Thursday’s flight was the first powered test flight by the VSS Unity spaceship, built after the crash of Virgin Galactic’s first SpaceShipTwo vehicle, which killed co-pilot Michael Alsbury and injured lead pilot Peter Siebold after an in-flight breakup 10 miles above California’s Mojave Desert on Oct. 31, 2014. The Spaceship Company, a Virgin Galactic sister firm also owned by Branson's London-based Virgin Group, built the new SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity, the second in a planned fleet of five, and took over the test-flight program from Scaled. After the voyage, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson tweeted that “space feels tantalisingly close now.”

VSS Unity has completed a series of unpowered test flights over the past year, according to Space.com, but Thursday’s mission marks Virgin Galactic’s first return to powered flight since the VSS Enterprise crashed in 2014, killing one of its pilots.
Virgin Galactic successfully tests VSS Unity, the first test since a October 2014 crash destroyed a previous version, VSS Enterprise.