Virgin Galactic launches rocket plane in space tourism venture
Global News
Virgin becomes the latest commercial enterprise catering to wealthy customers willing to pay large sums of money to experience the exhilaration of travelling to space.
A twin-fuselage jet took off carrying Virgin Galactic‘s rocket plane with a three-man crew from Italy into the New Mexico sky on Thursday for a high-altitude launch of the company’s first flight of paying customers to the edge of space.
The two Italian air force colonels and an aerospace engineer from the National Research Council of Italy were strapped into the spaceplane with their Virgin Galactic instructor and its two pilots, poised for a suborbital ride expected to take the six men about 50 miles (80 km) above the desert floor.
The flight marks a decisive moment for Virgin Galactic Holding Inc, the space tourism venture founded by British billionaire Richard Branson in 2004, as it inaugurates commercial service following several years fraught with development setbacks.
Virgin becomes the latest commercial enterprise, along with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and fellow billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX, catering to wealthy customers willing to pay large sums of money to experience the exhilaration of supersonic rocket speed, microgravity and the spectacle of the Earth’s curvature from space.
The mission of the Italian team flying on Thursday, however, was billed as a scientific one, with the three men planning to collect biometric data, measure cognitive performance and record how certain liquids and solids mix in microgravity conditions.
For Italian Air Force Colonel Walter Villadei, designated as commander, the flight aboard the spaceplane, dubbed VSS Unity, is also part of his astronaut training for a future mission to the International Space Station.
Joining him on Thursday were two Italian colleagues – Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Angelo Landolfi, a physician and flight surgeon, and Pantaleone Carlucci, a research council member acting as flight engineer and payload specialist.
Rounding out the crew was their Virgin Galactic trainer, Colin Bennett, the company’s lead “astronaut instructor,” and Unity’s two pilots, Michael Masucci and Nicola Pecile.