Virgin Galactic continues cadence of monthly spaceflights

Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity spaceship shot into space Friday morning from Spaceport America in southern New Mexico with three paying passengers on board, marking the company’s fourth successful commercial spaceflight since June.

Unity and the mothership VMS Eve took off together from the spaceport runway at 9:28 a.m. with the spaceship strapped to the wings of the carrier plane. The mothership climbed to about 44,000 feet, at which point Unity detached from Eve and fired up its rocket motor to shoot into space, allowing the three adventure tourists nestled in the six-passenger cabin to unstrap from their seats and float for a few minutes in microgravity while viewing Earth below.

Just moments later, the spaceship was homeward bound again, floating down from suborbit and landing back at the spaceport runway at 10:25 a.m.

“Welcome back to Earth,” Virgin Galactic tweeted following the flight, dubbed Galactic 4. “Our pilots, crew and spaceship have landed safely at Spaceport America.”

Like the previous flight in early September, dubbed “Galactic 3,” Virgin Galactic declined to livestream Friday’s event for public viewing, instead providing real-time images of Unity rocketing into space, plus a three-second video of the passengers floating in the cabin.

The company says it wants to respect the privacy of its paying customers going forward as it moves into regular monthly flights, offering live-streamed coverage only on select missions.

But Ron Rosano — a U.S. citizen from the San Francisco Bay Area and one of the three space tourists on Friday’s flight — spoke with the Journal about his experience, which he called “ineffable.”

“It’s very hard to describe in words,” Rosano told the Journal shortly after debarking from Unity. “I spent a long time imagining it over years, and to actually be on the flight was amazing.”

Once the spaceship detached from Eve and fired up its rocket motor, everything went very quickly, Rosano said.

“The rocket boost itself is quite an experience,” he said. “As the fuel burns, the spaceship gets lighter and quicker as it moves away from gravity. It escalates after motor ignition and goes faster and faster, and then, instantaneously, you’re in weightlessness and going from the thrill of rocketing to a completely quiet, pitch-black sky.”

Rosano and the other three passengers, which included Virgin Galactic Chief Astronaut Instructor Beth Moses, unbuckled from their seats and floated in front of the cabin windows.

“I just stayed at the window to take everything in,” Rosano said. “I saw the moon up in the sky and I looked at the surface of the earth below and saw the incredibly vibrant blue of the atmosphere. You can think of it as a fire hose of sensory input, but it’s more like multiple fire hoses — so much more than you can take in during the short amount of time you’re there.”

Rosano is now one of nine space tourists to fly on Unity since August, with three passengers strapped in on each flight, plus a Virgin Galactic astronaut instructor accompanying them in the cabin, and two pilots at the controls.

Friday’s flight also included British advertising executive Trevor Beattie and Namira Salim — a native of Pakistan and longtime resident of Dubai who on Friday became the first Pakistani person to ever fly to space.

All three are “founding members” of Virgin Galactic’s “Future Astronaut” community, which includes some 800 individuals from more than 60 countries who have made reservations to fly on Unity. Friday’s passengers reserved their seats as early as 2006, each paying $200,000 for a chance to board the spaceship.

Today, a ticket to fly costs $450,000 per person.

Apart from the nine passengers that boarded Unity’s three monthly flights since August, a three-member Italian crew also flew to space in late June on a research mission to test experiments in microgravity. And, in May, an in-house Virgin Galactic crew launched into suborbit to conduct a final, full-system evaluation before beginning commercial service the following month.

That makes five flights in five months, putting the company on a monthly flight cadence that it expects to continue until 2026, when its next-generation Delta class spaceships enter service, allowing Virgin Galactic to progress to weekly flights, and eventually daily ones. The company is now preparing to build the Deltas at a new rocket-assembly facility it is constructing in Arizona.

“Our teams … have delivered on our monthly spaceflight objectives,” company CEO Michael Colglazier said in a statement Friday. “Three new astronauts journeyed to space today and brought back incredible memories and stories of their experience above the Earth. These early missions with our initial ship, VSS Unity, have informed and confirmed the design and maintenance objectives for our Delta class spaceships, and the production tooling for those ships is on track to commence in the fourth quarter.”