Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic announces first space tourism flight for three people in August

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic announced Thursday that its first space tourists will launch as soon as August 10.

The mission, dubbed Galactic 02, will see three customers who paid the original $250,000 or $450,000, an increase implemented this year.

The crew, which has not yet been named, will pack into the company’s spaceplane attached to the underbelly of a larger carrier plane and jet off toward space.

Once the pair reach at least 45,000 feet, the rocket plane will separate and travel more than 50 miles above Earth’s surface.

Virgin Galactic has already booked a backlog of 800 customers vying for their chance to go to space, which was made possible by the company’s inaugural mission in June.

Branson’s company said it will release the flight manifest, including crew and pilots, at a later date and is set to live stream the launch.

A three-member crew of its first-mission ‘Galactic-01’ made the brief suborbital ride, marking a long-delayed breakthrough for the company, finally commercial service after being fraught with development setbacks for nearly 20 years.

The 90-minute mission took off from Spaceport America in New Mexico at around 8.30am local time.

And August’s mission is set to carry out the same way.

The rocket plane, known as Unity, will be strapped to the ‘mothership,’ a carrier aircraft called VMS Eve.

Eve is a type of carrier plane and will take Unity far above Earth’s surface to release it.

Unity will then ignite its thruster and shut off once it reaches space.

At the apex of the flight, the spaceplane is expected to ‘feather’ its wings open and hover above our planet’s atmosphere, allowing the crew to experience weightlessness and epic views of the final frontier for a few minutes.

The focus of the Galactic 01 mission was to test 13 experiments in zero gravity, which collected biometric data, measured cognitive performance and recorded how certain liquids and solids mix in microgravity conditions.

The rocket plane, known as Unity, will be strapped to the ‘mothership,’ a carrier aircraft called VMS Eve. Eve is a type of carrier plane and will take Unity far above Earth’s surface to release it. Unity will then ignite its thruster and shut off once it reaches space.

The inaugural flight on June 29 included three Italian researchers

Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin use rockets to launch capsules into space, while Branson chose to take a different approach with mid-air launches.

Branson’s technique has been explored over several decades of flight research, including the X-1, the first plane to break the sound barrier, and the X-15, the fastest-piloted aircraft ever flown, topping out at 4,520 miles an hour during a 1967 flight.

And it reduces the need for massive amounts of fuel since the craft is not using force from the rocket to crawl through the dense lower atmosphere.

Branson became the first billionaire in space when he took the maiden voyage of the VSS Unity on July 11, 2021.

The Virgin Galactic founder was one of six Virgin Galactic employees aboard VSS Unity.

Inside the space plane is a minimalistic design that features seats and windows to take in the stunning views of space

Branson became the first billionaire in space when he took the maiden voyage of the VSS Unity on July 11, 2021 

However, the spaceplane was grounded shortly after the flight due to an investigation when it veered off course during its descent back to the runway in the New Mexico desert.

Branson became the first billionaire in space when he took the maiden voyage of the VSS Unity on July 11, 2021.

The Virgin Galactic founder was one of six Virgin Galactic employees aboard VSS Unity.

However, the spaceplane was grounded shortly after the flight due to an investigation when it veered off course during its descent back to the runway in the New Mexico desert.

In September 2021, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it was investigating a deviation in the descent of the flight.

The FAA, which oversees commercial air and spaceflight in the US, found the spaceplane ‘deviated from its Air Traffic Control clearance’ and did so for about a minute and 41 seconds.