CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida// A suborbital passenger spaceship being developed by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic crashed during a test flight on Friday at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, officials said.
One of two pilots was killed, and the other was seriously injured, the CNBC channel reported, citing local police.
The spaceship was undergoing its first powered test flight since January.
Virgin Galactic tweeted that the craft had suffered an “in-flight anomaly” scheduled a press conference for later on Friday.
“We will work closely with relevant authorities to determine the cause of this accident and provide updates ASAP,” the company said.
Mr Branson said last month that Virgin Galactic was targeting its first commercial flight in spring 2015, with the billionaire and his son to be aboard for the initial launch.
More than 800 people have paid or put down deposits to fly aboard the spaceship, at a cost of about US$250,000 (Dh918,000) each.
The spaceship is carried to an altitude of about 14,000 metres and released. It then fires its rocket motor to catapult it to an altitude of about 100 kilometres, giving passengers a view of the planet set against the blackness of space and a few minutes of weightlessness.
The spaceship is based on a prototype, called SpaceShipOne, which 10 years ago won the $100 million Ansari X Prize for the first privately developed manned spacecraft to fly in space.
Friday’s test was to be the spaceship’s first powered test flight since January. In May, Virgin Galactic and spaceship developer Scaled Composites, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman Corp, switched to an alternative plastic-type of fuel grain for the hybrid rocket motor.
The accident is the second this week by a US space company. On Tuesday, an Orbital Sciences Antares rocket exploded 15 seconds after liftoff from Wallops Island, Virginia, destroying a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station.
* Reuters and Bloomberg News
