Virgin Galactic has defended its safety regime in the face of media criticism following the crash of its experimental spacecraft in the US on Friday.
The company said that principle of safety “has guided every decision we have made over the past decade, and any suggestion to the contrary is categorically untrue”.
SpaceShipTwo broke up in mid-air during a test flight in California’s Mojave Desert, killing one of the two pilots.
Virgin Galactic aims to send tourists on suborbital flights.
Meanwhile, the US National Transportation Safety Board – which is in charge of the crash investigation – said it had found almost all of the parts of SpaceShipTwo.
NTSB head, Christopher Hart, has said the full investigation could take up to a year.
“We’ll be looking at training issues. We’ll be looking at was their pressure to continue testing. We’ll be looking at safety culture. We’ll be looking at the design, the procedure,” the BBC reported him as saying on Sunday evening in California.
“We’ve got many, many issues to look in to much more extensively before we can determine the cause.”
Virgin Galactic said in a statement responding to criticism in the media about its approach to safety, “everything we do is to pursue the vision of accessible and democratised space – and to do it safely”.
It added: “Just like early air or sea travel, it is hard and complicated, but we believe that a thriving commercial space industry will have far reaching benefits for humanity, technology and research for generations to come.
“Now is not the time for speculation. Now is the time to focus on all those affected by this tragic accident and to work with the experts at the NTSB, to get to the bottom of what happened on that tragic day.”
Virgin Galactic founder, Sir Richard Branson, has said he is “determined to find out what went wrong” and learn from the tragedy.