It is heading into the 3-month mark when a tragic accident claimed three lives at the Scaled Composites facility in Mojave, California. Glen May, Eric Blackwell and Todd Ivens were killed and three others were injured when an explosion happened during a nitrous oxide injector cold flow test.
The injured and deceased were working at Burt Rutan’s Mojave Spaceport at the time on SpaceShipTwo, which is scheduled to bring tourists to space as early as 2009. Rutan’s company has set up a Scaled Family Support Fund to funnel generous contributions from the public to the affected families. The Scaled Composites employees were the first fatalities in the burgeoning space tourism industry.
