After a long urge to fly into space, Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson was ready to embark on his most daring and greatest adventure aboard his own rocket on Sunday.
The adventurous billionaire has joined five company employees who were also deployed on the edge of space test flight over the desert of southern New Mexico.
Branson has always been the showman and has counted the days considerably to take off on Twitter.
He viewed the brief ups and downs as a confidence factor, not only for the 600+ people who already had reservations and were waiting behind the scenes but also for potential space tourists willing to spend a few hundred thousand dollars to try their luck. luck. . In law.
Also Read: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to Become Blue Origin’s First Space Passenger the Next Month
The London founder of the Virgin Group, who will be 71 in a week, is not expected to fly until the end of the summer. But he was reassigned to a previous flight after Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos announced he would launch his own rocket from West Texas on 20th July.
Virgin Galactic doesn’t expect to start stealing customers until next year. Blue Origin has yet to open ticket sales or even announce pricing, but at the end of last week, it bragged on Twitter that it would increase customers and offer larger windows.
Unlike Elon Musk’s Blue Origin and SpaceX, which launch capsules on reusable booster rockets, Virgin Galactic uses a twin-fuselage aircraft to lift its space rocket.
The spacecraft detaches from the mothership at an altitude of about 13,400 meters, then fires its rocket engine to fly directly into space. The maximum altitude is around 70 kilometers with three to four minutes of weightlessness.
The rocket plane, which requires two pilots, glides on a runway at its base in Spaceport America.
Virgin Galactic first reached space in 2018 and repeated the feat in 2019 and again last May, each time with minimal crew.
It received clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration last month to begin deploying customers.
