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Virgin Galactic aims to fly its second commercial spaceflight on Thursday, its first carrying private-paying tourists.
Called Galactic 02, the flight is launching from Spaceport America in New Mexico. The company’s spacecraft is flown by a pair of pilots and carries four other people: a Virgin Galactic trainer, to oversee the mission from inside the cabin, and a trio of passengers.
The three customers onboard Galactic 02 are British former Olympian Jon Goodwin and two passengers from the Caribbean, Keisha Schahaff and Anastatia Mayers, who won seats through a charity fundraising drawing by nonprofit Space for Humanity.
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Virgin Galactic uses a two-step system known as “air launch” to fly its passengers on a suborbital spaceflight.
This type of spaceflight gives passengers a couple of minutes of weightlessness, unlike the much longer, more difficult and more expensive private orbital flights conducted by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
After the jet-powered carrier aircraft, VMS Eve, carries the spacecraft into position, the rocket-powered VSS Unity is released and fires its engine to climb past an altitude of 80 kilometers, or about 262,000 feet. That altitude is what the U.S. recognizes as the boundary of space.
The company completed its first commercial spaceflight, the Galactic 01 mission carrying members of the Italian Air Force, in late June and now hopes to ramp up flying cadence for paying customers.
Virgin Galactic has a backlog of about 800 passengers. Many of those tickets were sold at prices between $200,000 and $250,000 over a decade ago, but the company reopened ticket sales two years ago, with pricing beginning at $450,000 per seat.
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