Yesterday it was morning in California when the news came that Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight in the Mojave Desert in California. The SpaceShipTwo crashed to the ground and in the hours after it was confirmed that, unfortunately, one of the two pilots died. The other pilot suffered injuries and was taken to a local hospital.

The spaceplane SpaceShipTwo was supposed to go through one of several flight tests needed to develop this aircraft / spacecraft hybrid. The first supersonic flight was accomplished in April 2013 and various other tests were carried out in the following months, always with success. Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic’s owner, planned to start commercial suborbital flights next year but at this point it’s not known when it will be possible to resume the tests.

Scaled Composit, Virgin Galactic’s partner company that built SpaceShipTwo, was performing a test flight using a new type of fuel that never caused any problems in the many ground test. SpaceShipTwo was released from the mother ship White Knight Two and had just turned on its engine when there was what was called an anomaly.

The investigation will shed light on the actual causes and the initial news are unclear. Some articles mention an explosion, others a fire while some eyewitnesses stated that SpaceShipTwo broke up during flight. All the witnesses and the data collected by on-board instruments will have to be put together to figure out what happened. Pieces of the spaceplane are scattered around a large area of the Mojave Desert and will be recovered to help understand the causes of the accident.

George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic’s CEO, said that the space is hard and this was a tough day. The company will go ahead, as it did after the incident in 2007 during the construction of SpaceShipTwo, which cost the lives of three workers.

It’s a very sad moment because SpaceShipTwo can be reconstructed but the life of a man was lost. Richard Branson immediately leaft for California to be close to his employees. It’s in these difficult times that we must find the strength to go on.