SpaceShipTwo Checking Out

Virgin Galactic is making good progress in proving its suborbital tourist spaceship, dubbed SpaceShipTwo, is up to the task. Four successively longer test flights have been flown, and all have been successful.

All four test flights so far have been simple glides from the WhiteKnightTwo mother ship. There will be more of those, followed by several flights in which SpaceShipTwo's rocket engine will be used for increasingly longer periods, leading up to a full-scale suborbital flight.