Space tourism company Virgin Galactic said Monday it planned a new test flight for its SpaceShipTwo craft this month after an aborted test in early December.

"The flight window will open on February 13 with opportunities to fly throughout February, pending good weather conditions and technical readiness," Richard Branson's company said.

"Pre-flight preparations are already underway at Spaceport America, New Mexico."

It added the flight would test remedial work completed since the December test when the onboard computer halted ignition of the rocket motor.

SpaceShipTwo had been expected to take its first passengers into space later this year.

So far, 600 people who have paid up to $250,000—Virgin Galactic calls them "future astronauts"—have been waiting for years to take their seat.

SpaceShipTwo's development was delayed by a devastating crash of the first one in 2014 due to a pilot error.

When fully functional, the spacecraft will be taken up by a special plane and released at high altitude.

On January 31, 1961, an intrepid chimpanzee called Ham was launched on a rocket from Cape Canaveral in the United States, and returned to Earth alive. In this process, he became the first hominin in space.

In the 1950s, it was unclear whether humans could survive outside Earth—both physically and mentally. The science fiction writer and warfare expert Cordwainer Smith wrote about the psychological pain of being in space.

Plants, insects and animals had been taken to high altitudes in balloons and rockets since the 18th century. The Soviet Union sent the dog Laika into orbit on Sputnik 2 in 1957. She died, but from overheating rather than the effects of space travel itself.

While the USSR focused on dogs, the US turned to chimpanzees as they were the most like humans. The stakes became higher when US President John F. Kennedy promised to land humans on the Moon by the end of the 1960s.

Biography of a non-human astronaut

Ham was born in 1957 in a rainforest in the Central African nation of Cameroon, then a French territory.

A pair of spacewalking astronauts completed a four-year effort to modernize the International Space Station's power grid on Monday, installing one last battery.

A Maine company that's developing a rocket to propel small satellites into space passed its first major test on Sunday.

Brunswick-based bluShift Aerospace launched a 20-foot (6-meter) prototype rocket, hitting an altitude of a little more than 4,000 feet (1,219 meters) in a first run designed to test the rocket's propulsion and control systems.

It carried a science project by Falmouth High School students that will measure flight metrics such as barometric pressure, a special alloy that's being tested by a New Hampshire company—and a Dutch dessert called stroopwafel, in an homage to its Amsterdam-based parent company.