Virgin Galactic sits in commercial flight takeoff area

Nearly 15 years ago, the founder of Virgin Group, Richard Branson, he bet on throwing tourists into space from a bush in southern New Mexico. Now, you're about to move the headquarters of your space company to the so-called "Land of Enchantment" (Earth of enchantment).

The transfer of Virgin Galactic to its permanent headquarters at Spaceport America, north of Las Cruces, involves accelerating its efforts to create a viable space tourism business. This also marks a recovery after the 2014 accident that claimed the life of a test pilot. Virgin Galactic announced Friday at a ceremony in the presence of Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham in Santa Fe that the company will transfer a hundred California employees before completing its flight test program. .

The next step – actually sending customers flying – could start later this year.

"The long promise to unite our spaceship with an exclusive Spaceport America is finally coming to fruition," Virgin Galactic GM George Whitesides said in a phone interview. Branson said that he would be among the first pbadengers; Whitesides has announced that he and his wife, Loretta, would likely be used by 2020. Blue Origin, the space effort of Amazon.com's founder, Jeff Bezos, is also planning its first commercial flights for this year.

Virgin Galactic flights from Spaceport America include a transport aircraft that transports the spacecraft at a height of approximately 45,000 feet, from where it falls and then fires its rocket into the suborbital space. Pbadengers who spend two days on the Virgin Galactic campus preparing for the trip will live about 10 minutes in zero gravity before descending to land at the spaceport.

In February, Virgin Galactic flew its last test flight to California, to Mojave, where flew its first non-pilot employee, NASA astronaut instructor and former engineer, Beth Moses. Moses is involved in designing Virgin Galactic's customer preparation and cabin protocols. His flight marks the first time that Virgin Galactic's suborbital VSS Unity has reached a speed of Mach 3, three times that of sound; it was also the highest altitude at which the company's probe had flown, at 295,000 feet, or 90 kilometers above the Earth.

Virgin Galactic already has about 700 customers, who pay $ 250,000 each for a 90-minute flight. Branson's space efforts were delayed due to significant technical changes required after the crash of his VSS Enterprise in 2014, when pilot Michael Alsbury died.

Whitesides said that "the key is to complete the installation of the commercial cabin. Our interior team is working on this process to create the world-clbad Virgin booth that everyone expects and requires a lot of work. " .

In addition to cabin work, Virgin Galactic also carries training equipment and land from California. "We moved from the field of space age physics to logistics," he said.