SpaceShipTwo

commercial spaceflight

SpaceShipTwo crash brings down Richard Branson with it

Virgin Galactic’s commercial spaceflight program was pushed back by more than a year after the test flight of its SpaceShipTwo rocket-plane over the California desert blew up mid-air and killed one of its two pilots on October 31. Virgin Galactic had planned to go start operating suborbital flights as

aerodynamic stability

Feathering malfunction, not hyped motor, suspected in SpaceShipTwo crash

On October 31, a manned suborbital test flight broke up mid-air and crashed into the California desert, a 50,000-foot dive that left it smashed. The pilot was killed and the copilot was critically injured. The vehicle was SpaceShipTwo (SS2), owned by British businessman Richard Branson’sVirgin Galactic enterprise, which