TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, New Mexico, June 29 (Reuters) – A three-man crew from Italy soared more than 50 miles (80 km) above the New Mexico desert on Thursday aboard a Virgin Galactic rocket plane, the company’s first flight of paying customers to the edge of space since British billionaire Richard Branson founded the venture in 2004.
The two Italian air force officers and an aerospace engineer from the National Research Council of Italy made the brief suborbital ride with three Virgin Galactic crew members, two of whom piloted the vehicle, VSS Unity, once it was launched at high altitude from the belly of its twin-fuselage carrier plane.
About 75 minutes after leaving the ground with its mothership, the Unity spaceplane safely glided back to its starting point on a runway at Spaceport America, a state-owned complex near the aptly named New Mexico town of Truth or Consequences. Virgin Galactic leases part of the facility.
The flight marked a long-delayed breakthrough for Virgin Galactic Holding Inc, finally inaugurating commercial service after nearly 20 years fraught by development setbacks.
Branson founded the company with renowned aerospace mogul Burt Rutan in a venture that grew out of the 2004 Ansari X Prize competition won by Rutan’s experimental spaceplane – forerunner of the SpaceShipTwo design of Unity.
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.
ITALIAN SCIENCE MISSION
The “Galactic 01” mission of the Italian team flying on Thursday, however, was billed as a scientific one, with the three men planning to collect biometric data, measure cognitive performance and record how certain liquids and solids mix in microgravity conditions.
For Italian Air Force Colonel Walter Villadei the flight was also part of his astronaut training for a future mission to the International Space Station.
Joining him on Thursday were two Italian colleagues – Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Angelo Landolfi, a physician and flight surgeon, and Pantaleone Carlucci, a research council member acting as flight engineer and payload specialist.
Rounding out the crew was their Virgin Galactic trainer, Colin Bennett, the company’s lead “astronaut instructor,” and Unity’s two pilots, Michael Masucci and Nicola Pecile.