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You can now ride with Virgin Galactic at the edge of space. An incredible new video shows images of the SpaceShipTo VSS Unity suborbital rocket, launched from its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo.
With a mountain range underneath, Unity lights up its engines. Some images later, the spacecraft flies into a black sky, the curve of the Earth below. Unity has reached a maximum altitude of 55.87 miles (89.9 km), which is slightly above the space limit defined by the US Air Force – the second time a Virgin Galactic spaceship has exceeded this limit.
In the video Unity slowly pivots on the black background of space by displaying black diagrams of several planes and several planes along its hull.
"Welcome to the space," said one of the two pilots. In addition to pilots Dave Mackay and Michael "Sooch" Masucci, Beth Moses, the third Virgin Galactic staff member, was also on board, and Moses is the chief astronaut instructor of the company and was his first Passenger test.
"Welcome to the club, astronauts," says one of the ground controllers.
Part of the purpose of the flight was to provide more data on the adaptation of the human body to space during SpaceShipTwo flights and on the feelings of the passengers. Unity also carried four NASA payloads to study data such as dust particles, payload vibrations, and liquid / gas interactions.
The February 22nd trip from Unity brought it to a maximum altitude of about 7.4 km (7.4 km) from its historic 13 December flight, which was the first time that Virgin Galactic was crossing the space border of the Air Force. However, the ascent of the two space flights was well below the Kármán line of 100 km (100 km) that the International Astronautical Federation considers as the beginning of space.
Hundreds of potential space tourists have already claimed a place for suborbital flights aboard the Virgin spacecraft, paying $ 250,000 each for this privilege. Entrepreneur Richard Branson, founder of the company, said that he hope to fly for the first time on July 16, 2019 – the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's launch of three human beings on the moon.
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