March 2010
Virgin Galactic's fledgling space tourism rocket was taken aloft over the California desert on an inaugural test flight attached to the wing of its mothership, the company said.

The captive-carry test marked the start of a test programme for SpaceShipTwo that will progress to free flights as a glider and then under rocket power, Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic said in a statement.

Throughout the two-hour, 54-minute test, the spaceship remained slung beneath the middle of the wing of its unique twin-fuselage carrier aircraft, the WhiteKnightTwo.

The pair achieved an altitude of 45,000 feet before returning to the Mojave Air and Space Port, which is 70 miles north of Los Angeles, the company said.

The rocket and mothership are the second-generation of the Burt Rutan-designed system that sent the first privately developed, manned rocket into space in June 2004. SpaceShipOne went on that year to make two more suborbital flights, winning the 10 million US dollar Ansari X Prize.

Sir Richard, the billionaire founder of Virgin Group Ltd, is in a deal with the Rutan-founded Scaled Composites LLC of Mojave, California, to develop passenger-carrying spacecraft and launchers.

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