T t 2014 11 01

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OF LONDON

saturday november 1 2014 | thetimes.co.uk | no 71343

Cheap and chic

The off-season Riviera need not break the bank Pages 50-51

PIXEL 8000

IN THE NEWS

Jerusalem holy site opened after rioting Israel reopened the most holy site in Jerusalem after it was closed by unrest over the shooting of a Palestinian man. Mutaz Hijazi was was killed by police searching for the gunman who seriously injured Rabbi Yehuda Glick, a prominent campaigner for Jewish prayer rights on the site known to Jews as Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. Page 34

Modi snubs Gandhi Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, missed a ceremony to mark the 30th anniversary of the assassination of his predecessor Indira Gandhi in favour of honouring a nationalist known as the “Ironman of India”. Page 31 Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo came down on a test flight yesterday. Sir Richard Branson, below with a prototype in 2008, had intended to create a space tourism industry

Virgin space flight crashes

One pilot killed, another critical after $500m rocketship explodes over Mojave desert Will Pavia New York

The $500 million rocketship on which Sir Richard Branson had hoped to fly a host of rich passengers into space exploded and crashed during a test flight over the Mojave desert in California yesterday. One pilot died and the other was seriously injured. Virgin Galactic said its SpaceShipTwo had “experienced an in-flight anomaly” during a flight from its base in California to test a new type of rocket fuel. The crash is a setback to Sir Richard’s project and threatens wider ambitions of commercialising space travel. Observers described the spacecraft exploding in the sky. Both pilots were said to be equipped with parachutes and one chute was said to have been seen opening over the Mojave Air and Space Port amid debris falling from the sky. However, a blogger who was cover-

ing the test flight said that he had driven to one of the crash sites and seen the body of a pilot amid the wreckage. “Body still in seat,” said Doug Messier, who writes for the site Parabolic Arc, in a post on Twitter. He said that SpaceShipTwo, had trouble with engine bur burn, blew up, came down in pieces near Koehn Lake”, a dry lake 100 miles north of Los Angeles. Virgin Galactic said that the powered test flight was being conducted by its partner, Scaled Composites. The company, run by the American aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004 by becoming the first private enterprise to send a shuttle into space twice within the space of a fortnight. Sir Richard sought to develop the world’s first commercial space airliner on the back of that success, building a passenger space rocket that was designed to hang beneath the wing of a

“mothership”, a more conventional aircraft with twin fuselages. Once the “mothership” reached 48,000ft, the shuttle would detach and its rocket engine would fire, blasting it up past the Karman Line 60 miles above the Earth, which many take as the boundary of space. After five minutes in orbit, the shuttle would then glide down again, its wings folding back to slow its return, coming back to land at the spaceport in New Mexico where Virgin Galactic was to be the first carrier of the new age of space tourism. Sir Richard sold more than 700 tickets for up to $250,000 each, persuading celebrities and scientists to sign up and garnering extra publicity and promising customers that his shuttle would begin blasting them into orbit within the few years — a deadline that crept back as the company experienced a series of Continued on page 7, col 5

Migrants ‘put in danger’ Thousands of migrants making the treacherous sea crossing from Africa to Europe are in danger of drowning as a limited EU patrol fleet goes into action in the Mediterranean today, the Vatican has warned. Page 33

Sons sue over MH370 The Malaysian government and the country’s national airline are being sued by two children for the loss of their father on flight MH370, which mysteriously vanished without trace almost eight months ago. Page 35

Inside today

The children shunned after survivingg ebola Pages 30-31

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