Virgin Galactic set to launch Richard Branson into space: why you should care

Shortly after sunrise on Sunday, Virgin GalacticTwo Unity Spaceship and the carrier aircraft VMS Eve will take off of a lonely track in one of the most desolate wastes in North America. A full crew will be aboard the suborbital spaceplane for the first time, including two pilots, three employees and Richard Branson, the company’s founding billionaire.

A crew member, Beth Moses, Virgin’s chief astronaut instructor, will make the trip for the second time. But the star of the show will be Branson, 70, who has invested over 16 years and over a billion dollars to finally make the short trip to the edge of space, experience weightlessness and contemplate the Land like only a privileged few. hundreds of other humans have.

“I always imagined as a kid that a spaceship would look like this,” Branson told NBC News. “I just thought that was how you should fly in space.”

But more is at stake on Sunday than the high-flying dreams of a wealthy media and travel mogul.

Over a million New Mexico taxpayers, including me, have invested nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to build Virgin Galactic’s home at Spaceport America in the hope that its main tenant will create a new industry in the state.

“We could not be more excited to finally share this revolutionary moment with the world,” Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “The dawn of space tourism is happening right here.”

There is also bragging rights to consider, as Branson scheduled his theft to take place nine days before his fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos flies one of his Blue Origin rockets into space for the first time on July 20. Branson insisted there was no race between him and Bezos, but the timing is hard to rule out.

Investors will be closely following the test program Branson is participating in on Sunday. Virgin Galactic is a publicly traded company worth over $ 11 billion as of July 6. And of course, there are the company’s 700 paying customers, who patiently lined up, willing to pay over $ 200,000 each for the ride.

Beyond that, there is a larger vision of easy access to space (or perhaps a planetary escape hatch, depending on your disposition) for humanity. Our species has been send handfuls of humans into space
for decades, but the rate of growth of the larger manned space flight program has been more or less stagnant for a generation or two now. And the ability for ordinary civilians to travel to space has remained virtually nil, except for a few who have managed to secure a seat with the highest levels of political or financial privilege.

Now with Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and also Elon Musk’s SpaceX, we’re finally on the verge of going from quirky one-off space tourists to regular commercial trips to microgravity, orbit and maybe even the moon, Mars and beyond, with a few super-fast point-to-point travel around the world Between.

“I truly believe that space belongs to all of us,” Branson says. “Virgin Galactic is at the forefront of a new commercial space industry, which should open space to humanity.”

Sunday’s flight may still be just a rich man and his employees on a very high-altitude ride that will likely be over in less than 90 minutes. But it is also more than that, and it has been a very long road to get there.

The road of the dead man

One of the longest and most arduous roads in history was the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro which connected Mexico City to Santa Fe and other points for almost three centuries, between 1598 and the end of the 19th century. The most dreaded stretch of the 1,500-mile (2,414-kilometer) journey was the Jornada del Muerto, or the Dead Man’s Road, north of Las Cruces. This flat, dry, desolate basin is 160 km long and has virtually never housed anything, except that it is now home to Spaceport America and Virgin Galactic’s commercial spaceflight operations.

Specifically, you’ll find the state-funded commercial spaceport of New Mexico near a place that was once called Aleman. The name (as well as the name of the Jornada del Muerto) comes from a German fugitive who attempted to cross the desert during the dry season in 1670. His remains were found, after having been picked up and scattered by vultures, not far from the place where Branson and his crew will take off on Sunday.

Despite the region’s inability to produce much more than suffer throughout its history, hope still springs from this dusty land. Much as generations have traversed it for centuries in search of opportunity and fortune, Virgin Galactic has walked its own tortured path, keeping the faith that this empty but peacefully beautiful desert valley could be the gateway. to a bright future.

Virgin Galactic was founded in 2004, and a little over a year later an agreement was reached with New Mexico to base the company’s commercial flights in the new spaceport, which is expected to be completed by now. 2010. Everything seemed to work. At one point, Branson predicted that Virgin could launch up to 50,000 passengers to the edge of space in its first decade of operation, by 2020.

The spaceport officially opened in October 2011, but development of Virgin Galactic’s unique horizontal launch system was slow. Unlike SpaceX or Blue Origin, which place passenger pods atop vertical launch rockets, Virgin uses a custom carrier aircraft called WhiteKnightTwo that carries SpaceShipTwo, which is essentially a rocket-propelled space plane, to an altitude where it is released. to then ignite and clear a path. towards space.

The company was still working to get the required speed and altitude from SpaceShipTwo when a fatal crash occurred during a test flight in California in 2014. SpaceShipTwo Enterprise crashed shortly after its engine was ignited, leaving a co-pilot dead and another seriously injured. Further delays and an investigation followed, but Virgin Galactic was able to resume test flights with a new SpaceShipTwo, the VSS Unity, in December 2016.

This is only a test

The past five years for Virgin Galactic have been much happier than the previous half-decade, even with last year essentially lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic. VSS Unity outperformed its predecessor, carrying Moses as the first person in the passenger cabin in 2019. The company unveiled his astronaut lounge at Spaceport America later that year and also started trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

A series of unveilings – of his flight suit, passenger cabin and the Next Generation SpaceShip III join the fleet – all led to this Sunday. Branson and his crew will take off from the center of the Dead Man’s Road, using a forgotten section of dry land to travel to places centuries of miserable visitors to the same valley could hardly dream of.

With all the hype surrounding Branson’s first trip to space, it’s easy to forget that this is still technically a test flight. Its role in the mission is pointedly “to assess the experience of private astronauts”. After Unity returns to the ground, the company still plans at least two more test flights before considering boarding paying customers, likely no earlier than 2022 (although the company does have FAA approval do it already).

Details of Sunday’s flight remain about as scarce as a waterhole between Las Cruces and Truth or Consequences, but we do know WhiteKnightTwo is expected to take off around 7:00 a.m. local time (6:00 a.m. PT). Based on previous test flights, it will take at least 30 minutes before the carrier vehicle reaches the altitude where VSS Unity detaches and ignites its rocket motor.

After detonating at an altitude of about 56 miles (90 kilometers) and floating a bit in microgravity, the spacecraft will return for a landing at Spaceport America, likely no more than 90 minutes after takeoff.

How to watch Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic flight

Virgin Galactic will be live streaming the mission, dubbed Unity 22, and you can watch it here. I’ll also be on the field at Spaceport America all day Sunday, so you can get behind-the-scenes updates and details by following me on Twitter and Instagram as well. @EricCMack.

To pursue CNET’s 2021 Space Calendar to stay up to date with all the latest space news this year. You can even add it to your own Google Calendar.