The shuttle Virgin Galactic space tourism that crashed Friday during a test flight in the California Mojave Desert broke in flight. This is what emerges from the first elements of the investigation released Sunday by the head of the federal authority responsible for transport security.
"It will take us months to determine the cause of the accident, said Christopher Hart, acting director of the National Transportation Safety Board. We will examine issues of pilot training. We will look at whether there was pressure for further testing. We will also examine safety procedures and the question of design. "
There was no explosion. The cause is in fact structural, may be related to a problem of tail, brake system that would have been triggered too soon.
"This is a major setback, said Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Galactic. This is terrible for the families, and we must now gather our forces to motivate 400 engineers who have worked so hard on this in recent years and find out what did not work. "
This is the second accident in less than a week for a private company in the space sector. On Tuesday, an unmanned rocket built by Orbital Sciences exploded seconds after takeoff from Virginia.
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