Virgin Galactic takes crew of three to altitude of 55 miles
WASHINGTON: Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft reached an altitude of more than 88.5 kilometres on Friday, carrying for the first time a passenger in addition to its two pilots.
SpaceShipTwo, built by British billionaire Richard Branson to carry tourists into space, launched from California’s Mojave desert and flew to an altitude of 89.9kms, the company said.
The US definition of space is anything over an altitude of 50 miles. The Virgin craft made it past that for the first time in December, reaching an altitude of 50.9 miles.
Branson announced with great fanfare at the time that it was the first time since Nasa ended its space shuttle programme in 2011 that an American vessel had carried humans into space.
However, the Virgin craft still has not crossed the internationally accepted boundary between Earth’s outer atmosphere and space, known as the Karman Line, which is set at an altitude of 100km.
“SpaceShipTwo, welcome back to space,” wrote Virgin Galactic as it Tweeted updates throughout the event, without sending out any live footage.
The spacecraft travelled at a speed of Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound in its ascent, and landed without incident at the Mojave spaceport.
It is designed to carry six passengers, but test flights are years behind schedule in large part because of an accident that killed a test pilot in 2014. — AFP