SPACEPORT AMERICA, N.M. — Virgin Galactic is ready to conduct its first industrial SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceflight June 29, one that may display the readiness of the vehicle for industrial operations in addition to its role as a research platform.
The corporate made final preparations June 28 for the Galactic 01 mission, the second suborbital flight of the corporate’s SpaceShipTwo spaceplane in as many months. Virgin has billed the flight as the corporate’s long-delayed transition to industrial operations after an prolonged test campaign.
Virgin Galactic is planning for a takeoff of its VMS Eve mothership aircraft with the VSS Unity spaceplane attached at about 10:30 a.m. Eastern June 29. Unity will separate from Eve nearly an hour later, igniting its hybrid rocket motor for its suborbital flight, then landing back on the spaceport.
The Galactic 01 mission, Virgin Galactic’s first fully industrial flight, will carry three Italian payload specialists to perform a set of experiments. Walter Villadei and Angelo Landolfi of the Italian Air Force and Pantaleone Carlucci of Italy’s National Research Council plan to conduct 13 experiments starting from biomedical data collection to studies of combustion in microgravity throughout the flight.
Accompanying them within the cabin will probably be Colin Bennett, a Virgin Galactic astronaut instructor who was on the July 2021 flight of Unity that carried company founder Richard Branson. He’ll assess the research flight experience during this flight.
While the majority of Virgin Galactic’s business will probably be flying private astronauts — the corporate has about 800 individuals who have signed up for suborbital flights — it argues that research flights like Galactic 01 will probably be a crucial a part of its business.
“It’s perfect that this primary industrial mission is a research mission. That shows that that is one other lab environment that’s producing science and technologies that we are able to invest into the people back on Earth,” said Sirisha Bandla, vice chairman of presidency affairs and research operations at Virgin Galactic, in a June 28 interview.
The corporate has flown research payloads on prior test flights, like those provided through NASA’s Flight Opportunities program. That included work by Bandla herself on the July 2021 flight. This mission, though, is dedicated to research with a test program developed by the Italian team. “It’s a mix of all the pieces that now we have tested on our spaceflights so far,” she said.
Bennett will probably be on board to observe how the Italian payload specialists perform their work. “He’ll have a look at how everyone’s moving across the cabin, conducting their research, and do a holistic evaluation of the research mission in order that we are able to continually improve on the experience,” she said.
Much of the training for research flights is identical as private astronaut flights. The important thing difference, Bandla said, is practicing the “choreography” of activities by the researchers during their temporary flight, in addition to working through the payload safety reviews for the experiments.
As the corporate moves into regular operations, it plans to conduct research flights on a set schedule, mixed in among the many private astronaut missions. “The goal is to have it at the identical time annually in order that researchers can time their grants and their proposals through whatever agency funds their research and have predictable and reliable access for his or her science,” she said.
The emphasis, she added, is on having a gentle cadence of flights, each for researchers seeking to test experiments before flying them into orbit and for those for whom suborbital flights are sufficient. “The primary thing that we hear is we wish repeatable and regular access to space,” she said of feedback from the research community.