WASHINGTON — Operating under a veil of secrecy paying homage to a national security launch, Virgin Galactic performed its third industrial suborbital spaceflight Sept. 8 with three private astronauts on board.
The corporate’s VSS Unity spaceplane, attached to its VMS Eve mothership aircraft, took off from Spaceport America in Latest Mexico at 10:34 a.m. Eastern. Unity separated from the aircraft and reached a peak altitude of 88.6 kilometers before gliding back to a runway landing on the spaceport at 11:36 a.m. Eastern.
The “Galactic 03” flight was the third industrial mission for Unity, after the Galactic 01 research mission June 29 and the Galactic 02 private astronaut flight Aug. 10. It was also the fourth suborbital flight for Unity in a bit greater than three months, when including a test flight in late May.
Galactic 03 was commanded by Nicola Pecile with Michael Masucci as pilot and Beth Moses, the corporate’s chief astronaut instructor, within the cabin. As with the corporate’s Galactic 02 flight, the vehicle also carried three private astronauts.
Nonetheless, unlike the previous two flights, the corporate didn’t disclose the identity of the private astronauts until after Unity landed. Traditionally, each government and personal crewed missions, suborbital and orbital, flown from the U.S. have publicly named the complete crews before launch, often weeks or months upfront. Virgin Galactic didn’t explain the secrecy surrounding the crew.
The corporate did discover the private astronauts after landing as Ken Baxter, Timothy Nash and Adrian Reynard. Baxter is a Las Vegas real estate entrepreneur who claims to have purchased the primary SpaceShipTwo ticket from Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson in 2004. Nash is an entrepreneur and adventurer from South Africa who purchased his ticket in 2006. Reynard is a British engineer who began a business a half-century ago constructing race cars.
While the corporate didn’t discover the shoppers on board until after the flight, a few of them has been talking concerning the flight upfront. Baxter, for instance, has a website where he provided updates about his flight preparations. That website also describes him as “America’s First Space Tourist,” a designation normally assigned to Dennis Tito, who paid for a seat on a Soyuz flight to the International Space Station 22 years ago.
Also unlike the 2 previous flights, Virgin Galactic didn’t provide a webcast of the Galactic 03 mission. As an alternative, it provided updates via social media, because it did on the May test flight.
“It’s an honor to see our ‘Galactic 03’ crew realize their lifelong dreams of spaceflight as they encourage our manifest of Future Astronauts,” said Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, using the corporate’s term for its customers. “Each successful flight shows how powerful and personally transformative space travel might be, and we stay up for scaling our operations and making space travel more accessible to people world wide.”
The corporate said its next flight, Galactic 04, is planned for early October, continuing a monthly cadence of missions.
Shares in Virgin Galactic closed down 2.1% in trading Sept. 8 at $2.29.