British billionaire Richard Branson yesterday soared more than 80km above the New Mexico desert in his Virgin Galactic passenger rocket plane’s first fully crewed test flight to the edge of space.
Branson, one of six Virgin Galactic Holding Inc employees strapping in for the ride as of press time last night, has touted the flight as a precursor to a new era of space tourism, with the company he founded poised to begin commercial operations next year.
Yesterday’s launch of the VSS Unity rocket plane marked the company’s 22nd test flight of its SpaceShipTwo system, and its fourth crewed mission beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
Photo: AFP
It was also the first to carry a full complement of space travelers: two pilots and four “mission specialists,” Branson among them.
The takeoff from New Mexico’s state-owned Spaceport of America, near the New Mexico town of Truth or Consequences, was pushed back by more than two hours due to overnight thunderstorms that kept Virgin Galactic from rolling out its rocket plane on time, the company said.
The gleaming white spaceplane was borne aloft at about 11:30am, attached to the underside of a specially designed twin-fuselage carrier jet, the VMS Eve, named after Branson’s late mother.
Separating from the mothership at an altitude of 50,000 feet (15.24km), Unity’s rocket engine ignited to send the spaceplane streaking straight upward about 88.5km into the blackness of space, where the crew experienced about four minutes of microgravity.
With the engine shut down near the peak of its climb, the craft shifted into re-entry mode before gliding back to a runway landing at the spaceport.
The entire flight, from takeoff to touchdown, took about 90 minutes.
Virgin has plans for two further test flights of the spaceplane in the months ahead before beginning commercial operations next year.
This is no discount travel service, but demand is apparently strong, with several hundred wealthy would-be citizen astronauts already having booked reservations, priced at about US$250,000 per ticket.
Branson’s participation in yesterday’s flight, announced just over a week ago, is in keeping with his persona as the daredevil executive whose Virgin Group Ltd brands — from airlines to music companies — have long been associated with ocean-crossing exploits in sailboats and hot-air balloons.
His ride-along also upstages rival space tourism venture Blue Origin and its founder, Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos, in what has been popularized as the “billionaire space race.”
Bezos is planning to fly aboard his own suborbital rocketship, the New Shepard, later this month.
Bezos posted a message on Instagram on Saturday wishing Branson and his team good luck and “a successful and safe flight.”
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has