The company is keeping its promise last month and took off from Spaceport America in New Mexico with two pilots, a companion and three lucky Italians on a flight funded by their national agency, ASI. This is the very first commercial airdrop of the small VSS Unity rocket plane.
Virgin Galactic has high hopes for the coming months.
A new experience?
After years, and even almost twenty years of preparation, Virgin Galactic is starting commercial flights! The company was promoting it last month, and for once the promise was indeed kept: only five weeks after the previous parabola, the small rocket plane VSS Unity was back in service. But for the first time, on board, they are no longer Virgin employees, but customers. In this case, not yet tourists, but three employees of the Italian space agency (ASI) as well as a rack containing a large part of the 13 experiments carried out on this flight. As for the previous parabolas, the carrier plane VMS Eve took the rocket plane VSS Unity to its cruising altitude, before releasing it at 5:30 p.m. (Paris). The latter then ignited its rocket engine and gained altitude to reach 85 km and leave a few minutes of weightlessness to its occupants.
Not for fun
On board the VSS Unity, there were two pilots from Virgin Galactic (Michael Masucci, and Nicola Pecile, who flew for the first time at this altitude), while in the cabin too, there was an attendant for the Italian experimenters: Colin Bennett, who had also already made a parabola in the device in 2021. The three Italians from the ASI (Pantaleone Carlucci, Angelo Landolfi and Walter Villadei) respected the instructions well, even if we can notice that they did not move much during their four minutes (approximately) in zero gravity.
Just one of them broke away to interact with the experiments, before a little photo session and a few looks through the portholes. The other two didn’t have the opportunity to detach themselves, their tablet absorbing all their attention (which is easily understandable, it’s not a tourist flight!). A. Landolfi, who is a doctor, carried out experiments on cognition, and P. Carlucci wore a veritable network of body sensors under his suit.
The lights are green for Virgin Galactic
The return, which shook the participants, did not fail to come back to glide through the clouds before landing on the Spaceport America in New Mexico. This is a real victory for Virgin Galactic, which waited years after technical setbacks to be able to set up the first commercial flights of its adventure. So much so that 2023 and its two suborbital flights have already equaled the record reached in 2019 and then in 2021. Virgin Galactic is counting on this good momentum for a next parabola from August, this time with three tourists on the passenger seats. Then, by the last quarter of the year, about one airdrop per month. Competitor, Blue Origin and its New Shepard capsule, is also waiting to resume operations.
Bonus tip: If you’re thinking “but wait, isn’t that the company that went bankrupt and was being broken up?” then you think of Virgin Orbit. The two entities are totally independent.
Source : Youtube
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