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Virgin Galactic will broadcast its founder’s flight, Richard branson, as the billionaire flies into space on Sunday July 11.
Branson, 70, and the rest of his Unity 22 crew will depart from Spaceport America near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, on Virgin Galactic. VSS unit SpaceShipTwo vehicle. The live broadcast will begin at 9:00 a.m. EDT (1:00 p.m. GMT), according to the company’s Twitter feed. You will be able to watch the live stream on this page, the Space.com home page and directly from Virgin Galactic.
Galactic Virgo has yet to release key milestones in the flight schedule. On Sunday morning, VSS Unity will take off under the wings of its carrier aircraft, an aircraft known as VMS Eve. At an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters), Eve will drop Unity and the spacecraft will fly on its own into suborbital space. Eve and Unity will both come to land at Spaceport America.
Related: How Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Works (Infographic)
Based on past Unity flights, Sunday’s mission will last around 90 minutes in total, and the “weightlessness” phase – when the ship reaches the top of its suborbital path – will last around four minutes.
Branson’s other passengers will include Beth Moses, Chief Astronaut Instructor for Virgin Galactic; Colin Bennett, Chief Operating Engineer of Virgin Galactic; and Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs and corporate research operations. VSS Unity will be piloted by Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, with CJ Sturckow and Kelly Latimer piloting VMS Eve.
If all goes according to plan, Branson is expected to complete a space flight just nine days before another company, Blue Origin, is taking a similar step with its New Shepard suborbital vehicle. Blue Origin plans to send its boss – Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon who recently resigned as CEO of the e-commerce giant at the age of 57 – in space on July 20, with a small team.
Bezos’ flight will take place on the occasion of the 52nd anniversary of the first crewed moon landing, that of Apollo 11, in 1969. Branson has said in interviews that he was inspired to go to space when he was young after watching the Moonwalker Mission. More recently, Branson denied that he and Bezos are competing to get to space first; Bezos has remained largely silent on the matter.
Technically speaking, if a successful flight actually reach space depends on the definition you are using. SpaceShip Usually two flights fly slightly below the Kármán line, the 62 mile (100 kilometer) elevation mark recognized by many as the limit of space. But VSS Unity has already flown three crewed test missions above 50 miles (80 km), the demarcation line recognized by NASA, the US military and the US Federal Aviation Administration.
Virgin Galactic has aimed to bring tourists to space since its founding in 2004, while Blue Origin has tried to do the same after it was founded four years earlier. the SpaceShipOne vehicle, on which Virgin Galactic based the design of SpaceShipTwo, flew 100 km above the Earth’s surface twice in 2004 to win the $ 10 million Ansari X award for repeated flights in a reusable spacecraft developed by the private sector.
Unity 22 will be Virgin Galactic’s fourth crewed space flight, while Bezos will be on board the first crewed space flight for Blue Origin (although New Shepard has successfully completed more than a dozen unmanned suborbital test flights). The most recently announced price for a Virgin Galactic seat was $ 250,000, and more than 700 people have put down a deposit, company representatives said.
Blue Origin has yet to release its price per seat, although an anonymous auction winner to date paid $ 28 million fly into space on July 20 with Bezos, his brother Mark and Mercury 13 aviator Wally Funk.
Visit Space.com on Sunday, July 11 for full coverage of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo launch with Richard Branson.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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