Virgin Galactic the Spacecraft Flights for Tourism

Virgin Galactic is a company within Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group which plans to provide sub-orbital spaceflights to the paying public, along with suborbital space science missions and orbital launches of small satellites. Further in the future Virgin Galactic hopes to offer orbital human spaceflights as well.

It is planned that the spacecraft are to be robust and affordable enough to take paying passengers. The craft is projected to be a six passenger, two pilot craft.[1] Its planned trajectory will overlap the Earth’s atmosphere at 70,000 feet (21,000 m), which will make it a sub-orbital journey with a short period of weightlessness. At around 16 kilometers or 52,000 ft (16,000 m), the rocket will separate when the plane reaches its maximum height. The time from liftoff of the White Knight II booster carrying SpaceShipTwo until the touchdown of SpaceShipTwo after the suborbital flight will be about 2.5 hours. The suborbital flight itself will only be a small fraction of that time. The weightlessness will last approximately 6 minutes. Passengers will be able to release themselves from their seats during these 6 minutes and float around the cabin.

In addition to the suborbital passenger business, Virgin Galactic will market SpaceShipTwo for suborbital space science missions and market WhiteKnightTwo for “small satellite” launch services. They plan to initiate RFPs for the satellite business in early 2010. [wikipedia]