Richard Branson it’s finally happening Space Journey on Sunday.
It’s been a very long wait for Branson, the 70-year-old British billionaire who heads up a galaxy of Virgin companies. In 2004, he founded Virgin Galactic, which provides adventure tourists with rides on rocket-propelled planes to the edge of space and back.
At the time, they thought that commercial service would start in two to three years. Instead, nearly 17 years have passed. Virgin Galactic says it still has three more test flights to operate, including one on Sunday, before passengers are ready to pay.
Branson will be the crew member for this flight. Their job is to evaluate the cabin experience for future customers.
When is the flight, and how can I watch it?
The flight is scheduled to take off from Spaceport America in New Mexico on Sunday morning, about 180 miles south of Albuquerque.
Virgin will broadcast coverage of the flight starting at 9 a.m. Eastern Time, with Stephen Colbert hosting the livestream. Singer Khaled is about to perform a new song after the crew takes off, and SpaceX founder Elon Musk suggested he might make an appearance.
What is Virgin Galactic’s space plane and what will it do?
The rocket plane, called SpaceShipTwo, is about the size of a working jet. There will be four people in the cabin besides two pilots. This spaceship 2 has been named VSS Unity.
Ekta is taken by a large aircraft to an altitude of about 50,000 feet to take off from the ground. There, Unity would be released, and the rocket plane’s motor would ignite. The acceleration would cause people to experience a force up to 3.5 times their normal weight on the way to an altitude of over 50 miles.
At the top of the arc, people on board will be able to get out of their seats and experience about four minutes of apparent weightlessness. Of course, they would not have actually escaped gravity. Fifty miles up, Earth’s downward gravitational pull is essentially as strong as it is on the ground; Rather, the passengers would be falling at the same speed as the aircraft around them.
The two tail booms at the rear of the space plane rotate to a “winged” configuration that creates more drag and stability, allowing the plane to enter Earth’s atmosphere more slowly. This configuration makes SpaceShip Two more like a badminton shuttlecock, which always falls with the pointed end down compared to a plane.
Nevertheless, the forces felt by the passengers on the way down will be greater than on the way up, reaching up to six times the force of gravity.
Once the aircraft is back in the atmosphere, the tail boom will spin back down, and the aircraft will glides to a landing. The entire flight can take less than two hours.
Who are the crew members in flight?
The pilots are David McKay and Michael Masucci.
In addition to Branson, three Virgin Galactic employees will evaluate what the experience will be like for future paying customers. They are Beth Moses, Chief Astronaut Instructor; Colin Bennett, Lead Operations Engineer; and Sirisha Bandla, Vice President for Government Affairs and Research. Bandala will also conduct a science experiment provided by the University of Florida.
Kenneth Chang c.2021 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in the new York Times.
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