The first commercial flight of the space tourism company Virgin Galactic successfully completed the Galactic 01 mission, which took off today from the New Mexico desert (United States) carrying on board three members of the Italian Air Force who took advantage of the ride to do some scientific research. Thus, for example, for Colonel Walter Villadei, the flight was also part of his training as an astronaut for a future mission to the International Space Station.
The VSS Unity spacecraft exceeded 80 kilometers in altitude, the limit that marks the beginning of space according to the criteria of the US army -some put it at 100 km-, according to a commentator announced on the company’s live video. After five test missions that have reached space since 2018, this flight marks the start of commercial operations for Virgin Galactic, an important milestone for the company, which, however, is almost 20 years late.
The two Italian air force officers and an aerospace engineer from the Italian National Research Council made the short suborbital journey with three Virgin Galactic crew members, two of whom flew the vehicle, VSS Unity, after it was launched to 15,000 meters high from a double-fuselage aircraft.
About 75 minutes after leaving the ground, the craft touched down safely back at its starting point on a runway at Spaceport America, a nearby state-owned complex that Virgin Galactic partially leases.
The rocket rose around 3:30 p.m. in Spain and after detaching from its mother plane, the pilots started the vehicle’s engine to send the craft on a near-vertical climb at about three times the speed. According to Virgin Galactic said that Unity reached an altitude of almost 85.1 km. At the apex of the flight, with the rocket turned off, the crew experienced a few minutes of weightlessness before the spacecraft switched to reentry mode and began its descent back to Earth.
This flight comes two years after Branson himself traveled with five other Virgin Galactic staff on the first fully crewed test space flight, in July 2021. At the time, the company aimed to regular commercial service will begin in 2022 after additional test flights. Finally it was today and his intention is to have a monthly flight starting this month of August, for which he assures that he has already sold 800 tickets at a price of $450,000 each.
