Richard Branson’s company Virgin Galactic on Thursday conducted a supersonic test flight over the Sierra Nevada Mountains of its SpaceShipTwo passenger rocket ship, the company said, three years after a fatal accident on an earlier version of the ship.
At about 8am local time, the VMS Eve carrier plane took off from Mojave, California, carrying the SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity before releasing it 14,000m above ground, Virgin Galactic said in a statement.
A rocket motor then accelerated the VSS Unity to Mach 1.87 during a 30-second rocket burn before the ship’s two pilots shut it down, the company said, adding that the spaceship reached 25,000m before making a smooth runway landing.
“Space feels tantalizingly close now,” Branson tweeted after the test flight.
THE ACCIDENT
Virgin Galactic’s original SpaceShipTwo vehicle broke apart during an October 2014 test flight that killed the copilot and seriously injured the pilot, in an accident that was ultimately attributed to pilot error. Both were employees of Scaled Composites, a Northrop Grumman subsidiary based in Mojave that built the vehicle.
The Spaceship Company, a Virgin Galactic sister firm also owned by Branson’s London-based Virgin Group, built the new SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity, the second in a planned fleet of five, and took over the test-flight program from Scaled.
PASSENGER SHIPS
The space company was in 2016 granted an operating license to fly its passenger ship with the world’s first paying space tourists once final safety tests are completed.
The company has not yet announced a date for the start of passenger flights, but is selling tickets for a ride aboard SpaceShipTwo at US$250,000 a seat.
Rides are to take passengers about 100km above Earth, high enough to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see the curvature of Earth set against the blackness of space.
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