27 July 2007
Press sources in California report that three people have been killed and four injured in an explosion at the home of Scaled Composites. Scaled Composites is the company which created the SpaceShipOne spacecraft which <a href=’http://www.flyer.co.uk/news/newsfeed.php?artnum=134′ target=’_blank’>won the Ansari X-Prize</a> for civilian manned spaceflight in 2004.
The explosion apparently happened in a remote corner of the Scaled Composites base, the Mojave Air and Space Port. According to Burt Rutan – legendary head of Scaled Composites and the brain behind many fine and unusual aircraft including SpaceShipOne – the explosion happened during the testing of a flow of nitrous oxide through an injector. This was to test the components for the new SpaceShipTwo program which aims to take space tourists into orbit.
Rutan – who was not on site when the accident happened – said that the test had been run safely many times for the initial SpaceShipOne program, and had been run safely once for SpaceShipTwo.
At this stage there’s no news about how the timescale will be affected – earlier this week Virgin Galactic (the Richard Branson-backed company which will be using SpaceShipTwo for space tourism) announced that <a href=’http://www.flyer.co.uk/news/newsfeed.php?artnum=614′ target=’_blank’>it hoped to have SpaceShipTwo on display</a> at Oshkosh this time next year.
