By CARLA K. JOHNSON

Associated Press

CHICAGO — Nik Wallenda successfully completed the first of two skyscraper tightrope walks in Chicago Sunday night in a stunt televised around the world.

It took the 35-year-old daredevil, the great-grandson of Karl Wallenda of the famous Flying Wallendas circus family, about six and a half minutes to walk the wire at a 19-degree incline from the Marina City west tower to the top of a building on the other side of a river.

“I love Chicago and Chicago definitely loves me,” said Wallenda as he walked the wire, with the crowd of thousands below him screaming in support. “What an amaz-ing roar!”

The next step of Wallenda’s high-wire event will be a blindfold-ed walk between the two Marina City towers — Chicago landmarks with Hollywood credits — with no net or harness.

The Discovery Cha-nnel is using a 10-second delay for the broadcast, allowing producers to cut away if Wallenda falls.

At around 6:40 p.m., just minutes before the anticipated start of his high-wire feat, Wallenda, who lives in Florida, said the chilly conditions in Chicago would not stall him.

“Yes there’s some wind, yes it’s cool, but it’s not unbearable,” he said.

Months of prepa-rations have meant helicopters lifting cable to the rooftops, road closures and clearanc-es from the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Coast Guard. Residents of Marina City have been asked not to use laser pointers, camera flashes or drones that could interfere. Even grilling has been prohib-ited.

Meanwhile, Wallenda has practiced the walk

in Florida. Two of his previous televised tight-rope walks — over the brink of Niagara Falls in 2012 and across the Little Colorado River Gorge in 2013.

The Discovery Chan-nel hoped to capture an elusive real-time audience in the DVR era. The network plans to keep the almost-live telecast of Wallenda’s progress on viewers’ TV screens even during the commercials, using a “double box” that will show advertisements and Wallenda simultaneously.

The Marina City tow-ers have been on screens — Steve McQueen chased a fugitive around the west tower’s cork-screw parking ramp in “The Hunter” — and graced the album cover of Wilco’s 2002 “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.”

Hours before the tightrope walk, Scott Jensen of Schaumburg, a Chicago suburb, waited to watch the spectacle with his 15-year-old son, Matthew, and Matthew’s friend Tommy Demaret, also 15. They were bun-dled up and eating sand-wiches while seated on a concrete planter with a nearly straight-overhead view of the high wire.

“I think anybody who does something like this is crazy and it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see it,” Scott Jensen said.

Cynthia Garner traveled 90 miles from Belvidere, Illinois, with her husband Johnny.

“I’m scared of

heights,” Garner said looking up at the wire.

“The feeling I feel when I look up there is scared for his life,” she said. “I’m scared for his life.”

Journalists covering Sunday’s event signed waivers relinquishing their right to claim emo-tional distress if they wit-ness a catastrophe.

By BRIAN MELLEYAssociated Press

MOJAVE, Calif. — Billionaire Richard Branson is promising to find out what caused the crash of his Virgin Galactic prototype space tourism rocket that killed a test pilot, but federal investigators are caution-ing that it may take up to a year to learn exactly what went wrong.

The crash in the California desert al-most certainly dashed Branson’s goal of starting suborbital flight next spring, but the mogul said that while he re-mained committed to civilian space travel “we are not going to push on blindly.”

In grim remarks at the Mojave Air and Space Port, where the craft known as SpaceShipTwo was under development, Branson gave no details of Friday’s accident and deferred to the NTSB, whose team began its first day of investigation Saturday.

“Yesterday, we fell short,” he said. “We’ll now comprehensively assess the results of the crash and are deter-mined to learn from this and move forward.”

The investigation could take up to 12 months to complete, he said.

He asserted that safety

has always been the top priority of the program that envisions taking wealthy tourists six at a time to the edge of space for a brief experience of weightlessness and a view of Earth below.

The pilot killed in the test flight was identified Saturday as Michael Tyner Alsbury, 39, of nearby Tehachapi. The surviving pilot is Peter Siebold, 43, who para-chuted to safety and was hospitalized.

Both worked for Scaled Composites, the company develop-ing the spaceship for Virgin Galactic. Scaled

Composite said Alsbury was the co-pilot for the test flight. Siebold, who was piloting SpaceShipTwo, “is alert and talking with his family and doctors,” the company said in a state-ment.

A former colleague said Alsbury was a “home-schooled, home-brewed” pilot who earned his way up through the ranks at the company, starting as an engineer. Alsbury also had put himself through commercial pilot school and was certified as a flight instructor.

“Mike loved what he

did. I think his career ended with him doing exactly that. ... That yesterday ended up in a tragedy was kind of heart-breaking for many of us,” said Brian Binnie, another test pilot who worked at Scaled Composites for 14 years before leaving the com-pany this year.

National Trans port-ation Safety Board Acting Chairman Chris-topher A. Hart said

in vestigators don’t yet know how Siebold got out of the rocketship be-cause they haven’t had a chance to interview him. He said they found an undeployed parachute at the crash site,

He said a five-mile path of debris over an area of uninhabited desert indicates the spacecraft broke up in flight. Learning where spacecraft parts fell will help investigators deter-mine when and how the breakup occurred.

“This will be the first time we have been in the lead of a space launch (accident) that involved

persons onboard,” said Hart, noting that the NTSB did partic-ipate in investigations of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters.

Hart said test flights are usually well-docu-mented. Investigators will review video from multiple cameras that were on the spaceship, on the mother ship, on a chase aircraft and at nearby Edwards Air Force Base. They also have six “nonvolatile” sources of information from the aircraft, and ra-dar data to sift through, he said.

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RINGO H.W. CHIU/AP

National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Acting Chairman Christopher A. Hart speaks Saturday in a press conference on the crash of SpaceShipTwo in Mojave, Calif. The explosion killed a pilot aboard and seriously injured another while scattering wreckage in Southern California’s Mojave Desert, witnesses and officials said.

Wallenda finishes 1st leg of skyscraper walk

CHARLES REX ARBOGAST/AP

Daredevil Nik Wallenda responds to a question Friday during a news conference in Chicago.