Branson’s ship goes into space. This is the great start of commercial flights for tourists with a thick wallet

Virgin Galactic made its first manned spaceflight in July 2021, just days before a similar one. Despite the manned tests already conducted, it took Virgin Galactic almost two years after Branson’s flight to ensure that tourism space in their performance is safe.

Virgin Galactic will take the rich to the edge of space

Now the billionaire’s extraordinary vehicle will fly on its first commercial flight. On board the VSS Unity spaceplane, piloted by two pilots (Mike Masucci and Nicola Pecile), there will be four passengers: Engineer Pantaleone Carlucci from the National Research Center of Italy, Colonel Walter Villadei from the Italian Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Angelo Landolfi, who is a doctor in the Italian Forces and Colin Bennett, an astronaut instructor working for Virgin Galactic. Therefore, it will not (yet) be a tourist mission, but a research and training mission, financed by the Italian Air Force. The goal of passengers is examining the influence of microgravity conditions on the behavior of the human organism and human cognitive abilities.

The VSS Unity plane with six people on board will be lifted about 15 km above the Earth by the mother plane VMS Eve, and only after detaching from it will it launch its own rocket engines. The launch will take place from the company’s Spaceport America spaceport in the state of New Mexico (USA) on Thursday at 12:00. 9:00 local time (17:00 in Poland). The entire flight will take about 2.5 hours, and VSS Unity passengers will be able to see the curvature of the Earth with their own eyes and spend a few minutes in weightlessness. The space plane will take off

This is the first in a series of Virgin Galactic commercial missions (whence the name Galactic 01). As part of the next ones (the next one is planned for August), the first people who decided to pay a fortune for their flight are to reach the border of space for tourist purposes. (PLN 1.84 million) per person. Although the planned date of the company’s first commercial flight was known a long time ago, Virgin Galactic has now received a huge wave of criticism – primarily in social media – for the not very favorable timing of the mission. that imploded during a tourist cruise near the wreck of the Titanic.