Virgin Galactic on Thursday was poised to send its spaceplane into the New Mexico sky with six men onboard, marking what will be company’s first flight of paying customers to travel to the edge of space.
Dubbed Galactic 01, the 90-minute mission will take off from Spaceport America near the New Mexico town of Truth or Consequences around 11 a.m. EDT.
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Those onboard include a three-member crew from Italy, including Colonel Walter Villadei and Lieutenant Colonel Angelo Landolf of the Italian Air Force as well as Pantaleone Carlucci of the National Research Council of Italy, Reuters reported. They will be joined by a Virgin Galactic instructor, Colin Bennett, and the spaceplane’s two pilots.
Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity (Matt Hartman/AP)
The pair of pilots have been tasked with guiding mothership VMS Eve to an altitude of 50,000 feet, before the SpaceShipTwo vehicle VSS Unity separates and ignites its rocket engines for suborbital space travel. At the peak of the flight, some 50 miles above the desert floor, the crew will experience a few minutes of weightlessness before the spacecraft shifts back into reentry mode.
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“We’re launching The Spaceline for Earth with #Galactic01, our first scientific research mission!” Virgin tweeted. The crew will “conduct more than a dozen experiments in space, which will examine how microgravity affects the human body and other materials.”
The Italian space travelers specifically intend to collect biometric data, measure cognitive performance and record how certain liquids and solids mix in microgravity conditions.
If successful, the Richard Branson-run space firm will join a small collection of companies ferrying passengers beyond planet Earth, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which has already shipped 32 people into space.
The flight comes two years after Branson himself joined a five-person crew from Virgin Galactic for its first fully crewed test spaceflight of Unity in July 2021. At the time, the company hoped to launch commercial services in 2022 after a series of additional test flights.
The timeline was significantly delayed however after federal regulators grounded Unity for almost three months while Virgin Galactic was investigated for deviating from its assigned airspace on ascent during the initial July 2021 flight.
The flight on Thursday was chartered by the Italian government and does not include any wealthy space tourists. Takeoff comes just 10 days after a commercial submersible imploded in the Atlantic Ocean during an deep sea-voyage to the wreck of the Titanic. All five people onboard were killed.
Virgin Galactic preps first commercial flight to edge of space
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