The pilot who survived the SpaceShipTwo tragedy has spoken for the first time about how he miraculously escaped death after the Virgin spaceship fell apart while in flight.
According to News.com.au, Peter Siebold, who suffered serious injuries during the mishap, said that he only regained consciousness halfway into his fall, but was composed enough to give a thumbs-up to colleagues in a passing aircraft to show he was alive.
Speaking about the tragedy, the pilot of the doomed aircraft said that he blacked out as the SpaceShipTwo space tourism craft broke up around him at 50,000ft, but was saved by his emergency parachute that deployed at about 20,000ft.
While Siebold survived the crash after being thrown clear of the wreckage, co-pilot Mike Alsbury was killed.
Siebold gave his account of survival to his father, Dr Klaus Siebold, who visited him yesterday at his modest ranch home in Tehachapi, California, on the edge of the Mojave Desert where the spaceship crashed, the report said.
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo space tourism rocket crashed during a test flight at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.
The crash of the vehicle, undergoing its first powered test flight since January over the Mojave Desert, 150 km north of Los Angeles, came days after another private space company, Orbital Sciences Corp, lost a rocket in an explosion moments after liftoff in Virginia.