Richard Branson is adamant his commercial space dream lives on

RICHARD Branson insists his dream of commercial space travel is alive, despite a spacecraft crash that killed a pilot.

Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson speaks at a press conference at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California insisting his dream of commercial space travel remained alive.

BRITISH tycoon Richard Branson insists his dream of commercial space travel is alive, despite a spacecraft crash that killed one pilot and ­seriously injured another.

The pilots were flying for Virgin Galactic, whose SpaceShipTwo rocket plane was meant to carry tourists on short but expensive trips to space.

The doomed flight — the 35th by SpaceShipTwo — marked the first time the spaceship had flown on a new kind of plastic-based rocket fuel mixture.

Federal investigators have launched a probe into the causes of Saturday’s accident, which was a devastating setback to the cause of commercial space tourism.

The crash was the second disaster to rock the private space industry in the space of a few days, after an Antares rocket carrying supplies to the International Space Station exploded after take-off in Virginia on Tuesday.

Early theories about the causes of the latest crash have focused on the fuel, amid reports that the company was repeatedly warned of concerns about its safety.

A rubber-based fuel was previously used.

Speaking after arriving in the California facility that had served as the hub of Virgin Galactic’s space program, Mr Branson said yesterday that safety remained his paramount concern.

“We owe it to our test ­pilots to find out exactly what went wrong, and once we’ve found out what went wrong, if we can overcome it, we’ll make absolutely certain that the dream lives on,” he said.

“We do understand the risks involved, and we’re not going to push on blindly. Safety has always been our No 1 priority.”

The surviving pilot, Peter Sie­bold, is “alert and talking with his family and doctors”, plane designer and builder Scaled Composites said. It named the dead pilot as Michael Alsbury, 39, a ­father of two.

National Transportation Safety Board acting chairman Christopher Hart said that investigators hoped to find clues to the accident in data gathered by Virgin Galactic.

“This will be the first time we have been in the lead of a space launch that involved persons on board,” he said.

It was not known whether a black box flight data recorder was installed on the suborbital craft, though Mr Hart stressed that test flights were usually documented with significant amounts of data.

Mr Branson headed to California within hours of the crash, after the suborbital SpaceShipTwo broke apart shortly after it had detached from a mothership at an altitude of 13.7km.

Experts say the accident will delay the advent of commercial space tourism by several years.

Virgin Galactic had hoped to start ferrying wealthy customers to the edge of space next year, charging $US250,000 ($270,000) a person.

About 500 people — including a slew of celebrities such as Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio — had already reserved tickets on the first wave of Virgin Galactic flights.

AFP