Excitement is building in preparation for the launch of Virgin Galactic’s seventh commercial spaceflight.
The launch window for the mission, known as Galactic 07, opens at 8:30 a.m. EDT (10:30 a.m. EDT or 1430 GMT) on Saturday (June 8) and will depart from Spaceport America in southwestern New Mexico.
The Galactic 07 crew will include backup astronaut Tuva Atasever from the Turkish Space Agency on the Axiom Space Mission 3 (Ax-3) and three private astronauts. Virgin Galactic doesn’t typically reveal the identities of private astronauts leading up to launches, but it does share them In the current situation This is one from California, one from New York, and one from Italy.
Related: Virgin Galactic launches first Ukrainian woman into space – and three others – on suborbital flight Galactic 06 (video)
This will be Virgin Galactic’s second mission of 2024. Its first flight of the year, Galactic 06, saw the first Ukrainian woman reach suborbital space.
Tickets for these flights are a big investment, typically selling for $450,000. Travelers on Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane experience a few minutes of weightlessness and get to see a view of Earth that very few get to see in a lifetime.
Commander Nicola Bissell and Pilot Jamil Janjua will fly VSS Unity, Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spaceplane, and Commander Andy Edghill and Pilot CJ Sturckow will fly VMS Eve, the mother plane carrying Unity, to high altitude before launching the spaceplane and igniting its rocket motor. .
The suborbital spaceflight will also carry research payloads from Purdue University and the University of California, Berkeley. According to a company statement, the Purdue experiment will focus on “the flow of propellant in the fuel tanks of maneuvering spacecraft,” while UC Berkeley will test a new type of 3D printing in microgravity.
Since 2018, Virgin Galactic has flown payloads as part of NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program, and was recently selected to be NASA’s contract flight provider for the next five years.
Axiom Space, a private spaceflight company based in Houston, has completed three crewed flights so far to the International Space Station, and has its fourth mission, (Ax-4), targeted for October at the earliest. The company has partnered with Virgin Galactic on several previous flights.
“Axiom Space’s commitment to enabling access to space and providing opportunities for scientific discovery beyond Earth is closely aligned with Virgin Galactic’s mission,” Tejpaul Bhatia, chief revenue officer at Axiom Space, said in a Virgin Galactic statement. “We are very excited about the upcoming Galactic 07 flight.”
The Galactic 07 mission follows the previous mission in January where an alignment pin unexpectedly separated from VMS Eve after VSS Unity separated. Although no one was in any danger on board the flight, the company notified the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) so that both entities could investigate the issue to prevent it from recurring on future missions.
Virgin Galactic has taken corrective steps to ensure the incident on Galactic 07 is not repeated.
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