[ad_1]
Retired astronaut Terry Virts is scheduled to take off Tuesday morning from Florida's Kennedy Space Center to try to break a world record of flying around the Earth over the North and South poles.
Virts and a team of pilots from the British company Action Aviation will fly a jet of business for about 48 hours with brief stops to refuel in Kazakhstan and Chile.
They will fly a Gulfstream G650ER belonging to a subsidiary of Qatar Airways. They will try to gain minutes on a record that has not been contested since 2008, said Action Aviation.
Aviation International News reported in 2008 that pilots had set a record of "polar circumnavigation" at 52 hours and 32 minutes. It was 95 minutes faster than a Boeing 747 in 1977.
The Virts mission, called One More Orbit, pays homage to the exploits of the Apollo lunar missions with a take-off time of 9:32 am – the same time as the take-off of Apollo 11 on July 16, 1969.
Virts is a former commander of the International Space Station and a space shuttle pilot for Flight Endeavor 2015, the STS-130.
"My teammate of the ISS, Colonel Gennady Padalka, Russian cosmonaut, will join us in a spirit of international cooperation while we fly over another orbit," Virts said in a press release.
"Hopefully our record will be certified by the International Aeronautical Federation and Guinness World Records," said Hamish Harding, president of Action Aviation.
The flight is also designed to be "carbon neutral" using carbon sequestration offsets.
The crew will attempt to broadcast live the entire flight, with a length of 25,000 km, using the connections provided by Satcom Direct.
Qatar Executive and Gulfstream said the jet could fly at a higher speed for longer distances than any other aircraft, with a range of 8,630 miles.
[ad_2]
Source link