Professor Hawking, who suffers from the degenerative condition amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), confirmed he was still hoping to take a trip into space on a Virgin Galactic rocket.
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Friday, Virgin Galactic unveiled its new spaceship to replace the one that crashed during testing a year and a half ago.
Passengers will get to see the curvature of Earth against the blackness of space and experience a few minutes of weightlessness, Virgin Galactic representatives say.
The first step, Engadget explained, will be to conduct full-vehicle electrical tests and to check all of its moving parts.
Pilot error is said to be part of the reasons behind the crash, so the new SpaceShip Two has more automated features, preventing pilots from any critical errors during flight.
“I would be very proud to fly on this spaceship”, Hawking said.
“But I had reckoned without the dream of another, a man with the vision and persistence to opening up spaceflight for ordinary Earthbound citizens”.
“We are entering a new space age and I hope this will help to create a new unity”, stated Hawking, who had hoped to attend the ceremony but was represented by a recording. The famous theoretical physicist, who has already booked a ride to space with Virgin Galactic, was the one to come up with the name Unity.
The unveiling and naming event will take place at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. Only then will the new SpaceShipTwo move onto the rocket-powered testing phase, the website noted. Virgin Galactic said in a statement about the rollout.
Virgin plans on “debuting the first commercial human spaceflight program in history”.
Virgin Galactic is paying much attention to safety to accomplish its goal of flying paying customers to the suborbital space. “If it was an easy business we wouldn’t only have had 500 people having been to space since space travel started”, Branson told Sky News on Friday.
The fatal mid-air break-up of the firm’s original flagship occurred at around 50,000ft on 31 October 2014.
The new ship has a locking mechanism to keep that from happening again. The new version of spaceship comes with a pin that prevents pilots from unlocking the tail section too early.
During operational flights, which will take off from Spaceport America in New Mexico, the space plane will take passengers up to a minimum of 62 miles above Earth’s surface – the traditionally accepted boundary where outer space begins.
Branson’s Virgin Group and Aabar Investments, run by the government of Abu Dhabi, have together invested more than £350m in Virgin Galactic, which is already diversifying from space tourism into cargo, building a space launcher, LauncherOne, for small satellites.
“Ultimately, we want to be able to produce our own point-to-point aircraft”.
“Obviously it was a horrendous day when it happened and I must admit we had moments where I questioned if we should carry on”, Branson admitted.
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“The best way to do that is to be involved with every aspect of the experimentation and the build”.
