Virgin Galactic

If you want to take a trip to outer space on your next vacation, you will be able to do so with Virgin Galactic. This is a branch of the Virgin Airline Company that plans to include space flights to its list of flight to various destinations. For the price of $200,000 per seat, ordinary citizens can have an experience similar to that of an astronaut traveling about 60 miles above the Earth’s surface and experiencing 6 minutes of weightlessness. Even though the first flight is not planned to take place until 2009, about 200 seats have already been sold.

Virgin Galactic is the first space tourism company offering sub-orbital flights to the general public aboard SpaceShipTwo. This is an eight-seat aircraft containing 2 pilots and 6 passengers and construction of its design began in 2005. The construction phase of the aircraft has now been completed, but is undergoing and extensive period of testing, which does involve anywhere from 50 to 100 space flights of the same nature planned for passengers. These test flights are scheduled to begin in June 2008.

Passengers cannot expect to have the same type of take off with Virgin Galactic as they do with commercial airlines. A rocket will be used in the lift off for SpaceShipTwo and the rocket will separate at an altitude of about 16 km from Earth. The total length of time on the spacecraft will be 2.5 hours, although the portion of the time actually spent in outer space will be much shorter. For the 6 minutes of weightlessness, passengers will be able top unbuckle their seat belts and float around inside the spacecraft.

SpaceShipTwo will travel at Mach 3 speed, which is a little faster than that of fighter jets, but it will only be able to hold this speed for a short period of time. It does have to fold its wings up when it reenters the Earth’s atmosphere and after doing so, it will spread them out for a smooth landing.