Virgin Galactic’s Branson climbs into space on a rocket plane made by Reuters

By Steve Gorman

TRUTH OR CONCLUSIONS, NM (Reuters) – British billionaire Richard Branson climbed more than 50 kilometers from the New Mexico desert on Sunday on a Virgin Galactic rocket and safely returned to space with his first vehicle equipment, a landmark project he started 17 years ago.

Branson, one of six employees at Virgin Galactic Holding Inc., has taken on a mission linked to the trip, taking it as a pioneer of the new space tourism era, with the company he founded in 2004 with the intention of starting commercial operations next year.

“We’re here to make the space more accessible to everyone,” said a 70-year-old Branson feed shortly after the flight ended. “Welcome to the dawn of a new era of space.”

The success of the flight also boasted the rights of the rare entrepreneur with billionaire Jeff Bezos, the online retail mogul of Amazon (NASDAQ :), in the fierce competition he hoped to fly into space for the first time on his space company rocket.

“Congratulations on the flight,” Bezos said on Instagram. “I can’t wait to join the club!”

Space industry executives, future customers and other welcome attendees were invited to attend the festival’s live broadcast of Stephen Colbert’s presentation of the nightly television comedy. Among those in attendance was billionaire Elon Musk and a pioneer in the space industry, Tesla (NASDAQ 🙂 Inc. also the founder of the electric car manufacturer.

Grammy-nominated R&B singer Khalid took to the stage after the flight to perform his next single “New Normal”.

The bright white plane was flown on Sunday to the top of a double-fuselage VMS Eve (named for Branson’s late mother) attached to the bottom in a takeoff from Spaceport America, near a well-named town of State-owned facilities, Truth or Effects. Virgin Galactic leases a large portion of the 18,000-acre site.

Reaching its high-altitude launch point at about 46,000 meters, the VSS Unity passenger rocket plane was released from its mother ship and crashed when the crew fired a rocket, sending it supersonic speed straight up into the darkness of 53 space. 85.9 km) altitude.

The trace of the space plane was clearly visible from the ground as it rose through the upper atmosphere, amidst the cheers of the crowd below.

At the top of the climb the rocket was extinguished, the crew had microgravity for a few minutes before the spacecraft entered re-entry mode, and began to return to the spaceport runway. The entire flight, from take-off to landing, lasted about an hour.

“I dreamed of this since I was a child, and nothing could prepare you to see it from space,” Branson told hundreds of animators from the stage outside the Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space complex at the spaceport before he and his crew members cheered. one with champagne.

The brave executive had previously broken world records with the feat of crossing the oceans in hot air balloons.

Retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield put on astronaut wings produced by Virgin in blue flight suits that Branson and his team wore. The official wings of the Federal Aviation Administration would be presented later, a company spokesman said.

HIGH COST TICKETS

Virgin said it plans at least two more flights on the spacecraft in the coming months before the start of its regular commercial operation in 2022.

Hundreds of wealthy astronauts have already booked reservations, priced at about $ 250,000 per ticket.

The Swiss investment bank UBS has estimated that the potential value of the space tourism market will reach $ 3 trillion annually by 2030.

It is essential to be safe for public rocket travel.

A first prototype of a Virgin Galactic rocket plane crashed in a test flight across the Mojave Desert in California in 2014, killing one pilot and seriously injuring another.

SPACE RACE

His career in Blue Origin and its founder, Bezos, was known as the “multimillion-dollar space race” he faced his astro-tourism rival.

Bezos plans to fly his own suborbital rocket, the New Shepard, this month.

Branson stressed that he and Bezos are friendly rivals and that they do not engage in personal rivalry to win each other in space.

Blue Origin, however, has condemned Virgin Galactic for its lack of real spaceflight experience, saying that unlike Unity, the New Shepard of Bezos is a 62-kilometer (100 km) peak called the Kármán line established by international aeronautics. the body as it defines the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and space.

“New Shepard was designed to fly over the Kármán line, so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to the name,” Blue Origin said in several Twitter posts on Friday.

However, NASA’s U.S. space agency and the U.S. Air Force define an astronaut as anyone who has flown more than 80 kilometers (80 km).

A third player in the space race, Musk’s SpaceX, plans to send its first civilian crew (without Musk) into orbit in September, after already launching numerous cargo payloads and astronauts for NASA’s International Space Station.

The two pilots of the plane were Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci. Three other mission specialists include Beth Moses, the company’s chief astronaut professor; Colin Bennett, chief operating engineer at Virgin Galactic; and Sirisha Bandla, vice president of research operations and government affairs.

(GRAPHIC: Virgin Galactic passenger spacecraft – https://graphics.reuters.com/SPACE-EXPLORATION/VIRGINGALACTIC/xklpyxlkwvg/Virgin-galactic.jpg)