Virgin Galactic spaceship tested

If you feel you can trust Richard Branson just about as far as you can throw him, then maybe space travel is not for you.  But the toothy entrepreneur is on the brink of offering tourists a quick trip into space.

His slightly more practical version of the space shuttle appears to have come through some test unscathed.  Good news I suppose for those who want to throw money at Mr Branson and go up where the sky is black – and then look down on the rest of us.

But I have to admit that space exploration on the cheap is not for me.

The Virgin team aiming to send tourists on suborbital flights has tested its spacecraft with a crew for the first time, it has announced.

The craft remained attached to a specially designed aeroplane throughout a six-hour flight over California’s Mojave desert on Thursday, Virgin Galactic said.

On its website, the company congratulated the crew and said “Objectives achieved”. It says the two crew members evaluated all the spaceship’s systems and functions.

Virgin Galactic says the flight test programme will run until 2011 before it starts commercial operations.