Three Italians are part of the six-man crew to make the 80km journey. Read more at straitstimes.com.
NEW MEXICO, United States - 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.
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.
Joining him on Thursday are two Italian colleagues – Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Angelo Landolfi, a doctor and flight surgeon, and Pantaleone Carlucci, a research council member acting as flight engineer and payload specialist. At the apex of the flight, the crew will experience a few minutes of weightlessness with the engine shut off before the craft shifts into re-entry mode and glides back to the spaceport for a runway landing.More On This TopicThe flight comes two years after Mr Branson himself rode along with five other Virgin Galactic personnel for the first fully crewed test spaceflight of Unity in July 2021.
Establishing a solid safety record is critical. An earlier prototype of the Virgin Galactic rocket plane crashed during a test flight over California’s Mojave Desert in 2014, killing one pilot and seriously injuring another.
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