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"Virgin Galactic is a company planning for journeys to space to make the ordinary people taste the weightlessness of space..."Once Virgin Galactic’s routine flights begin, ordinary people—at least, ordinary people with US $200 000 to spare—will be able to buy tickets into space. True, the company won’t take them into orbit, but it will fly them 100 kilometers (62 miles) above sea level which is almost defined as the edge of space.
To get there, they’ll have to have at least a dollop of the right stuff. The six passengers and two pilots will take off horizontally from the spaceport’s 3.7-kilometer-long runway in a space plane that will likely have the ambiance of a trendy business jet. This craft—dubbed SpaceShipTwo by the company that designed it, Mojave, Calif.–basedScaled Composites—will be slung beneath a double-fuselage carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, on takeoff and for the flight’s first couple of hours.
The real adventure begins after the two linked craft rise about 15 km (50 000 feet), at which point SpaceShipTwo will drop from its mounting, fire up its rocket motor, and go zooming upward into the heavens. Its passengers will then experience peak forces that are almost 4 g’s—four times normal gravity—more than what a ride up on the space shuttle gave its astronauts, although for passengers on SpaceShipTwo the push into their seats will last for just a minute or so. The feeling of acceleration will abruptly disappear when SpaceShipTwo’s rocket motor shuts down, as the craft coasts upward through a broad arc that will give its occupants about four minutes of free fall, or “weightlessness.”
Although Virgin’s plans do not include having flight attendants on board, the company is promising passengers that at this point of their flight they will be free to move about the cabin, as they say. (The pilots will no doubt joke with them about the dangers of unexpected turbulence.) After floating over to press their noses to the windows and spending some time enjoying a magnificent view of star-dappled blackness behind Earth’s curved horizon, these new astronauts will have to reseat themselves for the leg back home.
