Virgin Galactic’s New Shuttle Plans to Take You to Space

The 2014 accident was a great setback in Virgin Galactic’s plans of flying its adventurous customers to suborbital space, but things could get back on track with the company’s brand new vehicle.

The first SpaceShipTwo – named Enterprise and unveiled in 2009 – disintegrated above the Mojave Desert during a test flight on October 31, 2014, killing one pilot and leaving another hospitalized with serious injuries. A new version of rocket plane SpaceShipTwo is ready to be launched, with the British-born entrepreneur due to unveil the craft today.

Virgin Galactic plans to take space tourists up to 50 miles above the Earth’s surface.

It all happened inside Virgin Galactic and ship builder The Spaceship Company’s massive hangar as hundreds of employees, sponsors, business partners and aspiring astronauts stood and cheered.

More than 700 people are said to have signed up for the flights so far, including actor Leonardo DiCaprio and physicist Stephen Hawking.

With independent flight time clocking in at around 30 minutes, based on the full price of a ticket, half an hour on the unsupported spaceship will cost £5,800 per minute (8,333 dollars), or roughly about £97 per second. On Thursday, we told you what you could expect from the new model, and today you can see pictures of the aircraft that will hopefully take paying customers to space.

“Even before we unveil this brand new vehicle – indeed, even before we’d assembled the parts together into something that looked like a spaceship – we had begun a rigorous test campaign patterned off the relevant industry standards”, the release reads.

“We would always remember the accident, but we would not be defined by it”, Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides said during the rollout. An investigation found Michael Alsbury had prematurely activated a braking system on the craft in an attempt to slow it down for re-entry. The spaceship is initially carried beneath the wing of a larger aircraft and then released at an altitude of about 45,000 feet (cruising altitude for typical passenger flights is about 33,000 feet), at which point it briefly glides before rocketing into the fringes of space.

Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is scheduled to show off its newest spacecraft at an event here Friday, in what would mark a significant milestone for a company that suffered a fatal accident just over a year ago.

“Each flight will generally fly a little higher, a little faster, and sometimes we may need to repeat a test point to get additional data or confirm a result”, it says. SpaceShipTwo’s feathering feature is used to bring the spacecraft back safely after it reaches the top altitude of its flight.

Branson was joined by several members of his family, including his 1-year-old granddaughter, Eva Deia, who marked her first birthday by christening the space ship “Unity”, using a bottle of milk in place of Champagne.

Mr Branson’s rivals in the privately funded space race include SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.