Virgin Galactic has announced that its boss, Sir Richard Branson, will be heading up into space in early 2021, according to The Telegraph.
It plans to launch two manned flights before the end of the year, and then if they go well, it will launch Branson into orbit on the SpaceshipTwo vehicle, called VSS Unity. He will accompany five other people in the space vehicle.
The VSS Unity successfully completed a second test flight in June 2020 from New Mexico, which Virgin Galactic said in a statement helped to “gather data about performance and handling qualities while flying at higher speeds”. On its test flight, it glided at a speed of Mach 0.85.
The VSS Unity travels into the atmosphere attached to its ‘mothership’ VMS Eve until it reaches an altitude of 51,000 ft–it then detaches and rockets into space. Passengers stay in space for 5 minutes–there are 16 cameras to capture everything, inside and out–and then they descend.
Whilst flights cost $250,000, the company says that 600 people have so far bought a ticket. They will look out through individual cabin windows.
Virgin Atlantic is competing against Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX to be the first company to take passengers into space.
Virgin Galactic has recently announced a collaboration with Rolls Royce to design an aircraft which can fly from New York to London in two hours or Sydney to London in four, at three times the speed of sound.
