Virgin Galactic’s Historic Suborbital Space Tourism Flight with Paying Passengers

Virgin Galactic has taken three paying tourists on a suborbital flight for the first time. This makes the space tourism that the company has been promising for about twenty years a reality, although the plane did not reach the semi-official altitude of space.

Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity spaceplane lifted off Thursday afternoon Dutch time from Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert aboard mothership VMS Eve. An hour later, the plane disconnected. Unity eventually reached an altitude of 88.5 kilometers. After a short period of weightlessness, the plane landed back on Earth.

The mission, Galactic 02, is the company’s second commercial space flight and the third with humans on board. At the end of June, Virgin Galactic already flew its first official space flight with paying astronauts on board. However, these were not tourists, but members of the Italian Air Force and the National Research Council of that country. Now there were three paying members on board who had bought a ticket as tourists.

One of the passengers was Jon Goodwin, an 80-year-old Briton who, in 2005, became one of the first people to buy a ticket for the flight. In the early years, Virgin Galactic raised money as an investment by selling tickets for around 200,000 to 250,000 euros. The promise of flying ‘within a few years’ was repeatedly postponed. Many of the first buyers have since asked for their money back or have even died. The other two passengers were Keisha Schahaff and Anastatia Mayers, a mother and daughter from Antigua and Barbuda. In 2021 they won a prize from the Space for Humanity foundation and were allowed to go up with Virgin Galactic.

Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson promised back in 2005 that the company would take commercial passengers ‘to space’. Back then, space tourism was only reserved for millionaires and wealthy people like Dennis Tito, the first space tourist who paid $20 million in 2001 for a week-long flight to the International Space Station. Space tourism is actually not the right name for Virgin Galactic’s flights. First, passengers are weightless for only a few minutes and do not enter orbit. Secondly, the plane did not reach the altitude of one hundred kilometers. There lies the Kármán Line, which most international bodies hold as the beginning of space.

2023-08-11 07:58:48
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