The next iteration of an aircraft that could someday help loft paying passengers on brief forays into space will appear at AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisc., this summer. WhiteKnightTwo had its first flight in December and is in the midst of flight tests. It will be flown to AirVenture and put on display for the week, the Experimental Aircraft Association reported. WhiteKnightTwo is set to start tests carrying an unmanned rocket – SpaceShipTwo – later this year. The Virgin Mothership, as it is also known, is a four-engine composite airplane with two hulls designed to carry a larger rocket ship in between the two. The plane can fly as high as 60,000 feet in parabolic arcs that simulate weightlessness.

A nitrous oxide test gone wrong that killed three Scaled Composites workers and severely injured three more last year could have been a less serious incident if the company had given the workers better safety training, California’s workplace safety department said last week. Burt Rutan’s company, famous for winning the Ansari X Prize in 2004 with its small, reusable SpaceShipOne design, has already been fined nearly $30,000 for the accident, The New York Times reported. Workers were doing a “cold flow” test of a rocket engine that runs on nitrous oxide and a rubber-based fuel. One group of workers moved behind a 15-foot earthen berm 430 feet from the test site and alerted another group of workers that the test was about to start. But rather than moving to a safe location, several of those workers gathered behind a chain-link fence close to the test pad. It was those workers who were killed and injured. Scaled Composites is appealing its fine and development of the SpaceShipTwo spacecraft has been delayed as a result of the accident.