If the date of the first flights is still not known, the leaders of Virgin recently assured that it was only a matter of months.
Half-plane, half-rocket, the Virgin Galactic spacecraft will first be carried by a special plane and dropped at altitude (archives).
KEYSTONE/AP/Virgin Galactic
Twelve windows, sixteen cameras and a mirror at the back of the cabin: the space tourism company Virgin Galactic presented Tuesday the interior of its ship which will take passengers to the frontier of space. The date of the first flights is still not known.
The company founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, now listed on the stock exchange, has continued to postpone the date of its first commercial flight. Its leaders recently assured that it was only a matter of months. Several test flights are yet to take place, an official said on Tuesday.
The interior of the cabin, which will have six seats in addition to the two pilots, has been designed to maximize the view of Earth. An AFP reporter visited her in virtual reality, with a headset provided by the company. Each seat is near a large oval window, and a camera is attached to each of these windows so that the passenger can be photographed with the Earth in the background, without having to take out their own camera.
600 clients
Passengers can unfasten their seat belts to float. Other portholes piercing the cabin ceiling will offer a spectacular view of the globe, in the middle of a dark sky. 600 customers who have spent up to $ 250,000, whom the company calls “future astronauts”, have been waiting for years to board the SpaceShipTwo. Development was delayed by a fatal accident in 2014, when improper handling by one of the two pilots caused the aircraft to disintegrate in flight.
The spaceship will first be carried by a special aircraft and dropped at altitude. A few seconds later, the spacecraft, half-plane, half-rocket, will ignite its engine for a supersonic ascent, with an acceleration of 3.5 g, or three and a half times the weight of the Earth.
Then it will cut it, which will create a feeling of weightlessness for several minutes, while the device reaches its peak, at an altitude of a little over 80 km. It then begins its descent to Earth, like a cannon ball. It will hover until it lands at the company-built Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert. As for the price for new customers, “we will probably see a small increase”, conceded Tuesday George Whitesides, “space director” of Virgin Galactic.
