Surely you were among the 500 who signed up to be the first passengers on Virgin Galactic’s two-hour space flights at $200,000 a pop, right? Well, mark your calendar in 2014, when Sir Richard Branson says the flights will start.
Yesterday, Branson’s Virgin Galactic conducted a second rocket-powered supersonic test flight of the passenger spaceship it is developing.
The craft, dubbed SpaceShipTwo, reached an altitude of 69,000 feet over California’s Mojave Desert after it was dropped from a carrier aircraft and its rocket was ignited for a 20-second burn.
Two pilots and a flight test engineer were aboard as the craft reached a maximum speed of Mach 1.43, then glided to a landing at Mojave Air and Space Port. Both the altitude and speed exceeded marks set during the first rocket-powered flight last April.
Virgin Galactic is owned by Branson’s Virgin Group and Abu Dhabi’s Aabar Investments PJS.