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Cape Canaveral - 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.
Two pilots were aboard the spaceship, which was undergoing its first powered test flight since January. It was not immediately known if they were able to parachute to safety.
More than 800 people have paid or put down deposits to fly aboard the spaceship, which is carried to an altitude of about 45 000 feet and released. The spaceship then fires its rocket motor to catapult it to about 100 km high, 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 $10 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, 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 lift-off from Wallops Island, Virginia, destroying a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station.
AFP is reporting one pilot was killed and another seriously injured when the Virgin
Galactic spaceship crashed in the desert a spokesperson for the
California Highway Patrol said.
The injured pilot was taken to hospital, the spokesperson told AFP after the accident that left debris from the commercial edge-of-space craft scattered across the desert near Mojave.
