Three Italians and a flight instructor from the company Virgo Galacticbelonging to the Millionaires Virgin Group Richard Bransonwill conduct the first commercial flight into space on Thursday, June 29.

Although the ship will depart two days late, from New Mexico, at 09:00, the company has announced the great achievement of going into space, so there will be a live stream of the journey, which can be followed via the page of Virgin like it space.com.

The flight operation also involves four pilots in two different ships. Two pilots go into the VMS Eve aircraft that will travel very high in the Earth’s atmosphere, and the other two will be the space plane VSS Unity who goes to suborbital space with the four passengers. In the future, an interested traveler can be a part of these trips, for which they have to pay $450,000 per person.

crew members

Is about Panteleone Cartucci, engineer of the Italian National Research Council; colonel Walter Villadei, of the Italian Air Force, training for future excursions of this type; colonel Angelo Landolfi, an Italian Air Force physicist; And Colin Bennettcommercial space instructor.

The mission is called Galactic 01 and will last 90 minutes. The journey consists of the Eve ship traveling with Unity under her wing, and at an altitude of 50,000 feet she is released to travel alone. At that moment, Unity turns on its rockets and travels to suborbital space. During that agreed time 13 experiments are being conducted that study sustainable materials for medical applications and fluid dynamics.

Unity has a maximum capacity of six passengers, and if this trip is successful, they already have the next flight, Galactic 2, scheduled for early August, with monthly commercial trips after Galactic 2. And if all goes according to the company’s plans, the trips would be weekly, but not before 2026.

This adventure will be a clear competition for Jeff Bezos’ company, Blue Origins.

“The ocean crushed the submarine”: this is how David Gallo, oceanographer and advisor to the RMS Titanic, explained the Titan’s implosion

The flight takes place against the background of the sub-tragedy Titan, in which the catastrophic implosion of an uncertified tourist submarine claimed the lives of five people. A tragedy in Earth’s atmosphere would likely have dire consequences not just for Virgin Galactic, but for the burgeoning private space industry as a whole.

“It’s exactly the kind of scenario that would cause a huge debate if it happened during a space tourism flight,” Tommaso Sgobba, executive director of the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS), recently told Space.com.