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"It is a beautiful day to travel to space."
British billionaire Richard Branson is already at Spaceport America, the spaceport built in New Mexico, USA, which today will experience one of the most decisive moments for the launch of space tourism.
By bike, he arrived this morning at the facilities built in the desert to join the team with which the founder of the aerospace company Virgin Galactic will get on his ship at 4.30 p.m. to carry out one of the last tests before starting his program
suborbital tourist flights.
The
Unity22 mission
is made up of two pilots and four specialists, including Branson (in the photo, fourth from the left), in charge of noting the experience that his future clients will have as space tourists.
Branson with the team with whom he will make this test flight V.G.
Traveling with him (left to right) Dave Mackay, chief pilot;
Colin Bennett, engineer responsible for operations;
Beth Moses, chief astronaut instructor, Sirisha Bandla, vice president of operations and research, and pilot Michael Masucci.
If all goes according to plan, the flight will take a little over an hour and a half.
Branson's
VSS Unity
ship
takes off attached to the manned mothership,
VMS Eve (named after the mogul's mother).
The first 45 minutes pass like in a commercial airplane.
When the altitude is approximately 15 km, the two ships disengage.
After a few seconds of fall, the
VSS Unity
will propel itself at around 4,000 km / hour, reaching approximately 90 km in a minute and a half (in a previous test it reached 89 km).
At that point, the crew members will unbuckle their seat belts to experience zero gravity for about four minutes and float through the ship.
Then they will start the return to land in the desert.
Richard Branson, who will turn 71 on July 18, announced in 2014 his intention to travel to space with his family, a dream that he will finally be able to make come true today. It has not been a bed of roses. His program, which should have started in 2009 to carry space tourists, suffered a major setback in 2014 when a pilot died during one of the tests.
Although the plan was to make the first suborbital flight with his family once the program began, Branson has gone ahead by deciding to participate himself in one of the trial tests as a specialist.
About twenty tests have preceded this Sunday's flight with which Branson has managed to get ahead of Jeff Bezos, owner of Blue Origin, who on July 20 will also get on his spacecraft, the
New Shepard,
for the
first time
for a suborbital flight.
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