If there is no setback, meteorological or technical, today at 5:00 p.m. in Spain, the Virgin Galactic spacecraft VSS Unity will once again rise to 90 km from the earth’s surface and return to Earth two hours later. If something prevents takeoff, plan B is to try it on Friday.
It is said that this will be the first commercial flight, because it will be the first in which the crew members will not be Virgin Galactic workers. But the reality is that the ship will not be occupied by any of the future 800 space tourists to whom the company assures that it has already sold a ticket, at a rate of $450,000 per seat.
The tickets for this mission, named Galactic 01, have been purchased by the Italian armed forces to carry out scientific research. The craft will be flown by former US Air Force officer Michael Musucci and former Italian Air Force pilot Nicola Pecile. With them will fly Colonel Walter Villadei, who will use a biometric smart suit that will measure his physiological responses. Space surgeon Angelo Landolfi will be in charge of evaluating cognitive performance and how the body behaves in a microgravity environment. In addition, the heart rate and brain functions of Italian air force researcher Pantaleone Carlucci will also be measured.
The next mission, Galactic 02, will take place in August and here the passengers will be real tourists who, yes, will have to have undergone prior training for two days. The company’s intention is to carry out a flight of this type every month and thus definitively initiate the era of commercial suborbital flights.
The last time the VSS Unity flew was in July 2021, when Richard Branson –owner of the space company– with Virgin executives and two pilots– beat Blue Origin, led by Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, to be the first to demonstrate that they could offer commercial suborbital flights. Bezos’s revenge was to reproach Branson that his had not been a true space flight, since his ship had not exceeded the Kárman line, which defines the limit between the atmosphere and outer space at an altitude of 100 km.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard took off nine days later in a flight of just 11 minutes, although in its case it did exceed 100 km from the earth’s surface. But it was Elon Musk’s Space X that took things even further by, in September of that same year, sending four private travelers on a trip that circled the Earth three times at an altitude of 575 km.
