Virgin Galactic revealed their second SpaceShipTwo this month at the Mojave Air & Space Port. The unveiling ceremony was quite the spectacle, complete the company’s founder, Sir Richard Branson, riding in atop an SUV that towed the vehicle into view. The space was filled with blaring music and blue-tinted lighting as guests were served cocktails to enjoy in celebration. Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking was honored with announcing the name of new suborbital commercial vehicle—VSS (i.e Virgin Spaceship) Unity.

The aircraft was christened, quite adorably, by Branson’s 1-year-old granddaughter, Eva-Deia, who was celebrating her birthday that day. She enthusiastically broke a bottle of milk over the ship’s front hull, with the help of a few close-by adults. The crowd applauded the momentous christening, following with a group rendition of “Happy Birthday,” led by famed English singer Sarah Brightman.

About 15 months ago, the companies original SpaceShipTwo, called VSS Enterprise, was destroyed in a fatal accident. The aircraft broke apart during a tragic test flight on Oct. 31, 2014 that resulted in the death of co-pilot Michael Alsbury and serious injuries to pilot Peter Siebold.

Unity has been under construction for years and had been about 65 percent complete at the time of the Enterprise accident. Thanks to an investigation by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), we now know that Enterprise’s accident was due in part to Alsbury deploying the space plane’s “feathering” re-entry system too early. Investigators determined that Scaled Composites, the aerospace company responsible for building VSS Enterprise, also demonstrated a “failure to consider and protect against the possibility that a single human error could result in a catastrophic hazard to the SpaceShipTwo vehicle,” NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart said in a hearing about the accident that took place last July.

VSS Unity was entrusted to be built by The Spaceship Co., a Mojave-based subsidiary of Virgin Galactic, and this second aircraft features safeguards that will prevent any reenactment of the events that caused the first crash.

SpaceShipTwo is capable of carrying six passengers, as well as two pilots, on brief sojourns to suborbital space. Flights will take off out of Spaceport America in New Mexico where the space plane will be carried to an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters) by a secondary airplane called WhiteKnightTwo. The secondary plane will then release the space plane, at which point the Unity’s onboard rocket motors will fire up, blasting the vehicle up to a minimum of 62 miles (100 km) above the Earth’s surface—the boundary where outer space begins.

Passengers can expect to see the curvature of Earth against the blackness of space and even experience a few minutes of weightlessness, Virgin Galactic representatives explained. Once the tour is complete, SpaceShipTwo will end in a runway landing, about 2.5 hours after later.

Tickets to ride the space plane are already on sale and currently going for $250,000. So far, hundreds of people have already put down deposits to reserve a seat. So many, in fact, that the total number of people expecting to experience the flight will exceed that number of people who have ever been to space.

Eager passengers will have to wait though, as the new SpaceShipTwo isn’t even ready for flight.

In a recent statement, Virgin Galactic representatives said, “Indeed, our new vehicle will remain on the ground for a while after her unveiling, as we run her through full-vehicle tests of her electrical systems and all of her moving parts. We already know these things work individually, but one can’t simply assume they will all work together—that must be tested and verified. We’ll do so quickly, but we won’t cut corners.”

It’s not yet clear how long fully testing the plane will take, but Virgin Galactic assured it’s fans that they won’t start until they are completely confident that they are ready to safely and reliably carry customers to and from space.