Virgin Galactic successfully flew its first paying customers to the final frontier on Thursday, a highly anticipated achievement that puts it back on track in the nascent private space sector.
Officers of the Italian Air Force unfurled their country’s flag and peered out the windows at the curve of the Earth as they enjoyed a few minutes of weightlessness at 85.1 kilometers above sea level.
“It’s been a beautiful ride,” Colonel Walter Villadei told reporters at a press conference, adding that his favorite moment was seeing the contrast between the blackness of space and the planet below.
Dubbed Galactic 01, the mission began when a giant twin-hulled “mothership” aircraft took off from a runway in Spaceport America, New Mexico, at around 8:30 a.m. local time (1430 GMT) on June 29, 2023.
The carrier reached high altitude and about 40 minutes later released a rocket-powered aircraft, named VSS Unity, which soared into space at nearly Mach 3.
Fifty miles is considered the limit of space by NASA and the US Air Force, although the internationally recognized limit, known as the Karman Line, is 62 miles high.
Villadei was joined in the cabin by Lieutenant Colonel Angelo Landolfi of the Italian Air Force, Pantaleone Carlucci of the National Research Council of Italy and Colin Bennett of Virgin Galactic.
There were also two pilots on the spaceplane and two on the aircraft carrier.
Unity later glided safely back to Earth, a live stream revealed.
The flight came nearly two years after Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson flew to space in a test flight intended to usher in a new era of lucrative space tourism.
But the company subsequently suffered setbacks, including a brief grounding by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which found that the Branson flight deviated from its assigned airspace and that Virgin Galactic failed to communicate the “accident” as required. .
Lab tests later revealed that certain materials used in its vehicles had fallen below required strength margins, necessitating fleet upgrades.
The company ended its spaceflight hiatus with a successful test in May, paving the way for Thursday’s mission. In total, it performed five test flights ahead of Thursday’s commercial flight.
Monthly flights
The Galactic 01 crew was tasked with conducting 13 controlled and autonomous experiments, collecting data from their suits and sensors in the cabin.
Experiments include measuring radiation levels in the understudied mesosphere, and how certain liquids and solids mix in microgravity.
Villadei explained that researchers who want to work in microgravity currently have only two options: parabolic airplane flights, where passengers experience weightlessness for a few seconds, and missions to the International Space Station, which last six months.
Virgin Galactic thus provides a “gap filler,” he said, and the spaceplane’s size allowed for larger experiments than could fit in a rocket.
Founded in 2004, Virgin Galactic has sold about 800 tickets for seats on future commercial flights – 600 between 2005 and 2014 for US$200,000 to $250,000, and 200 since then for $450,000 each.
Movie stars and celebrities were among the first to take seats, but the company’s program suffered a disaster in 2014 when a spaceplane on a test flight broke apart in mid-air, killing the copilot and seriously injuring the pilot.
The company is now looking to the future. Its next mission, Galactic 02, is scheduled for August and after that it hopes to make monthly space jumps.
Branson, Bezos and Musk
Virgin Galactic competes in the “suborbital” space tourism sector with billionaire Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin, which has already sent 32 people into space using a vertical launch rocket.
But since an accident in September 2022 during an unmanned flight, the Blue Origin rocket is no longer there grounded. The company promised to resume space flights soon in March.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, meanwhile, has worked with partner companies to send paying customers higher up, into orbit or to the International Space Station.
But chartering a SpaceX rocket is a much more expensive affair. Tickets to the ISS in joint SpaceX-Axiom Space missions reportedly run into the tens of millions of dollars.
© Agence France-Presse