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How Virgin Galactic's spaceship pilot survived a 10-mile fall back to Earth

The Halloween morning test flight was the first time that Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo would blast toward the heavens under the power of a new rocket motor.

And in the days before, pilot Peter Siebold had prepared intensely, spending hours in a flight simulator, going through the “what ifs.” He considered the mission to be “high risk.”

But it wasn't until SpaceShipTwo was more than 10 miles above the Mojave Desert and had passed through the sound barrier that Siebold noticed something was seriously wrong.

Seconds later, Siebold heard a loud bang and then a sound — like “paper fluttering in the wind” — which he now knows was the rocket plane breaking apart.