SPACEX TEST FLIGHT OKD; VIRGIN GALACTIC CARRIES 1ST PASSENGER
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) on Friday cleared the aerospace company SpaceX to conduct an unmanned test flight of a newly designed crew capsule to the International Space Station on March 2.
Nasa awarded $2.6 billion to SpaceX and $4.2 billion to its rival, Boeing Co., to build separate rocket and capsule launch systems to ferry US astronauts to the space station, an orbital research laboratory that flies 402 kilometers above Earth.
Design, safety concerns
“Nasa and SpaceX are proceeding with plans to conduct the first uncrewed test flight of the Crew Dragon on a mission to the International Space Station,” Nasa said in a statement.
The agency made the decision after it raised design and safety concerns for the astronaut launch systems being developed by both companies.
“There are serious challenges to the current launch schedules for both SpaceX and Boeing,” Nasa said in its annual report earlier this month.
Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo spacecraft reached an altitude of more than 88.5 km on Friday, carrying a passenger in addition to its two pilots.
Branson’s Virgin Galactic
Built by British billionaire Richard Branson to carry tourists into space, the spacecraft launched from California’s Mojave Desert and flew to an altitude of 89.9 km, the company said.
For the first time on Friday, the flight carried a passenger, Virgin Galactic’s Beth Moses, who will train the company’s future space tourists.
The US definition of space is anything over an altitude of 80.47 km and the Virgin craft made it past that for the first time in December, reaching an altitude of 81.91 km.
Branson announced at the time that it was the first time since Nasa ended its space shuttle program in 2011 that an American vessel had carried humans into space.
However, the Virgin craft still has not crossed the interna- tionally accepted boundary between Earth’s outer atmosphere and space, known as the Karman line, which is set at an altitude of 100 km.
Bezos’ Blue Origin
“One of the issues that Virgin Galactic will have to address, eventually, is that they are not flying above the Karman line, not yet,” said billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, founder of Branson’s main rival, Blue Origin.
Bezos told an audience in New York this week that his New Shepard suborbital vehicle would start flying people later this year and to a greater altitude than SpaceShipTwo.
New Shepard has already flown above the Karman line, but not with people on board.
SpaceShipTwo is designed to carry six passengers and is carried by a larger plane, WhiteKnightTwo, before it is released and starts its own rocket engine.
At the apogee, its passengers float in zero gravity for several minutes.
It then descends and glides back to the landing strip.