Virgin Galactic Soon Ready to Fly People to Space

Written by Marko on April 26, 2008

Virgin Galactic, the first commercial space flight company, is soon ready to take the first people to space. Virgin Galactic will use their special-purpose aircrafts to provide this unforgettable trip outside our atmosphere. The company has spent years and millions of dollars to develop this spacecraft. Soon ordinary people can experience the feeling of flying to space.

So what is Virgin Galactic anyways? Wikipedia says:

Virgin Galactic is a company within Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, which plans to offer sub-orbital spaceflights and, in the future, orbital spaceflights to the paying public. Virgin Galactic’s mission is to fly passengers who are not professional astronauts to an altitude slightly over 100 kilometers (62 mi) and allow them to experience weightlessness for up to 6 minutes. Each seat will be sold for US$200,000. According to Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn, the company had sold nearly 200 seats as of November 2007. The first flight is planned for 2009.

Virgin Galactic is aiming to be the first space tourism company specializing in the provision of sub-orbital flights to the public. While orbital flights can be made by budding space tourists through the Russian Space Agency, there are presently no operational craft capable of sub-orbital flight aside from SpaceShipOne. However, EADS is currently working on a competing sub-orbital craft. Given that SpaceShipOne was designed for a very specific task, Virgin Galactic has commissioned Burt Rutan to design a newer, bigger and better version of his suborbital craft, called SpaceShipTwo. It is this eight seater craft, seating 2 pilots and 6 passengers, which will be used by Virgin Galactic passengers.

Check out the video below. It gives you more information on Virgin Galactic, commercial spaceflights, SpaceShipTwo aircraft as well as Sir Richard Branson, the “father” of Virgin Group.
Virgin Galactic, the first commercial space flight company, is soon ready to take the first people to space. Virgin Galactic will use their special-purpose aircrafts to provide this unforgettable trip outside our atmosphere. The company has spent years and millions of dollars to develop this spacecraft. Soon ordinary people can experience the feeling of flying to space.

This article was written by Marko Pyhajarvi and its original location is in HomeboyAstronomy.Com astronomy blog. For more great astronomy articles, please visit HomeboyAstronomy.Com.