Virgin Galactic Just Got FAA Approval to Launch Customers Into Space—for $250,000 a Seat

June 26, 2021 at 12:07AM

(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — Virgin Galactic finally has the federal government’s approval to start launching customers into space from New Mexico.

Richard Branson’s rocketship company announced the Federal Aviation Administration’s updated license on Friday.

It’s the final hurdle in Virgin Galactic’s yearslong effort to send paying passengers on short space hops.

The company is working toward three more space test flights this summer and early fall, before opening the rocketship’s doors to paying customers. The original plans called for company engineers to launch next to evaluate equipment, followed by a flight with Branson and then a science mission by Italian Air Force officers.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

In the meantime, Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos earlier this month announced plans to ride his own rocket into space July 20 from Texas.

Virgin Galactic officials acknowledged the growing chatter over whether Branson will try to beat Bezos into space.

“Clearly, Sir Richard Branson’s flight date has been subject to speculation for some time. At this time we do not have any further details on the upcoming flight dates,” company spokeswoman Aleanna Crane wrote in an email.

Unlike Blue Origin’s and SpaceX’s fully automated capsules launched from the ground by reusable rockets, Virgin Galactic uses a winged spacecraft that launches from the belly of an airplane and requires a pair of pilots. It’s reached space three times since 2018. The second trip carried a third company employee.

A review of the company’s third flight to space in May — which reached an altitude of 55 miles (89 kilometers) — showed everything went well and paved the way for the necessary FAA permission.

“Today’s approval by the FAA of our full commercial launch license, in conjunction with the success of our May 22 test flight, give us confidence as we proceed toward our first fully crewed test flight this summer,” chief executive officer Michael Colglazier said in a statement.

More than 600 people already have reserved a ride to space. Tickets initially cost $250,000, but the price is expected to go up once Virgin Galactic starts accepting reservations again.

Blue Origin has yet to sell tickets to the public or say what it will cost. Bezos is taking his brother and two others along for the ride on July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the first human moon landing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

They’re Healthy. They’re Sustainable. So Why Don’t Humans Eat More Bugs?

Image
February 26, 2021 at 08:01PM Sylvain Hugel is one of the world’s foremost experts on crickets of the Indian Ocean Islands . So when he received an email from a fellow entomologist in March 2017 asking for help identifying a species in Madagascar that could be farmed for humans to consume, he thought it was a joke. “I’m working to protect those insects, not eat them,” the French academic responded tartly. But the emails from Brian Fisher , an ant specialist at the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, kept coming. Fisher had been doing fieldwork in Madagascar when he realized that the forests where both he and Hugel conducted much of their research were disappearing. Nearly 80% of Madagascar’s forest coverage has been destroyed since the 1950s, and 1-2% of what remains is cut down each year as farmers clear more trees to make room for livestock. The only way to prevent this, Fisher told Hugel in his emails, was to give locals an alternative source of protein.
Read more

A Climate Change-Induced Landslide Is Wreaking Havoc on Denali National Park

Image
September 07, 2021 at 07:24PM For decades, the rangers at Denali National Park in Alaska were easily winning their battle against a slow-moving landslide underneath the park’s only road. Now, due in part to the effects of climate change, they are losing very badly. This summer, the National Parks Service has been frantically dropping 100 dump-trucks-worth of gravel every week on the top of the Pretty Rocks Landslide in an effort to keep up with its accelerating pace, which is the result of rapidly thawing permafrost in the country’s fastest-warming state . Two weeks ago, as the landslide hit unprecedented speed, causing the ground around it to undulate with each passing truck, the team conceded defeat and closed the back half of the park weeks earlier than anticipated. The closure is bad news both in the short term—with hundreds of camping and hotel reservations cancelled on a local economy that depends on tourism—and a scary omen for an entire state that rests on similarly t
Read more

Depression Is a Pandemic. Let’s Use the Lessons of COVID-19 to Find Treatments

Image
May 17, 2021 at 10:50PM A version of this article also appeared in the It’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign up here to receive a new edition every Sunday. This week, we have a special Mental Health Awareness Month edition of It’s Not Just You. In addition to the piece below, you can read a guest essay from Ciara Alyse Harris , one of the stars of the hit Broadway show, Dear Evan Hansen here. My dad, who was always intuitive, told us he saw that my little sister’s depression had returned when he printed photographs he’d taken of her. “I could see it in her eyes, like a ghost,” he said. It was an observation born of love and experience, not science, but not wrong. Until recently, major depression has felt like a ghost disease–invisible but devastating. It’s a disorder that still affects millions every year–one in four of us will suffer a depressive episode in their lifetime. Despite those numbers and the fact that humans have been documenting and speculating about it fo
Read more