UPDATE 4/11:  Virgin boss Richard Branson has been doing the international media rounds wince the crash of SpaceShipTwo, slamming “self-professed experts” for their “damaging” claims.

Mr Branson hit out at TV experts asserting that an explosion was behind the crash, as the US National Transportation Safety Board investigating the crash had found that the spacecraft's fuel tanks and engine found in the Mojave Desert were not broken apart.

Branson said sensationalist claims about the crash had been “incredibly hurtful”.

“I've never seen such irresponsible innuendo and damaging innuendo,” the tycoon said.

“I'm absolutely convinced that Virgin Galactic has a great future once the NTSB has made clear exactly what happened.”


ORIGINAL STORY: The future of private space travel has taken a blow, with the tragic death of a test pilot after Virgin’s Galactic SpaceShipTwo went down during a test flight.

Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson says commercial space travel will continue after the crash, but his company will not “press on blindly”.

Branson has held a media conference near the scene of the crash in the Mojave Desert in California, where he said he was working with US authorities to find the cause of the disaster, while the company tries to learn from the incident.

The Virgin crash happened just days after another commercial space flight company, Orbital Sciences, lost a space station cargo ship to a catastrophic first-stage failure seconds after launch. 

Government investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) were at the crash site within hours on Saturday, as they began piecing together what happened.

NTSB acting chair Christopher Hart told reporters that the team was in unknown territory, but would being looking for clues in data gathered by Virgin Galactic.

“This will be the first time we have been in the lead of a space launch that involved persons on board,” Mr Hart said.

“This was a test flight and test flights are typically very well documented in terms of data... and we may get some video feed. We may have lots of evidence that will help us with the investigative process.”

One of the first points of the investigation will focus on SpaceShipTwo's rocket engine, which was testing a new type of fuel for the first time.

It was powered by a solid plastic-type propellant is ignited by nitrous oxide.

The change came after Virgin Galactic announced in May that it would not use standard rubber-based propellants, which had seen success in the spaceship's three previous rocket-powered test flights.

“We've tested both of these fuel grains a lot,” Virgin Galactic chief executive George Whitesides told Reuters at the time.

The crash involved two test pilots for Scaled Composites, a Northrop Grumman Corp subsidiary.

The second pilot is still in a critical condition.

The same company lost three other employees in a July 2007 ground test accident during development of the ship’s propulsion system.

“We owe it to our test pilots to find out exactly what went wrong, and once we've found out what went wrong, if we can overcome it, we'll make absolutely certain that the dream lives on,” Branson told reporters.

“We do understand the risks involved, and we're not going to push on blindly. To do so would be an insult to all those affected by this tragedy.

“We're going to learn from what went wrong, discover how we can improve safety and performance and then move forward together.

“We've been undertaking a comprehensive testing program for many years and safety has always been our number one priority.”