Virgin Galactic is an American spaceflight company within the Virgin Group. It is developing commercial spacecraft and aims to provide suborbital spaceflights to space tourists. Richard Branson had originally hoped to see a maiden flight by the end of 2009. The date was delayed for several years, most seriously by the October 2014 in-flight crash of VSS Enterprise.
About Virgin Galactic in brief
Virgin Galactic is an American spaceflight company within the Virgin Group. It is developing commercial spacecraft and aims to provide suborbital spaceflights to space tourists. Virgin Galactic’s founder, Richard Branson, had originally hoped to see a maiden flight by the end of 2009. The date was delayed for several years, most seriously by the October 2014 in-flight crash of VSS Enterprise. In February 2019, the project carried three people, including a passenger, on VSS Unity VF-01, with a member of the team floating within the cabin during a spaceflight that reached 89. 9 kilometres. In July 2007 at the Mojave spaceport three Scaled Composites employees were killed and three critically injured while testing components of the rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo. Just a year later, in July 2008, Branson predicted the maiden space voyage would take place within 18 months. By July 2014, TSC was only halfway through the completion of a second SpaceShip two, and had commenced construction of a a second WhiteKnightTwo. On 14 May 2013, he stated that he would be capable of ‘launching 100 satellites every day’. However Branson still announced his spaceship would be able to carry six passengers into space, and that he planned to fly six people into space every day for the rest of the year. He has added a variation of the Virgin Galactic livery to his personal business jet, the Dassault Falcon 900EX ‘Galactic girl’.
The Spaceship Company was founded by Branson through Virgin Group, and Burt Rutan through Scaled composites to build commercial spaceships and launch aircraft for space travel. Branson told the 300 people attending, each of whom had booked rides at USD 200,000 each, that flights would begin “in 2011” However, in April 2011, he announced further delays, saying “I hope 18 months from now, we’ll be sitting in our spaceship and heading off into space”. The credibility of the earlier promises of launch dates by Virgin Galactic were brought into question in October 2014 by its chief executive, George Whitesides, when he told The Guardian: “We’ve changed dramatically as a company. Right now we can design, build, test and fly a rocket motor all by ourselves and all in Mojave, which I don’t think is done anywhere else on the planet” In February 2012, SpaceShip Two had completed 15 test flights attached to White Knight Two, and an additional 16 glide tests, the last of which took place in September 2011. A rocket-powered test flight took place on 29 April 2013, with an engine burn of 16,000 feet, and reached a altitude of 55,000ft. While this was half the speed of 2,000mph, it fell far short of the 2,500mph for 70 seconds required to launch a satellite. The first commercial space flight is scheduled to take place in 2015.
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This page is based on the article Virgin Galactic published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 12, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
