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Virgin Galactic Launches First Commercial Flight To Space, Charging $450K Per Ticket
Virgin Galactic Charging $450,000 Per Ticket As First Commercial Flight To Space Launches
A twin-fuselage jet stood ready on Thursday to carry a Virgin Galactic rocket plane with a three-man crew from Italy into the New Mexico sky for a high-altitude launch of the company’s first flight of paying customers to the edge of space.
The two Italian air force colonels and an aerospace engineer from the National Research Council of Italy were due to join their Virgin Galactic instructor and the spaceplane’s two pilots on a suborbital ride expected to take the six men about 50 miles (80 km) above the desert floor.
The flight marks a decisive moment for Virgin Galactic Holding Inc, the space tourism venture founded by British billionaire Richard Branson in 2004, as it inaugurates commercial service following several years fraught with development setbacks.
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Virgin becomes the latest commercial enterprise, along with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and fellow billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX, catering to wealthy customers willing to pay large sums of money to experience the exhilaration of supersonic rocket speed, microgravity and the spectacle of the Earth’s curvature from space.
The mission of the Italian team flying on Thursday, however, was billed as a scientific one, with the three men planning to collect biometric data, measure cognitive performance and record how certain liquids and solids mix in microgravity conditions.
Considering the recent Titanic submarine incident, this space flight news has been met with mixed reactions. “The type of people to buy this shit had to be living under a rock or something this last week,” someone commented.
“So they didn’t learn for the submarine. Now they’re trying to do space expeditions and shit,” another person wrote.
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