On Friday, Oct. 31, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo exploded, killing pilot Michael Tyner Alsbury and injuring pilot Peter Siebold. At the time of the explosion, the ship was about 45,000 feet in the air and about 20 miles northeast away from Mojave, California. The debris spread within a 5 mile area.

The SpaceShipTwo is a spaceship intended for sending lay people just above the Earth’s atmosphere for a short amount of time.In order to continue being able to provide this opportunity, Virgin Galactic wants to keep the investigation moving along. There are still many months of research ahead of the crew that is investigating the crash. However, the National Transportation Safety Board told news reporters that this certain pattern of debris usually indicates an in-flight breakup. An in-flight breakup happens when something happens and causes the ship to break apart while still flying. The crash was most likely caused by a problem in the re-entry equipment. The equipment was activated too early and caused the ship to explode.

The head leaders of Virgin Galactic are denying any implications that the project was too rushed or ahead of its time. Virgin Galactic released a letter of condolences to the Alsbury’s family. They send out their deepest regrets and told the family that they will continue to keep them in their thoughts and prayers. Many people are now criticizing the safety of commercial space travel. Before this most current crash, a small, unmanned space travel ship had severe complications. The ship then had to be shot down after the problems became apparent.

So, the question to be considered now is, will Virgin Galactic continue to test and improve their commercial space tourism? As of now, Virgin Galactic is fully intending to continue developing. They already have over 700 tickets sold for the space tourism rocket. The tickets cost over 250,000 dollars and have been bought by many celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Stephen Hawking, and Ashton Kutcher.

Virgin Galactic’s CEO Richard Branson and other Virgin Galactic CEOs have released statements addressing how brave the pilots were and there are special tributes to them inside Virgin Galactic headquarters. One of the key points in all of the CEO’s speeches was how they need to continue to develop their space technologies so something like this never happens again.

As with anything, there will be issues and complications. Virgin Galactic hopes to always remember the pilot who lost his life, and move forward. Their tourism rocket is set to possibly start flying as soon as next spring.