Virgin Galactic rolled out its newest spaceship Tuesday as the company looks to resume test flights in the coming months at its headquarters in the New Mexico desert.

Company officials said it will likely be summer before the ship—designed and manufactured in California—undergoes glide flight testing at Spaceport America in southern New Mexico. That will coincide with the final round of testing for the current generation of spacecraft, which will be the one that takes British billionaire and Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson to the fringes of space later this year.

CEO Michael Colglazier said the addition of the new ship marks the beginning of Virgin Galactic having a fleet that will one day be capable of ferrying paying customers and scientific payloads from spaceports around the globe. The company is still aiming for commercial operations to begin next year following testing and a few months of downtime for maintenance and other upgrades.

Virgin Galactic has reached space twice before—the first time from California in December 2018. The company marked its second successful glide flight over Spaceport America last June.

A billionaire's private SpaceX flight filled its two remaining seats Tuesday with a scientist-teacher and a data engineer whose college friend actually won a spot but gave him the prize.

The new passengers: Sian Proctor, a community college educator in Tempe, Arizona, and Chris Sembroski, a former Air Force missileman from Everett, Washington. They will join flight sponsor Jared Isaacman and another passenger for three days in orbit this fall.

SpaceX chief Elon Musk confirmed on Twitter Tuesday that the latest prototype of the company's Starship rocket series had crashed, after the video feed of its test flight cut out.

"At least the crater is in the right place!" he joked, in acknowledging the fourth failed test of the prototype.

"Something significant happened shortly after landing burn start. Should know what it was once we can examine the bits later today," he added.

The rocket, SN11, launched from the company's south Texas facility around 1300 GMT and began its ascent to 10 kilometers (six miles), experiencing some video glitches.

It was descending to the surface when the feed was lost once again.

"We lost the clock at T plus five minutes, 49 seconds," said announcer John Insprucker, meaning the amount of time that had passed after lift-off.

"Looks like we've had another exciting test of Starship Number 11," he added, dryly.

SN11 is the 11th prototype of Starship, which SpaceX hopes will one day be able to fly crewed missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond.

It was the fourth to conduct a test flight attempting to return to the ground for a soft vertical landing.

Researchers from Brown University have discovered a previously unknown type of ancient crater lake on Mars that could reveal clues about the planet's early climate.

In a study published in the Planetary Science Journal, a research team led by Brown Ph.D. student Ben Boatwright describes an as-yet unnamed crater with some puzzling characteristics. The crater's floor has unmistakable geologic evidence of ancient stream beds and ponds, yet there's no evidence of inlet channels where water could have entered the crater from outside, and no evidence of groundwater activity where it could have bubbled up from below.

So where did the water come from?