VIRGIN Galactic tourism rocket ship test flight reached the edge of space last month, reaching just over 52 miles of altitude, and traveled at 2.9 times the speed of sound. Virgin’s high-altitude launch comes four years after the original SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight that killed the co-pilot and seriously injured the pilot.
The 50-mile mark is high enough to earn astronaut wings from the air force and the Federal Aviation Administration, though other agencies define space as beginning at 62 miles above Earth.
The actual spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo was strapped to the belly of WhiteKnighTwo as the latter gave it a ride up to about 45,000 feet. At that point SpaceShipTwo ignited its rocket engine and started zooming upwards at increasing speed. The flight had two pilots onboard, four NASA payloads and a mannequin named Annie as a stand-in passenger. The flight landed safely back on Earth just over an hour after it took off.
More than 600 people have paid or put down deposits to fly aboard Virgin’s suborbital flights, including the actor Leonardo DiCaprio and pop star Justin Bieber. A 90-minute flight costs $250,000.
The space tourist market is being coined the “billionaire’s space race”. Another venture of the space tourist market is the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. Short sightseeing trips to space aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket are likely to cost around $200,000 to $300,000. Other firms planning a variety of passenger spacecraft include Boeing Co, Elon Musk’s Space X and late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch.
In September last year Space X announced a Japanese fashion billionaire and art collector Yusaku Maezawa would be the company’s first passenger on a trip around the moon on its forthcoming Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) spaceship, tentatively scheduled for 2023. Maezawa is going to invite artists with him for the week-long trip.
