Virgin Galactic crash: 'Don't let more die', Richard Branson told Virgin Galactic and its partner Scaled Composites have faced serious criticism for the air disaster on October 31 amid claims that the space ship, which is intended to take six passengers at a time to the fringes of space at a cost of $250,000 each, was being rushed into service too soon. Sir Richard had pledged that SpaceShipTwo would take off with its first passengers in March next year. Previous planned inaugural flight dates had come and gone and the latest deadline will also be missed while investigators try to determine what went wrong. On Saturday, Virgin Galactic's chief executive George Whitesides praised as "truly incredible" the survival of Peter Siebold, the pilot of SpaceShipTwo, who managed to parachute to safety when the craft tore apart at 50,000ft above the Mojave desert in California. His co-pilot Mike Alsbury, 39, a father of two, died in the crash. Mrs Ford said the news of the rocket ship crash had brought memories of the death of her brother flooding back to her. Mr Ivens, 33, and two colleagues Eric Blackwell, 38, and Charles 'Glen" May, 45, who were employed by Scaled Composites, died when a tank of nitrous oxide exploded on July 26 2007 at Mojave Air and Space Port. They had been watching the test from behind a chain-link fence which offered them no protection from the shrapnel and other debris when the nitrous oxide tank blew up. Three other employees were injured in the blast and Scaled Composites was fined a little over $25,00 for five breaches of health and safety rules. It is understood that Scaled Composites conducted its own an internal review of what went wrong although those findings have never been made public. The cause of the accident was also never made public. Mrs Ford, who lives in Portland, Oregon, where Mr Ivens grew up, said: "I got that 'not again" feeling when I saw the news last week. They never really got to the bottom of why it happened, I still don't know. We were just told it was a one-in-500,000 accident. But here we are again. She believes the commercial space travel project has become "too risky" and that one life lost was too many. Mrs Ford also drew attention to a number of senior staff who had quit the project in recent months - including Virgin Galactic's vice president in charge of safety and the chief who designed SpaceShipTwo. She said those resignations should have sounded alarm bells for other senior executives at the company. While Mrs Ford said her brother had not expressed any specific concerns for his safety to her, his work did worry him. In the weeks before his death he told her: 'If anything happens it's going to be big. Sir Richard, along with other executives from Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites, met Mrs Ford's parents to offer their condolences in the weeks after the accident, and the family was given tickets to SpaceShipTwo's maiden voyage. Mrs Ford said that neither she nor her parents had ever planned to attend the maiden launch. But she remains proud of the work her brother had done. "Whatever the family thinks of the program, Todd would truly be proud to see it launch," she said. I would tell the family of the pilot that died last week to be proud of what he was doing too. A statutory investigation into the causes of the crash will take between six months and a year but in the meantime Virgin is expected to plough on with the completion of a second space rocket that uses the same design. About 20 paid-up passengers have demanded their money back in the nine days since the crash. Virgin Galactic on Saturday said it planned to continue with its space programme while pointing out that the 2007 test, which went wrong, was conducted by Scaled Composites. A source at Virgin said that the 2007 explosion was "an industrial accident with tragic consequences during a nitrous cold flow test and clearly has no bearing on the events of last week." The source added that the explosion in 2007 was subject to external and internal investigations and resulted in a number of important modifications to the hybrid propulsion system. Scaled Composites was not available for comment at time of going to press. This weekend details began to emerge of Mr Siebold's "truly incredible" escape. The rocket had no ejector seats but it is now thought Mr Siebold had just enough time to reach either the door immediately to the rear of the pilot station or the emergency hatch set into the right hand side of the middle passenger window. It is estimated he had between three and four seconds between realising the ship was breaking up and its destruction to escape.