What’s Going On?
During a test flight over the Mojave Desert today, Virgin Galactic’s spaceship suffered a “serious anomaly” and crashed.
Two pilots were on board the plane, as is typical during test flights, and media reports claim that one parachute was seen on the ground. The California Highway Patrol is reporting one fatality, according to the AP.
Photos posted on social media show a with parts of the plane scattered across the desert.
What’s happening now?
Local authorities from the Kern County Fire Department are conducting search and rescue operations and Virgin Galactic issued a statement saying it “will work closely with relevant authorities to determine the cause of this accident” and provide updates soon.
Today was the 55th time SpaceShipTwo had flown, and the 35th time the vehicle flew on its own, detached from the airplane that carries it airborne. It was only the fourth time SpaceShipTwo had actually fired its rocket, but the first time the ship had used a new polyamide-based rocket fuel—effectively a plastic-based fuel rather than the rubber-based fuel that had been used previously.
Joel Glenn Brenner, a journalist speaking on CNN today, said that the SpaceShipTwo rocket engine appeared to have burned for two seconds after ignition and then stopped in what may have been a hard start. The vehicle engine then restarted and exploded.
And what next?
The first concern of everyone involved is the status of the pilots and one pilot has been taken to the hospital with serious injuries.
At takeoff, SpaceShipTwo hangs beneath a double-hulled carrier plane named WhiteKnightTwo, which resembles a catamaran. WhiteKnightTwo flies up to roughly 50,000 feet before dropping SpaceShipTwo, which then fires up its own rocket engine to fly vertically, out of the atmosphere.
The vehicles took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port, where Virgin Galactic is based, at 9:19AM PDT, following a three-hour delay to allow bad weather to clear. SpaceShipTwo experienced a “serious anomaly” just minutes into its rocket-powered flight. A tweet by Virgin Galactic indicated that SpaceShipTwo had successfully fired its rocket and was traveling under its own power.
Because the space plane broke up at a very high altitude, the debris field will be widely scattered across the desert making the reconstruction of the aircraft particularly difficult.
Virgin Galactic has scheduled a press conference for later this afternoon and this post will be updated as additional information becomes available.
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