Virgin Galactic launches commercial flights for space tourists
- The Galactic 01 mission took Italian Air Force pilots 85km above sea level, where they enjoyed several minutes of weightlessness
- The successful trip puts the company back on track in the emerging private space flight sector, after a number of setbacks
For years, British billionaire Richard Branson vowed that commercial space flights with his firm Virgin Galactic were just around the corner.
On Thursday, that hype finally became reality when three Italian researchers boarded the VSS Unity space plane as Virgin Galactic’s first paying passengers and flew about four minutes in suborbital space.
The researchers – Colonel Walter Villadei and Lieutenant Colonel Angelo Landolfi of the Italian Air Force and Pantaleone Carlucci, an engineer with the National Research Council of Italy – spent their precious minutes in microgravity conducting scientific research on topics ranging from cognitive performance to physiological responses in space.
The carrier aircraft and the attached VSS Unity space plane took off from the Spaceport America launch site around 7.30am local time near Truth and Consequences, New Mexico, and climbed to an altitude of about 13,716 metres. By 8.30am, the carrier aircraft released the space plane, which rocketed to the edge of space.
A livestream of the flight showed the researchers strapped into their seats as they travelled at Mach 2, with one researcher puffing out his breath in visible O’s.
