After years of procrastination, space tourism company Virgin Galactic hopes to take its first customers into space soon. It promises to launch its commercial flights into space within a few weeks, at the end of June. The company has already presold, in recent years, some 800 tickets: 600 between 2005 and 2014, for a price between $ 200,000 and $ 250,000, and 200 additional more recently, for $ 450,000 each. Despite the tidy sum paid, these buyers had to wait. The space program has indeed fallen far behind schedule following a fatal accident in 2014.
A first mission, called Unity 25, should embark at the end of May four employees of the company. Unity 25 will be "the last evaluation of the complete space system and astronaut experience before commercial flight service opens in late June," the company said. The first commercial flight, called Galactic 01, will carry passengers from the Italian Air Force. The company's founder, Richard Branson, was present aboard the latest space flight to date, in July 2021.
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Unity 25 promises to be the fifth flight to reach space, according to the American definition, which thus qualifies a flight exceeding 80 kilometers of altitude. In practice, the carrier plane, which embarks the spacecraft, takes off from the Spaceport America base in the New Mexico desert. Dropped, the latter then exceeds the famous border of 80 kilometers of altitude. It remains a few minutes in weightlessness before descending by hovering and landing on the same runway.
Virgin Galactic's big competitor, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' company, has already boarded 32 people on its short suborbital flights. Since an accident in September 2022, however, the rocket has been grounded. Blue Origin did not give dates when it would resume flights.