SpaceShipTwo makes history

The winged spaceplane, dubbed “Unity,” rocketed to 271,268 feet altitude, or 51.4 miles, in the skies above the Antelope Valley, a feat heralded on the ground at the Mojave Air and Space Port by a cheer­ing crowd of on­look­ers from the Virgin Gal­ac­tic fam­ily, friends, media and others.

“It’s amazing. It’s still set­ting in,” Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides said following the flight. “This was a huge, huge mile­stone.”

In addition to reaching its highest altitude yet, the spacecraft also reached its fastest speeds, hitting Mach 2.9 during the rocket boost.

“It’s been 14 hard years. We’ve had tears and joy. Today, let’s give everybody a huge cheer,” Virgin Gal­ac­tic founder Richard Bran­son said, adding he shed tears over the flight’s suc­cess. “We’ve got many ex­ci­ting things ahead of us.”f

During Thursday’s test flight, the rocket motor burned for 60 seconds, slight­ly longer than of­fi­cials had originally hoped and ensuring the flight would reach space.

Pilot Mark “Forger” Stucky earned civilian as­tro­naut wings for the flight, while fellow Virgin Gal­act­ic pilot and former NASA space shuttle astronaut C.J. Sturckow added to his spaceflight tally.

“Everything worked great,” Stucky said, calling the flight “incredible” and adding the ride was smooth during the rocket motor burn.

“There’s still more left for the chief pilot (Dave Mackay) to break our record on the next flight,” he said. “It was really amazing.”

NASA, the Federal Avi­a­tion Administration and the Air Force use the 50-mile mark to award astronaut wings for spaceflight. The FAA has prom­ised an award cer­e­mony in Washington early next year to present Stucky and Sturckow with civ­il­ian astronaut wings.

As part of the flight test program, the test was yet another incremental step toward a full flight profile. The rocket motor can burn for about another five seconds, Whitesides said.

The WhiteKnightTwo moth­ership, with the spacecraft slung between the twin fuselages, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port at 7:11 a.m., heading north to climb to the release point at about 43,000 feet altitude. Unlike ver­tic­al-launch rockets such as the SpaceX Falcon, Space­ShipTwo uses the mothership as its first stage, carried aloft to a launch altitude of between 40,000 and 50,000 feet.

When the spacecraft was released at 8 a.m., it quick­ly lit the hybrid rock­et motor and shortly began a near-vertical climb, reach­ing supersonic speeds within 10 seconds.

After the rocket motor shut down, the spacecraft con­tin­ued to climb, topping out at the 271,268-foot mark.

It then glided back to the same runway for a picture-per­fect landing about 13 minutes later before the cheering crowd, with Sturckow at the controls.

“It was a great flight and I can’t wait to do it again,” a succinct Sturckow said.

Adding to the celebratory nature of the event, Vir­gin Galactic employee Bran­don Parrish retrieved a small box carried in Stucky’s flight suit pocket, then got down on one knee and proposed to fellow Vir­gin Galactic employee Ver­on­ica McGowan, pre­sent­ing her with a ring that had just been to space and back.

Champagne was opened and sprayed over the happy couple, matching the celebration toasts enjoyed by team members shortly after.

“Today, for the first time in history, a crewed space­ship, built to carry private passengers, reached space. Today we completed our first revenue generating flight — thank you NASA —  and created two new astronauts,” Branson said, adding Sturckow’s new designation is in addition to the one he already earned with NASA. “Today, we have shown that Virgin Galactic really can open space to change the world for good.”

The test flight logged another first: it carried four science ex­per­i­ments for NASA’s Flight Op­por­tu­nities pro­gram as payload for the com­pany’s first revenue-gen­er­a­ting flight. The experiments took ad­van­tage of the reduced grav­ity environment of the Space­Ship­Two flight and will contribute to future NASA space missions.

Thursday’s flight, while reaching a key milestone, does not signal the end of the test program. Ad­di­tion­al flights to expand the space­craft’s flight envelope are still needed before com­mercial service will begin.

Running in parallel with the envelope expansion flights will be flight testing of the spacecraft’s interior and passenger procedures, Whitesides said.

The last two flights have included passenger seats installed in Unity, and future test flights will in­clude Virgin Galactic staff flying as passengers to test the passenger experience.

The number of test flights remaining and the timeline to begin com­mer­cial service will depend on analysis of the tremendous amounts of data generated, until officials are con­fid­ent of the spacecraft per­for­mance. However, it is “not a huge number of flights” left, Whitesides said.

The early results from Thursday’s spaceflight were solid, he said.

With the capability for a longer rocket burn, “the vehicle will definitely go higher,” he said, but just how high ultimately will be decided by the test program.

Commercial flights will take place from Spaceport Amer­ica in New Mexico, and Branson confirmed Thurs­day he plans to be on board the first commercial flight.

Some 700 people have booked tickets for pas­sen­ger flights, and he expects ticket sales to begin again after halting them fol­low­ing the 2014 accident of the SpaceShipTwo pro­to­type, which killed Scaled Com­pos­ites pilot Mike Als­bury and injured pilot Pete Siebold.

Thursday’s flight was the first spaceflight from the Mojave Air and Space Port since the final flight of its predecessor, Space­Ship­One, in October 2004, which claimed the $10 mil­lion Ansari X Prize and led to the development of Virgin Galactic and Space­Ship­Two. Branson ob­tained license to the Space­Ship­One technology for his nascent spaceline, with plans to provide commercial spaceflight for passengers and science.

Branson said Thursday the development program has cost approximately $1.3 billion to date, in­clu­ding investments not only in Virgin Galactic’s space­line, but also The Space­ship Company which de­vel­ops and manufactures the spacecraft and Virgin Orbit, a small satellite launch firm which uses a mod­if­ied 747 airliner as an air launch platform for its Laun­cher­One rocket. That firm is preparing for its first launch next year.

For video of the flight and additional photos, visit avpress.com.

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