Richard Branson reaches space on Virgin Galactic flight

Sir Richard Branson, after nearly 17 years of development and over $ 1 billion invested in Virgin Galactic, has made his dream come true and reached space.

Speaking from the cabin of the spacecraft, Branson called the space flight the “complete experience of a lifetime.”

VSS Unity’s spacecraft launched above the New Mexico skies on Sunday, with two pilots guiding the vehicle carrying the billionaire founder and three Virgin Galactic employees. VSS Unity – after being released by a carrier plane called VMS Eve above 40,000 feet – triggered its rocket motor and accelerated to a speed greater than the speed of sound while climbing to the edge of space .

VSS Unity will then perform a slow backflip in microgravity, when the Virgin Galactic crew were in zero gravity and floated around the cabin of the spacecraft. The vehicle then glided back into the atmosphere, landing on the runway of Spaceport America from where it had taken off earlier.

Pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci flew Unity. Alongside Branson in the spaceship cabin are Chief Astronaut Coach Beth Moses, Chief Operations Engineer Colin Bennett and Vice President of Government Affairs Sirisha Bandla. Mackay and Masucci have flown in space before, as have Moses and pilots CJ Sturckow and Mark Stucky.

The United States officially considers pilots who have flown above 80 kilometers (or approximately 262,000 feet) to be astronauts.

The VSS Unity is designed to accommodate up to six passengers with both pilots. The company has approximately 600 bookings for tickets on future flights, sold at prices between $ 200,000 and $ 250,000 each.

It was Virgin Galactic’s fourth space flight so far, its second this year and the first carrying more than one passenger.

In addition to piloting Branson, the space flight had other goals as Virgin Galactic is still testing its spacecraft system, aiming to begin commercial service in early 2022.

The four crew members test the spacecraft’s cabin and the training program developed by Virgin Galactic, to ensure it properly prepares customers for the experience. Additionally, Bandla will be testing the completion of a research experiment, as she performs an exercise with plants in test tubes for the University of Florida.

Sunday’s space flight is one of three remaining for Virgin Galactic to complete development, with two more expected this year.

Branson has dreamed of going to space since watching the Apollo moon landings and, in 2004, founded Virgin Galactic to carry private passengers into space. He formed the company to purchase spacecraft built by Scaled Composites from aerospace designer Burt Rutan, who created the SpaceShipOne vehicle that won a $ 10 million prize for flying twice on the edge of space in two weeks. .

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo system is the result of Branson’s agreement with Scaled Composites. Development of the spacecraft suffered multiple setbacks, however, including a ground rocket engine explosion in 2007 that killed three Scaled Composite employees and the crash of SpaceShipTwo’s first vehicle, VSS Enterprise, in 2014, which killed the co-pilot. of Virgin Galactic Michael Alsbury and injured pilot Peter Siebold.

The company then built VSS Unity, designed with additional safety measures to prevent future accidents. Virgin Galactic started testing Unity in 2016, and in December 2018 it hit space for the first time. Additionally, Virgin Galactic earlier this year launched the next spacecraft in its fleet, VSS Imagine, which is the first in its next-generation SpaceShip III vehicle class.

Last month, Virgin Galactic received a license extension from the United States Federal Aviation Administration, allowing the company to carry passengers on future space flights. The company completed a 29-item verification and validation program for the FAA, passing the last two regulatory milestones with its most recent space flight test in May.

Branson was not supposed to fly on Sunday’s space flight, as Virgin Galactic management said the company planned to fly the founder on his penultimate test flight. But after fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos announced he would fly on his company’s Blue Origin first passenger flight on July 20, Virgin Galactic revamped its schedule – with the goal of flying Branson nine days ahead of Bezos.

Launched before Bezos or Elon Musk, Sunday’s flight means Branson is the first of the billionaire space company’s founders to pilot his own spacecraft.

Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin compete in suborbital space tourism, with the two companies’ spacecraft carrying passengers to the edge of space to float in microgravity for a few minutes. An orbital flight, as with Musk’s SpaceX, costs tens of millions of dollars and typically spends several days or weeks in space.

Branson’s company believes there is a market for transporting up to 2 million people on suborbital space flights priced between $ 250,000 and $ 500,000, with the market expanding if and when costs drop. .