What was supposed to be relatively safe testing routine for the rocket motor of SpaceShipTwo went awry as a freak accident caused an explosion that took the lives of three people and injured three others.

The accident took place around 2:30 pm last Thursday, in the Mojave Air and Space Port facility in California. Three unnamed personnel were killed, while three others were critically injured. All suffered severe shrapnel wounds, with two of the three people who perished dying at the scene, while another died in the hospital.

Burt Rutan, aerospace designer and one of the founders of Scaled Composites, claimed that they were performing a completely safe testing of nitrous oxide flow through an injector for SpaceShipTwo's rocket motor, when the accident happened.  "We were doing a test we believe was safe. We don't know why it exploded. We just don't know," he said.

The victims of the accident were employees of Scaled Composites, a privately-owned space travel outfit run by Rutan. The rockets were proposed to be used in Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space venture.

Virgin Galactic's president, Will Whitehorn, would not comment on the accident but instead gave the company's sympathy to the bereaved. Stuart Witt, the Mojave airport's general manager, acknowledged the dangers that come with space exploration. What we do is inherently risky," he said. "These are not the days we look forward to, but we deal with it."

Rutan's first manned Rocket, the award-winning SpaceShipOne, was the first of its kind to reach space and was privately financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Rutan's current project, the SpaceShipTwo, has Virgin Galactic's Branson as one of its investors, with investments amounting to at least US$ 202 million. It was planned to be ready within a year, and have its commercial launch in 2009.

With Christmas just around the corner, Popular Mechanics magazine releases its picks for this year's top scientific innovations and breakthroughs.

From the latest in viral research to the fastest way to ground peanuts,  Breakthrough awards are handed to ground-breaking products in their field, forcing competitors to take notice, and paving the way for future innovations. Just some of the more interesting products we've seen:

Samsung Helix XM2G0
Samsung's new mobile marries the XM satellite radio network with this gizmo, allowing the user to hear/record XM broadcasts, and download MP3's via satellite.

Sawtop Contractor's 10-inch saw
Sawtop's product has sensors that shut the blade down three to five milliseconds after your fingers touch 'em, ensuring that your close shave doesn't end with a trip to the hospital.

Lego Mindstorms NXT
Lego's new kit can be programmed to react to light, sound (voice commands), and movement, and comes equipped with a blue-tooth antenna for better accessibility.

Also featured is the Breakthrough Leadership Award handed to Burt Rutan. He's the famed creator of the Voyager plane (1986), and the SpaceShipOne rocket plane, the winner of Ansari's X prize two years ago for a commercially produced, low-cost space vehicle.

The rest of the honorees can be accessed by the source link, and we hope it'll give you ideas on just what to get
come this season's greetings (We've got our eye on the Helix and Lego 'Bot).

  

Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson today revealed a mock-up of the rocket-propelled spaceplane that will take Virgin Galactic business customers into sub-orbital space flight. Tickets on a Virgin Galactic flight are expected to cost $ 190,000, a price that isn't bad considering that the spacecraft which Branson revealed today can only carry a total of 8 people, 6 passengers and 2 pilots, on the sub-orbital flight at an altitude of 140km.

The design of the yet unnamed craft was based upon the successful SpaceShipOne craft which was built by pioneer Burt Rutan, the first engineering beauty which claims the title for the first privately built vehicle to reach space in 2004. Since the success of SpaceShipOne, Virgin Group later created Virgin Galactic, the space-faring division of Virgin Atlantic and has contracted Rutan's company Scaled Composites to design and build a passenger version of SpaceShipOne. Virgin Galactic will own and operate at least five spaceships and two motherships which carry the spaceships up to approximately 50,000ft.

The passenger flights which could begin as early as 2009, will take off from the purpose-built 5m facility called Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, technically the first private spaceport on earth. Virgin claimed back in July that they had already received 150 space-flight bookings already and that 60,000 potential customers had registered interest in the flights. It's just like Star Trek really, just without the faster than light engines.

Burt Rutan has etched his mark in the complex and sometimes dangerous world of aerospace design. In case you have no idea who in the world this guy is, he is an American aerospace engineer known for his originality in designing light, strong, unusual-looking, energy-efficient aircraft, and not to mention those sideburns.

He is most famous for his design of the record-breaking Voyager, which was the first plane to fly around the world without stopping or refueling, and the suborbital rocket plane SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004. Now, that's something for his resume.

Now, the guy has been busy on building the SpaceShipTwo, the successor to the highly venerated SpaceShipOne. When asked what he plans for his next innovation, he says that he's "focusing now on going ahead and doing something that I never did with airplanes. That is, not just do research but go ahead and build something that would be certified. Produce it and sell it to spacelines and let them go out there and compete with each other to fly the public."

The SpaceShipTwo, according to Rutan, has lots of windows, which is quite unusual for a spacecraft but would be great for customers who want to engage in civilian spaceflight. Experiencing weightlessness is also very crucial - A person in SpaceShipTwo will feel just four minutes of freefall, so having a great big cabin is extremely important “to be able to stretch out your arms and legs and float around.” Customers will also not wear the usual pressure suit, as Rutan emphasizes that experiencing weightlessness in shirtsleeve is important.

Hauling a SpaceShipTwo into launch position will require use of a mega-mothership that’s patterned after the White Knight aircraft utilized for the Tier 1 program. That giant airplane will have an identical cabin like that built into SpaceShipTwo. You can take up people and float them out of their chairs.

In the future, it won't be surprising when SpaceShipTwo takes enthusiastic space tourists into space. Working with Virgin Galactic - a spaceline which plans to offer sub-orbital spaceflights and later orbital spaceflights to the paying public, a surreal but nice, and not to mention cheaper spaceflight would be entirely possible.