Branston is all in a pickle!
Posted: Sun Jul 11, 2021 6:57 am
Let's hope Branson, et al, don't end up in one!
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From The Verge...Virgin Galactic will launch Richard Branson and three company employees to the edge of space on the morning of Sunday, July 11th. The company is promising quite a show for the mission: Stephen Colbert will host the mission’s livestream, singer-songwriter Khalid will reportedly perform a new single live onstage following the spaceplane’s landing, and Branson has said he’ll “announce something very exciting” after his spaceflight.
The flight marks one of the company’s final test missions before it aims to kick off commercial space tourism business next year. The mission, dubbed Unity 22, will mark Virgin Galactic’s fourth flight to space carrying humans, with its largest crew yet. Four people, including Branson, will test the astronaut cabin experience, and two pilots will be in the cockpit.
The action will start when Virgin Galactic’s twin-fuselage WhiteKnight carrier aircraft takes off from Spaceport America, the company’s spaceport in New Mexico on Sunday morning. The WhiteKnight aircraft, VMS Eve, will carry a rocket-powered spaceship called VSS Unity, with Branson and others on board. About 40 minutes after takeoff, Unity will drop from the middle of the mothership and ignite its rocket engine moments later to send Branson and the crew to the edge of space, about 55 miles high, for a few minutes of weightlessness. Unity will return to a landing strip at Spaceport America, much like any normal commercial airplane.
Unity 22 is a significant step forward for Virgin Galactic’s ambitions for space tourism, a burgeoning market catered to wealthy adventure-seekers. The company, started in 2004, has already sold roughly 600 tickets, with each ticket going for around $250,000. Branson is just one player in the billionaire-led race to court space tourists. He’s vying with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which aims to launch passengers on its suborbital New Shepard rocket, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which plans to put tourists in its orbital Crew Dragon capsule for a longer and more expensive experience in space.
Sunday’s mission has also been surrounded by an increasingly spicy air of competition with Bezos. Virgin Galactic announced Branson’s spaceflight a few weeks after Blue Origin announced it would send Bezos to space on July 20th. Then, Blue Origin announced it’d also fly Wally Funk on its July 20th mission, an aviator who initially planned to fly on Virgin Galactic’s spaceship first. Branson denies his new flight date was meant to beat Bezos to space; he told The Washington Post last week it was just a “wonderful coincidence that we’re going up in the same month.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... nson-orbitA spat has erupted over whether Branson’s flight really counts as going into space.
The boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, known as the Kármán line, has been a source of controversy for years.
Aeronatics standard setter Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the Switzerland-based world body, defines the Kármán line as the altitude of 100 kilometres (62 miles; 330,000 feet) above Earth’s mean sea level, as do several other organizations.
However, US space agency Nasa says the boundary is 50 miles, or 80 kilometers, above sea level, with pilots, mission specialists and civilians who cross this boundary officially deemed astronauts.
Seemingly stung that its prized “first” moment for space travel for the general public is being seized by Branson, Bezos’s Blue Origin took to Twitter to make digs alluding to whether Unity 22 is really going into space, instead of just to the edge of space.
“From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name,” the company tweeted Friday.
“For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100km up at the internationally recognized Kármán line.”
Virgin Galactic hasn’t engaged in the social media banter, instead promoting the launch, and hosting a question and answer thread with Unity 22 crew members, with the flight label recognizing that this will be the 22nd flight of the company’s VSS Unity rocket plane, although the first to carry space travel passengers as opposed to crew.
Branson’s spaceplane will be borne aloft by a twin-fuselage carrier jet to an altitude of 50,000 feet, where the Unity craft riding upon it will then be released and soar by rocket power in an almost vertical climb through the outer fringe of Earth’s atmosphere.
By contrast, Blue Origin’s passenger capsule lifts off vertically atop a reusable rocket from a launchpad in west Texas, with Bezos’s flight on 20 July scheduled for the 52nd anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing.
On 2 July, Branson had told CNN Business, “I don’t know for sure exactly when Jeff Bezos is going, he may decide to go before us, but I honestly don’t see this as a space race.”
“I would love for Jeff to come and see our flight off … I would love to go and watch him go in his flight, and I think both of us will wish each other well,” he continued.
http://parabolicarc.com/2021/07/10/to-b ... more-79841Fewer than 25 suborbital spaceflights have ever been conducted
Most suborbital launches were conducted with vehicles retired decades ago
No suborbital flight has ever carried a paying passenger
There is no agreement on what even constitutes a suborbital spaceflight