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“Space is hard – but worth it,” Richard Branson wrote after Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashed in October 2014, killing one of the pilots. Now the company is making good on that mantra, having launched its first test flight since the tragic incident.
The brand-new VSS Unity, the latest SpaceShipTwo craft to roll off the production line, flew for nearly 4 hours across the Californian desert earlier this week, as you can see in the video below.
The VSS Unity was named by Stephen Hawking, who also has his name down to be one of the first to take the journey to the edge of our atmosphere.
Eventually, it’s hoped that the craft will be able to take six passengers at a time