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WASHINGTON – SpaceShipTwo sailed for the second time Feb. 22, carrying three people for the first time as the company was approaching the start of commercial operations of the suborbital space plane.
VSS Unity, dubbed the second SpaceShipTwo, was released from its WhiteKnightTwo carrier at 11:53 pm ET, approximately 45 minutes after taking off from Mojave, California 's air and space port. It launched its hybrid rocket engine for about a minute, flying at an altitude of 89.9 km and at a maximum speed of Mach 3, before falling back on a landing strip at Mohave at 12:08. Is.
The flight was the first for SpaceShipTwo since the December 13th flight, which was the first to exceed the 50-mile (80.5 km) altitude above which US government agencies are giving astronauts wings. The company considers that the space limit is less than the 100 km Karman line used by other organizations.
SpaceShipTwo's orders were David Mackay, Virgin Galactic's lead test driver, and Mike "Sooch" Masucci, the company's main training pilot. This flight was the first time that one or the other pilot was traveling in space.
For the first time on a SpaceShipTwo test flight, the vehicle was embarking a third person: Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic's chief astronaut instructor. "It will provide human validation of the data we collect, including aspects of the customer cabin and the space flight environment, from the point of view of people in the back," the company said in a tweet. The company did not reveal that it was in the flight before takeoff.
The vehicle was carrying four payloads from NASA's Flight Opportunities program, which provides access to suborbital flight for scientific and technological demonstration payloads. Three of the four payloads also flew during the previous SpaceShipTwo flight in December, the first time the vehicle had been conducting experiments for the Flight Opportunities program.
With the experiences and the presence of a third person, Virgin Galactic said that SpaceShipTwo had "a commercial weight close to the approximate commercial weight" of this flight. Part of the flight also displaced the vehicle's center of gravity to expand its operational envelope in anticipation of commercial flights.
"This represents these first steps towards the next, most difficult step of our test program – reproducibility," said Mike Moses, president of Virgin Galactic and husband of Beth Moses, before the scheduled flight Feb. 20. rubbed because of strong crosswinds. "We've tested it, we've punctured the tires to see what it can do, now we have to enlarge this trunk so that it flies so every time."
Neither Mike Moses nor George Whitesides, general manager of Virgin Galactic, would indicate how many additional test flights the company plans to start before starting commercial service. "We are still at the heart of the testing program," said Moses, the number of flights depends on the time required to meet all the requirements of the entire program.
Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, said after the December flight that three more flights would be needed before operations were transferred to Spaceport America, New Mexico. He then stated that he planned to make the first commercial flight of the vehicle this summer, perhaps around the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission in July.
Debra Werner contributed to this article from Mojave, California.
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