Virgin Atlantic rebounds into private spacelift, unveils new ship today

After many months of grounded spacecraft, Orbital and SpaceX are flying again (although Orbital is hitching a ride on someone else’s rocket), and now Virgin Galactic is ready to get back in the game.

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Today at 2pm Eastern, the company will reveal its new spaceship. The rocket-powered spaceplane, which will look a lot like its predecessor, the SpaceShipTwo, is designed to launch from another aircraft at an altitude of 50,000 feet, then ascend into suborbital space before gliding gently back down to Earth and landing like an airplane. Its rocket engines are easy to reuse, since the company doesn’t have to worry about those tricky vertical landings that SpaceX and Blue Origin have to contend with.

The first SpaceShipTwo crashed because Alsbury deployed the plane’s feathering re-entry system too soon, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. So, the second version of the ship will have safeguards in place to make sure that doesn’t happen again, as well as a few other modifications that had been planned before the accident.

Virgin Galactic’s new ship won’t fly today—it needs to go through a lot of testing first. The ship will work its way gradually up to space, beginning by simply piggybacking on its mothership, later gliding off of it, and eventually using its rocket engines to travel higher and faster on each successive flight.

Recall than an unmanned Orbital Sciences launch exploded in October 2014, followed just days later by the crash of SpaceShipTwo–the suborbital spaceplane built by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic– and the death of pilot Michael Alsbury followed by SpaceX losing its unmanned resupply mission in June of 2015.

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