Washington (AFP)

12 portholes, 16 cameras and a large mirror at the back of the cabin to admire: the space tourism company Virgin Galactic presented Tuesday the interior of the vessel which will take, on a date still undetermined, passengers capable of paying hundreds thousands of dollars to float a few minutes on the edge of space.

The company founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, and now listed on the stock exchange, has continued to postpone the date of its first commercial flight, but its executives recently assured that it was only a matter of months. Several test flights have yet to take place, an official said on Tuesday, before Richard Branson himself took his place on board.

The interior of the cabin, which will have six seats in addition to the two pilots, has been designed to maximize the view of Earth.

An AFP reporter visited her in virtual reality, with a headset provided by the company. Each seat is near a large oval window, and a camera is attached to each of these windows so that the passenger can be photographed with the Earth in the background, without needing to take out their own camera. .

Passengers will be able to unfasten their seat belts to float, and other windows piercing the cabin ceiling will offer a spectacular view of the globe, amid a dark sky.

600 customers with up to $ 250,000, what the company calls "future astronauts", have been waiting for years to board the SpaceShipTwo, but development was delayed by a fatal accident in 2014, when improper handling of one of the two pilots caused the aircraft to disintegrate in flight.

The spaceship will first be carried by a special aircraft and dropped at altitude. A few seconds later, the spacecraft, half-plane, half-rocket, will ignite its engine for a supersonic ascent, with an acceleration of 3.5 g, or three and a half times the weight of the Earth.

Then it will cut it, which will create a feeling of weightlessness for several minutes, the time for the device to reach its peak, at an altitude of just over 80 km, and begin its descent back to Earth, like a cannonball. cannon. It will hover until it lands at the company-built Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert.

As for the price for new customers, "we will undoubtedly see a small increase", conceded Tuesday George Whitesides, "space director" of Virgin Galactic, at a virtual press conference.

© 2020 AFP