Virgin Galactic plans to launch its third business spaceflight on Friday (Sept. 8), but you will not have the opportunity to observe the motion live.
The corporate is targeting Friday morning for the liftoff of the Galactic 03 mission, which is able to send three paying customers aloft from Spaceport America in Latest Mexico.
Liftoff will occur around the identical as Virgin Galactic’s previous missions, company officials told Space.com via email — so, about 10:30 a.m. EDT (1430 GMT). But Galactic 03 won’t be livestreamed; we’ll must depend on updates that Virgin Galactic provides via social media.
In one other departure from previous procedures, Virgin Galactic has not yet identified the three customers. Just about all we all know is that they have been ticketholders for a very long time.
“The three Galactic 03 crewmembers are the primary of Virgin Galactic’s group of ‘Founder’ astronauts — the primary customers whose forward-thinking vision and early ticket purchases helped make the dream of normal business spaceflights a reality,” Virgin Galactic wrote in an announcement late last month.
“The Galactic 03 crew bought their tickets as early as 2005 and, since then, have been an energetic a part of the corporate’s vibrant Future Astronaut community,” they added. (The ticket price back then was considerably cheaper than the present $450,000.)
The trio will fly aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity space plane with Colin Bennett, one in all the corporate’s astronaut instructors. Unity can be piloted by Nicola Pecile and Michael Masucci.
Unity lifts off beneath the wings of VMS Eve, Virgin Galactic’s carrier aircraft. Eve drops the space plane at an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters), at which point Unity fires its rocket motor to rise up to suborbital space. Each Unity and Eve come back to Earth for runway landings.
Galactic 03 is Virgin Galactic’s third business spaceflight, after Galactic 02 on Aug. 10 and Galactic 01 on June 29. When test flights are included, VSS Unity has reached the ultimate frontier a complete of seven times so far.