

The failure of SpaceShipTwo is the biggest setback to the Virgin Galactic project since it was founded by Sir Richard Branson in 2004. At the start of this year the company had pledged to conduct its first commercial flight by the end of 2014. But that deadline had looked increasingly unlikely as the year progressed, and will now certainly not be met.

Branson arrived at the spaceport in the Mojave Desert on Saturday, where he told reporters that the company “will make sure that the dream lives on”.

“We owe it to our test pilots to find out what went wrong, and once we find out, if we can overcome it,” he was quoted saying by the BBC.

The pilot killed in the crash was named as 39-year-oild Michael Alsbury, who was employed by Virgin’s partner, Scaled Composites.

sourced:traveldailymedia.com

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