2023-06-29 20:37:04
Galactic 01 has been a scientific mission
PABLO SCARPELLINI
The Angels
Madrid
Updated Thursday, June 29, 2023 – 20:37
After a deadly accident and numerous delays, Richard Branson’s space tourism company begins operations. The three Italian passengers -two soldiers and one engineer- who were on board the VSS Unity ship have carried out scientific experiments during this flight that reached 85 km of altitude.
Video: The World
At last the day of the premiere arrived. The Virgin Galactic space tourism company has successfully completed its first commercial suborbital flight on Thursdaynamed Galactic 01, two years after Richard Branson himself, owner of the company, flew along with five other members of Virgin Galactic in a test flight of his space vehicle, made up of two assembled ships that separate when they reach 15 km in height .
The VSS Unity vehicle and its mother ship, VMS Eve, took off from the New Mexico Spaceport, in the USA, with the aim of reaching an altitude of 85 km, at which time the crew – Italian air force officers Walter Villadei y Angelo Landolfi, and the engineer Pantaleone Carlucci- as well as the Virgin astronaut instructor Colin Bennett, They experienced a few minutes of weightlessness.
At 5:30 p.m., when the two assembled ships reached an altitude of 15,000 meters, VSS Unity separated from the mother ship, VMS Eve, propelling at supersonic speed to ascend to an altitude of about 85 kilometers.
Angelo Landolfi (i), Walter Villadei (c) and Pantaleone Carlucci deploy the Italian flag on the ship VSS Unity. VIRGIN
The VSS Unity spacecraft was flown by a former US Air Force officer, Michael Musucci, ship commander, and the former pilot of the Italian air force, Nicholas Pecile, while at the controls of the mother ship (VMS Eve), it was Kelly Latimer, as commander, and the pilot Jameel Janjua. At 1742, VMS Eve has landed without incident at the Spaceport. In total, the flight lasted one hour and 12 minutes.
With this trip, the owner of Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson, inaugurates his commercial program of suborbital flights, with which he plans to make regular space tourist trips in a sector in which he competes with other millionaires such as Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos. (Blue Origin). This first Virgin Galactic flight, however, has had an eminently scientific character since the three crew members, who They have displayed an Italian flag inside the shiphave carried out several experiments during their space adventure.
Landing of the VSS Unity ship after completing the mission VIRGIN
for the colonel Walter Villadei the flight was part of training for a future mission as an astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS). Lieutenant colonel and doctor Angelo Landolfi, For his part, he has been in charge of the biometric tests and his physiological responses, while Pantaleone Carlucci, engineer and member of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), has conducted tests involving the use of multiple sensors that examine heart rate, brain function and other metrics of human performance during spaceflight and in microgravity.
“Today, our team successfully delivered six people and more than a dozen research payloads into space at VSS Unity, our unique suborbital science laboratory,” said Virgin Galactic Director Michael Colglazier.
Virgin Galactic’s July 2021 test voyage, in which Branson participated, suffered some technical problems that led the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA, for its acronym in English) to open an investigation and delay the flight of the Italian team. , which was to have occurred that same year. Until the report was completed, Virgin Galactic was not allowed to resume operations. The accident of one of its rockets in 2014, where the pilot died and another was injured, was a serious blow to the company’s reputation.
The space tourism race
Richard Branson, 72, intends to compete in the tourist flight sector, although this Thursday was not the prototype trip that this billionaire hopes to normalize, who just over a month ago had to close Virgin Orbit, the company that created to launch small satellites, after declaring it bankrupt. At the beginning of the year, the first satellite mission of this company, launched from British soil, with its LauncherOne rocket, failed.
Following the success of today’s flight, Michael Colglazier has confirmed that Galactic 02, his first spaceflight with private astronauts, is planned for August: “We look forward to VSS Unity continuing with monthly space missions as we simultaneously work to scale our future fleet of spacecraft.” for a global audience”, pointed out the director of the company. The plans are to make about 400 flights a year, but it still seems to be a distant goal. Virgin Galactic plans to charge its customers $250,000 (about 230,000 euros) per seat.
The three Italian crew members who will do scientific experiments during the flight. From left to right: Pantaleone Carlucci, Walter Villadei and Angelo LandolfiVIRGIN
In the space tourism sector, there is also rivalry and debate about what minimum altitude a ship must reach for a flight to be considered space and the passengers astronauts. While Richard Branson’s ship reaches 80 kilometers, Bezos’s (New Shepard) reaches 100 kilometers above sea level, the so-called Krman line from which space begins, according to the definition of international organizations. aeronautical
However, both NASA and the US Air Force consider an astronaut to be anyone who has reached at least 50 miles in altitude.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
#Virgin #Galactic #successfully #completes #commercial #suborbital #flight #kicking #space #tourism #program