Sir Richard Branson has vowed to continue his space tourism venture after the $500 million rocketship on which he had hoped to fly a host of rich passengers into space exploded and crashed during a test flight over the Mojave desert in California yesterday.
One pilot died and the other was seriously injured.
The dead man has been named as Michael Alsbury, aged 39. The pilot who survived Friday’s crash has not been identified.
Mr Alsbury was an employee of Scaled Composites, the company developing SpaceShipTwo
Speaking publicly for the first time following the SpaceShipTwo crash over California’s Mojave Desert, the entrepreneur told a news conference in California: “Pushing the bounds of possibility comes with unavoidable risk. We are standing on the shoulders of giants,