Virgin Galactic off to space in flight milestone

mojave (California) — A Virgin Galactic space tourism vehicle took off from California’s Mojave desert under clear skies on Thursday bound for the fringes of space, a mission that if successful would mark the first US human flight beyond the atmosphere since the end of America’s shuttle programme in 2011.

The test flight foreshadows a new era of civilian space travel that could kick off as soon as 2019, with British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic battling other billionaire-backed ventures, like Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, to be the first to offer suborbital flights to fare-paying tourists.

In the first steps before a highaltitude rocket launch, Virgin’s twin-fuselage carrier aeroplane holding the SpaceShipTwo passenger spacecraft took off soon after 7am local time (10am ET) from the Mojave Air and Space Port, about 90 miles (145km) north of Los Angeles.

Richard Branson, wearing a leather bomber jacket with a fur collar, attended the take-off along with hundreds of spectators on a crisp morning in the California desert.

If all goes according to plan, the carrier airplane will haul the SpaceShipTwo passenger rocket plane to an altitude of about 45,000 feet and release it. Seconds later, SpaceShipTwo will fire, catapulting it to at least 50 miles (80.47 km) above Earth, high enough for the pilots to experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the planet.

Virgin’s latest flight test comes four years after the original SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight that killed the co-pilot and seriously injured the pilot, dealing a major setback to Virgin Galactic, a US offshoot of the London-based Virgin Group.

“We’ve had our challenges, and to finally get to the point where we are at least within range of space altitude is a major deal for our team,” George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic’s chief executive, told reporters during a facilities tour on Wednesday in Mojave, where workers could be seen making preflight inspections of the rocket plane. —

Unity AP The VSS craft isn’t launched from the ground, but is carried beneath a special aircraft to an altitude around 15,240 metres where it’s released before igniting its rocket engine and climbing. —