Virgin Galactic spacecraft takes first passenger into space
Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft has taken its first passenger into space.
SpaceShipTwo, built by British billionaire Richard Branson to carry tourists into space, launched from California’s Mojave Desert on Friday (local time) and flew to an altitude of 89.9 km, the company said.
The US definition of space is anything over an altitude of 80.4km. The Virgin craft made it past that for the first time in December, reaching an altitude of 81km.
Mr Branson announced with great fanfare at the time it was the first time since NASA ended its space shuttle program in 2011 that an American vessel had carried humans into space.
However, the Virgin craft still has not crossed the internationally accepted boundary between Earth’s outer atmosphere and space, known as the Karman Line, which is set at an altitude of 100 km.
“SpaceShipTwo, welcome back to space,” Virgin Galactic wrote as it tweeted updates throughout the event, without sending out any live footage.
The spacecraft travelled at a speed of Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound in its ascent, and landed without incident at the Mojave spaceport.
It is designed to carry six passengers, but test flights are years behind schedule in large part because of an accident that killed a test pilot in 2014.
Mr Branson told AFP earlier this month he hoped the test flights would be far enough ahead by July that he would be able to join a flight.
For the first time on Friday, the flight carried a passenger, Virgin Galactic’s Beth Moses – who will be in charge of training the company’s future space tourists, along with two pilots.
To take off from the ground, SpaceShipTwo is carried by another larger plane, WhiteKnightTwo, which resembles a combination of two airplanes attached by their wing tips.
When it is high enough, it releases the spaceship which then fires up its own rocket engine and ascends for roughly a minute into space.
At the apogee, its passengers float in zero-gravity for several minutes. It then descends and glides back to the landing strip.
Mr Branson’s main rival is Blue Origin, created by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Mr Bezos told an audience in New York this week his New Shepard suborbital vehicle would start flying people later this year and to a greater altitude than SpaceShipTwo.
“One of the issues that Virgin Galactic will have to address, eventually, is that they are not flying above the Karman Line, not yet,” Mr Bezos said, according to Space News.
New Shepard has already flown above the Karman Line, but not with people on board.
Do you know more or have a story tip? Email: y7newsroom@yahoo7.com.au.
You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter and stay up to date with the latest news with Yahoo7’s daily newsletter. Sign up here.
