As with the company’s previous spaceflights, Virgin Galactic will use two vehicles: VSS Unity and VMS Eve. VSS Unity is the rocket-powered spacecraft that carries the space tourists, and VMS Eve is the transport rocket that takes Unity into space. When the double reaches an altitude of 15,000 meters, Eve will drop Unity so that passengers can experience weightlessness for a few minutes while looking down on Earth from far above.
The spacecraft then glides back to Earth and, like a space shuttle, lands on a runway. The whole thing takes no more than an hour.
Source: Virgin Galactic
The current plane is named Unity 25 because it will be the 25th flight (including “glides” through Earth’s atmosphere) of the spacecraft. The mission will launch from Spaceport America in New Mexico, Virgin Galactic’s commercial operations center.
After failures
The company, founded in 2004, has survived many technical and economic crises. They expect paying customers to correct the company’s promises that have not been kept for years, the missed deadlines and owner Sir Richard Branson to sell a huge part of his share.
The price of the tickets is 450,000 dollars each, i.e. 154 million forints, which already includes the 150,000 dollars to be deposited in advance by the passengers. In any case, the share price jumped 4% when the June trading start was announced. The money is needed, as Virgin Galactic is unprofitable, and the satellite launch’s sister company, Virgin Orbit, already went bankrupt in April.
Photo: Courtney Crow / Source: Virgin Galactic
Richard Branson was among six Virgin Galactic employees to take part in the maiden flight in 2021, more than 80km above the New Mexico desert. At the time, Branson hailed the mission as a precursor to a new era of space tourism and said the company was ready to begin commercial operations. The flight preceded Branson’s rival Jeff Bezos’ expedition to the edge of space by about two weeks. Branson has denied competing with Bezos.
Unfortunately, it later turned out that their spacecraft deviated from its authorized route, so the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) launched an investigation against the company, and it was banned from flying for a while. THE New Yorker His September 2021 article stated that because the pilots did not want to bring bad news to Branson’s highly publicized flight, they decided not to abort the climb. Even though they were warned by several warning red lights in the cockpit, the trajectory of the vehicle deviated from the regular one.
