Virgin boss says dream will live on only if engineers can identify and overcome cause of fatal accident that claimed life of a test pilot in Mojave desert

Sir Richard Branson acknowledged on Saturday that his dream of commercial space tourism may have ended in the explosion that consumed Virgin Galactic’s test craft SpaceShipTwo in the skies above California’s Mojave desert.

After rushing overnight to the scene of Friday’s accident, the Virgin chief executive told reporters he and his team would love to see the project through to completion – but he added a big if. “We owe it to our test pilots to find out what went wrong,” Branson said. “And once we find out what went wrong, if we can overcome it, we will make absolutely certain that the dream lives on.”

“Yesterday we fell short,” he said. “We’ll now comprehensively assess the results of the crash and are determined to learn from this and move forward.”

“We are not going to push on blindly,” he added.

According to initial accounts, SpaceShipTwo broke up at an altitude of about 45,000ft shortly after separating from its mothership, WhiteKnightTwo. One crewmember, identified on Saturday as 39-year-old Michael Tyner Alsbury of Tehachapi, California, was killed.

Alsbury was a project engineer and test pilot at Scaled Composites, a Northrop Grumman Corp subsidiary that built and designed the spacecraft for Virgin Galactic. He was flying for the ninth time aboard SpaceShipTwo, including serving as the co-pilot on the vehicle’s first rocket-powered test flight on April 29, 2013, according to his biography on the company’s website. Another, who has been named as Peter Siebold, was injured.

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board – which has investigated space shuttle crashes but confines most of its work to conventional aircraft – on Saturday began the painstaking task of sifting through the wreckage, in the desert near Edwards air force base north of Los Angeles, going through the test flight data and interviewing witnesses.

In an initial news conference, the acting NTSB chairman, Christopher Hart, said he did not even know if SpaceShipTwo had a black box flight recorder.

Branson said it was up to the NTSB to establish what happened and that he would not comment until the agency had completed its investigation. In a prepared statement, he sounded upbeat about recovering from Friday’s accident and continuing his ambition of launching a commercial venture to send civilians into space.

However, when reporters started asking him follow-up questions, he sounded much more hesitant and tentative. “We would love to finish what we started some years ago,” he began, then hesitated several times before completing his sentence.

‘It was eerie, just an eerie feeling’

Accounts of what happened on Friday morning are necessarily murky and unreliable at this stage. But it is known this was the first test flight in nine months. It is also known that Virgin Galactic had been forced to abandon a previous rubber-based fuel compound because it did not deliver the required performance and was trying out a new plastic-based compound for the first time on a live flight.

Some reports suggested Friday’s test flight was delayed because of concerns about the fuel’s temperature. At about 10.30am, SpaceShipTwo and its mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, soared into the sky.

Shortly after they separated, about 40 minutes later, SpaceShipTwo suffered what Virgin Galactic has described as “a serious anomaly”, broke up at 45,000ft.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest SpaceShipTwo crash kills pilot.

Siebold parachuted out and, despite incurring unspecified injuries, reached ground safely and was rushed to hospital. Alsbury was not so lucky. It is not clear if he too parachuted out and died on his way to the ground, or if he never made it out.

The wreckage of SpaceShipTwo was strewn on either side of a railway track about 22 miles north of Mojave. Deputies from the local sheriff’s department rushed to secure the scene pending the arrival of the NTSB investigators, staying out all night in unseasonably cold temperatures to keep the curious at arm’s length.

The pilots worked for Virgin Galactic’s partner company, Scaled Composites, which is based at the Mojave air and space port. The pilots, who wear distinctive green and blue uniforms, are a fixture in the tiny town not far from Edwards Air Force Base and their misfortune plunged much of Mojave into mourning.

The accident was too far away to hear, but cafes and restaurants along Mojave’s main drag realised there was a problem when nobody showed up for what is usually a crowded lunch hour. “It was eerie, just an eerie feeling,” said Carlos Davila, who runs the Old Desert Café.

From the start, Branson has cut a glamorous figure in this town and his promise of space travel within reach of anyone – anyone with $250,000 (£156,000) spare for a ticket, anyway – never lacked for public-relations panache.

His timetable, however, has always seemed wildly overoptimistic. At SpaceShipTwo’s unveiling, he talked about commercial flights beginning as early as 2011. Last year, he applied to begin a rigorous 18-month testing process with the Federal Aviation Authority, only to stop the clock once it became clear the fuel compound still needed work.

Branson’s chutzpah won him a lot of supporters. Virgin Galactic said 800 people had paid deposits for a ticket, including teen pop bad-boy Justin Bieber and the actor Ashton Kutcher. The town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, meanwhile, has invested more than $200m in public funds to start work on the spaceport from which VirginGalactic’s commercial flights would blast off.

All of that is now in doubt. “Space is hard,” the chief executive of Virgin Galactic, George Whitesides, acknowledged after the accident.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A piece of debris is seen near the crash site of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo near Cantil, California, on Saturday. Photograph: LUCY NICHOLSON/REUTERS

Few projects in the history of aviation have carried the weight of so many ill omens as Branson’s extravagant venture to send civilians into space.

Even before Friday’s disaster in the skies above the Mojave desert, this was a project marked by bad luck and near-calamity.

Five years ago, as Branson was declaring SpaceShipTwo to be “the sexiest spaceship ever” at an unveiling at the Mojave spaceport, howling winds, sleet and near-freezing temperatures reduced the invited glitterati – politicians, actors, glamour babes and some of the world’s top aerospace engineers – to human icicles. Barely 20 minutes after they abandoned their vodka cocktails and champagne, the heavy tent erected for them on the airport runway collapsed. It was pure luck the structure did not succumb sooner and kill a lot of people.

Branson put on his bravest face on that occasion. And he was forced to do so again on Saturday, as he flew into Mojave to reassure his large team of engineers that the commercial space tourism project would continue – if at all possible.

Branson was wearing his trademark open-neck white shirt and black jacket, but the casual confidence of his delivery before the news cameras could not mask a deep hesitation about a project that has already crashed through several deadlines and whose cost has skyrocketed north of $1bn.

“It’s fair to say that all 400 engineers who work here and indeed most people in the world would love to see the dream living on,” he said. “Once we find out what went wrong, if we can overcome it, we will make absolutely certain that the dream lives on.”

That “if” was a big one. Roughly one-third of Branson’s seed money has come from a single source, the Abar investment fund in Abu Dhabi, which will now have to think seriously whether it is realistic to expect a space tourism hub in the Arabian Gulf in the near future, as it had been hoping.

The loss of SpaceShipTwo, on its own, means that Branson’s dream of boarding a test flight himself early next year has now been shattered. It is too early to say if a new test craft will be built, how long it will take, or how much it will cost.