Virgin Galactic to roll out new space tourism rocket plane

Sir Richard Branson is set to unveil the new Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo as the company pushes ahead in the race to send passengers into space.

The venture is unveiling SpaceShipTwo – a six-passenger space plane which will take commercial customers on five-minute trips into suborbital space.

Virgin Galactic’s first SpaceShipTwo was destroyed on October 31, 2014, when a co-pilot prematurely unlocked the feathers during a powered test flight and aerodynamic forces broke the craft apart.

Such is the case of the private spaceflight company Virgin Galactic plans to renew its space travel endeavors with the unveiling a new spaceship on Friday.

“As a thousand year old saying goes, there is no easy way from the Earth to the stars”, said Virgin Galactic in a statement.

A key feature of the design is the so-called feathering system – a term derived from the feathers of a badminton projectile. Peter Siebold, director of flight operations for Scaled Composites and the pilot of SpaceShipTwo, was able to parachute to safety and was taken to a hospital for treatment. They are designed to swivel upward at an angle to create drag, preventing a buildup of speed and heat, and then rotate back down to normal flying position as the craft descends into the thickening atmosphere.

An investigation by the National Transporation Safety Board found that the spacecraft was ill-equipped to sufficiently account for potential human error.

Sir Richard Branson says he briefly wondered if it was worth continuing his space tourism program following the 2014 accident that destroyed a rocket and killed a pilot.

Many journalists and industry experts sort of lost faith into Virgin Galactic’s ability to provide safe space travelling; the accident made a lot of them skeptical about the viability of their project, but the launching of a new vehicle could represents the company’s comeback. That accident has hung over the program ever since, but the company said it had learned “brutal but important lessons from one tragic test flight accident”. One of the two pilots aboard was killed.

SpaceShipTwo is the successor to SpaceShipOne, the winged rocket plane that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004 by demonstrating a reusable spacecraft capable of carrying three people could make two flights within two weeks to at an altitude of least 62 miles.

Like SpaceShipOne, SpaceShipTwo is carried aloft beneath the wing of a mother ship – a special jet aircraft that releases it at an altitude of about 45,000 feet. When it reaches its suborbital trajectory, the SpaceShipTwo will start falling back to Earth, gliding until it lands on a runway.