If Branson’s flight is successful, the Brit will be nine days ahead of Blue Origin’s main competitor, Jeff Origin’s founder. He planned his trip to space on July 20.
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VSS Unity takes off from the Spaceport America spaceport near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. The ship will take off the parent aircraft VMS Eve to the expected height of about 15 kilometers. Then the shuttle separates, starts its own engines and climbs steeply to the 90-kilometer mark.
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Shuttle of the Virgin Galactic VSS Unity company
Foto: Virgin Galactic, Reuters
When reaching the highest point of the flight, the crew will experience a state of weightlessness for several minutes. Then the machine slowly descends and lands on the runway of the Spaceport America spaceport, from which it took off with the carrier aircraft. If everything goes according to plan, the flight will take an hour and a half.
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Fully loaded for the first time
It will be the 22nd VSS Unity flight test. Three of the twenty-one have taken place with people on board. This time, however, it will be the first flight with a full, six-member crew. It is to consist of two pilots and four “mission specialists”, including Branson.
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Virgin Galactic has previously announced that it expects to launch its space commercial services next year. However, this should be preceded by two more test flights.
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Richard Branson
Foto: Virgin Galactic, Reuters
Bezos will fly higher
Jeff Bezos has reduced the importance of his competitor’s efforts after announcing that the boss of Virgin Galactic will fly before he does. He pointed out that Branson wasn’t actually looking into space. As in any previous flight, the VSS Unity space shuttle will not exceed an altitude of 100 kilometers, which is the generally accepted limit of the beginning of space.
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“Only four percent of the world recognize the lower limit of 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, as the beginning of space,” Bezos’s Blue Origin said on Twitter. She added that her New Shepard rocket flies over a hundred kilometers, which is “one of the many benefits of flying with Blue Origin”.
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Another billionaire, Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, occasionally joins the spacefight. However, it does not focus on suborbital jumps of tourists into space.
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Its Falcon 9 launch vehicles and Dragon ships are already transporting cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). He himself is mainly interested in getting to Mars, where he would like to die, but not in a spaceship crash.
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