The hangar that housed Virgin Galactic's ill-fated SpaceShipTwo has an empty space, but at a manufacturing plant just down the road technicians on Wednesday were back at work putting together an identical sister ship.The original rocket-powered space plane, built to take paying passengers on short rides into suborbital space, broke apart over Mojave, California, on Friday during a test flight that killed one pilot and left another seriously injured.
The cause of the accident is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, which is focusing on why co-pilot Mike Alsbury, who died in the crash, unlocked the ship's movable tail section early, before aerodynamic forces were right to keep the structure held in place as designed.About two seconds after the tail was unlocked, it began to swivel outward, likely triggering the vehicle's supersonic breakup and Alsbury's death.
The surviving pilot, Pete Siebold, 43, and Alsbury, 39, had planned to test the so-called feathering tail system as part of SpaceShipTwo's fourth rocket-powered test flight, the first since Virgin Galactic decided to use a new fuel to boost the space plane to higher altitudes.
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