2023-06-29 17:19:35
PABLO SCARPELLINI
The Angels
Updated Thursday, June 29, 2023 – 17:19
The ship will take off from a space airport in New Mexico with a scientific mission that will last 90 minutes and reach a few kilometers of altitude.
? DIRECT | Virgin Galactic launches its first flight into space today with three Italian passengers
Virgin Galactic will launch its first commercial flight into space from the United States on Thursday, a suborbital flight signed by British billionaire Richard Branson that aims to usher in a new era in the space industry. A crew of three passengers, all of them Italian, will be on board the ship piloted by a former US Air Force officer, Michael Musucci, and the former pilot of the Italian air force, Nicholas Pecile. Also going will be the Virgin astronaut instructor, Colin Bennett.
The three passengers are two Italian air force officers and an engineer, all with the goal of collecting biometric data, measuring cognitive performance, and recording how certain liquids and solids mix in microgravity conditions. for the colonel Walter Villadei, cAs mission commander, the flight is part of training for a future mission as an astronaut to the International Space Station. Lieutenant colonel and doctor Angelo Landolfi, for their part, perform the biometric tests and their physiological responses. AND Pantaleone Carlucci, engineer and member of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) conduct tests involving the use of multiple sensors that examine heart rate, brain function and other metrics of human performance during spaceflight and in microgravity.
The flight will leave from 9 in the morning (17 Spanish time) from Spaceport America, the first commercial spaceport built in the world. It was inaugurated in 2011 with an investment of about 200 million dollars and is located in the middle of the desert 72 kilometers north of Las Cruces. The journey is scheduled to take an hour and a half and the ship, VSS Unity, is scheduled to reach an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters) to begin with, a voyage dubbed Galactic 01 that comes two years after Branson himself flew alongside to five other members of Virgin Galactic as part of a test of their space rocket.
The three crew members and the instructor who will go on the VSS Unity ship, together with two pilotsVIRGIN
Zero gravity at 90 km altitude
Once the ship reaches 50,000 feet, Unity will break free of the mother ship and fall as the space plane’s rocket ignites, sending the vehicle soaring upward at supersonic speed into the blackness of space for about 50-55 miles. (80-89 km) high. If all goes as planned, the ship will fly again at the beginning of August, with monthly flights. thereafter, according to the company.
Vigin Galactic’s ship
Virgin seeks to write one more episode of a race to dominate tourist flights into space in which two other American companies backed by billionaires are also fully involved, Space X (Elon Musk) and Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos). Of course, this will not be the prototype trip that the company of the 72-year-old Briton hopes to normalize. It will have a markedly scientific purpose.
The shares, which have suffered a dizzying decline in the last two years, reacted strongly to gain 9% on the news of the flight. The company’s initial projections called for 1,000 paying customers at a rate of $250,000 per seat once commercial flights began.
The mission will take off from Spaceport America in New Mexico.
Virgin Galactic had planned to book its first thousand paying customers, charging about $250,000 per seat once commercial service was available. The plans are to make about 400 flights a year, but it still seems to be a distant goal. 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.
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