Virgin Galactic preps for second research flight this year

A biomedical harness will collect physiological data on human spaceflight. Three payloads will evaluate health care technologies in microgravity conditions through the collection of biometric data and examine how confined fluid behaves, an effort that will inform future health care technologies in space.

Those are the tests that will take place Thursday as Virgin Galactic launches its sixth spaceflight — and second that is research related — this year from Spaceport America.

“The pursuit of scientific discovery has driven Virgin Galactic from the beginning, and we’re thrilled to offer a wide breadth of high-quality and reliable access to space-based research,” Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said in a statement. “With six flights in six months, our teams have delivered on our turn time objectives for our initial spaceship, VSS Unity.”

Thursday’s flight, dubbed the “Galactic 05” mission, will include a crew of three first-time passengers.

They include Alan Stern, a planetary scientist and associate vice president for the Southwest Research Institute’s Space Sector; Kellie Gerardi, a payload specialist and bioastronautics researcher for the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences; and a private astronaut of Franco-Italian nationality.

The Virgin Galactic crew also includes VSS Unity Cmdr. Mike Masucci and Pilot Kelly Latimer, VMS Eve Cmdr. Jameel Janjua and Pilot Andy Edgell, as well as Astronaut Instructor Colin Bennett.

Thursday’s flight will be Virgin Galactic’s 10th overall to date.

Its first research flight this year came in late June, when three Italians — two members of the Italian air force and an engineer from the National Research Council of Italy — conducted more than a dozen experiments in the three-plus minutes they spent in suborbit on Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity spaceship.

That research mission also served as Virgin Galactic’s inaugural commercial spaceflight.

The trip for Stern, who was the principal investigator for NASA’s New Horizons mission to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, will also serve as training for a future suborbital spaceflight with NASA.

In a blog posted Monday on NASA Watch, Stern said he will take pictures of immediate family, mission patches and decals from the New Horizons mission, among other items, with him on Thursday’s research flight.

“What sets this flight apart from others, and which likely represents a new kind of space activity, is that more than anything else I will be training — in space — for future space experiments I will be performing with NASA funding,” Stern said in a statement. “Virgin’s suborbital costs are low enough to open up space training actually in space as a viable opportunity, and that is a game changer.”

Gerardi, who called Thursday’s flight a “personal lifelong dream,” said the mission “represents the beginning of a new era of access to space for the research community.”

“I’m grateful for the support and confidence that IIAS continues to place in me, and I’m looking forward to paving the way for our many talented researchers who will follow, using space as a laboratory to benefit humanity,” she said.