Virgin Galactic reaches suborbital space
MOJAVE – Virgin Galactic reached suborbital space for the first time in a test flight Thursday, bringing Richard Branson’s company closer to flying its customers beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
Thursday was the fourth time VSS Unity fired up its rocket motor and flew on its own power after being released from the belly of a larger, twin-fuselage carrier airplane. The space plane reached a maximum altitude of 271,268 feet, or 51.4 miles above the Earth, the company said.
Thursday marks the latest step in Virgin Galactic’s long test-flight campaign that re-started in September 2016, almost two years after a previous version of the Spaceshiptwo space plane broke apart in midair during a powered test flight, killing one of two pilots.
The National Transportation Safety Board later said the space plane broke apart after the co-pilot prematurely opened the craft’s “feather system,” a movable tail designed to help slow it down as it reenters Earth’s atmosphere.
The NTSB placed most of the blame on that plane’s builder, Scaled Composites, saying the design should have protected against the possibility of this human error. Mojavebased Scaled Composites is now owned by Northrop Grumman Corp.
The current version of the space plane is now built in-house at Spaceship Co., Virgin’s spacecraft manufacturing and assembly arm. Virgin Galactic has said it devised additional safety mechanisms to prevent pilots from opening the feather system too early.
The company has been in the space tourism business for a long time – British billionaire Branson first announced his commercial space service in 2004, saying at the time that he expected the first flight to occur in 2007. Since then, a number of other firms have jumped into the fray.
Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company developed a capsule and rocket system called New Shepard that’s designed to take tourists to suborbital space. The company has not yet announced ticket prices for the ride, which is expected to last for 11 minutes from liftoff to landing. So far, the rocketand-capsule system has completed nine test flights.
Virgin Galactic charges $250,000 per ticket for its rides to suborbital space, and it has sold at least hundreds of those tickets while testing and fine-tuning its system. On Thursday, the company flew four research payloads to help simulate the weight of paying customers in the space plane.