Virgin Galactic aims to reach space with rocket
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is preparing to take the long-awaited step of trying to fly its tourism rocket ship to the edge of space.
Virgin Space Ship Unity was undergoing final checks in preparation for a test flight on Thursday that could take it far higher than before and a big step closer to turning the dream of commercial space tourism into reality.
“It’s a day that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” CEO George Whitesides told reporters on Wednesday at the Virgin Galactic facilities at Mojave Air and Space Port.
Whitesides said VSS Unity would try to fly higher than 80 kilometres, which Virgin Galactic considers the boundary of space because it is used by the US Air Force and other US agencies.
That’s different than a longheld view that the boundary is at 100 km. Whitesides noted that recent research favours the lower altitude.
Test pilots Mark “Forger” Stucky and Rick “CJ” Sturckow were scheduled to be at the controls.
Virgin Galactic officials emphasized that it would be a test flight and there could be an array of reasons why it could end short of its goal or be aborted altogether.”
“Risk is a valuable part of forward progress and intrinsic in risk is sometimes you have good days and sometimes you have bad days,” Whitesides said.
Reaching the threshold of space would demonstrate significant progress toward the start of commercial flights that were promised more than a decade ago. Virgin Galactic’s development of its spaceship took far longer than expected and endured a setback when the first experimental craft broke apart during a 2014 test flight, killing the co-pilot.
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