British billionaire Richard Branson said Saturday that he was determined to find out what went wrong with his space tourism aircraft that crashed, killing one pilot and seriously injuring the other.

Branson said at a news conference that safety has always been the top priority of the program.

He would not discuss details of Friday’s accident, which U.S. transportation officials are in the early stages of investigating.

The Virgin Galactic commercial spaceship, SpaceShipTwo, crashed after it was released from a plane during a test flight over the Mojave Desert in the western U.S. state of California.

The pilot who died was identified as Michael Alsbury, 39, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing the Kern County coroner’s office. The coroner’s office could not be reached immediately to confirm the report.

Alsbury was a project engineer and test pilot at Scaled Composites, a Northrop Grumman Corp. subsidiary that built and designed the spacecraft for Virgin Galactic. He was flying for the ninth time aboard SpaceShipTwo, including serving as the co-pilot on the vehicle’s first rocket-powered test flight on April 29, 2013, according to his biography on the company’s website.

The injured pilot, who has not been identified, parachuted from the plane and was hospitalized for severe injuries, officials said.

The Virgin probe will most likely focus on SpaceShipTwo’s engine, which on Friday was flying with a new type of fuel for the first time, experts said.

The solid plastic-type propellant is ignited by nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas.

Virgin Galactic announced in May that it was replacing the rubber-based propellant used during previous test flights to get better performance.

“We’ve tested both of these fuel grains a lot,” Virgin Galactic Chief Executive George Whitesides said at the time.

Before Friday’s flight, SpaceShipTwo’s last powered test flight was in January, though the rocket and its new propellant had passed multiple ground tests.

Virgin Galactic, which was founded by Branson, plans to sell trips on SpaceShipTwo to the edge of space. Passengers would have a few minutes of weightlessness before returning to Earth.

The accident was the second suffered by a private U.S. space company in recent days. On Tuesday, an unmanned commercial rocket that was supposed to send a cargo ship to the International Space Station exploded seconds after liftoff from a NASA launch pad in the eastern state of Virginia.

Some information for this report comes from Reuters.
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