“The significance of yesterday’s flight is that it is the first flight of a spaceship built entirely by The Spaceship Company and operated by Virgin Galactic”.
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“Team has worked (very) hard to get to this point”.
Thursday’s test flight comes just under two years after the company’s first SpaceShipTwo, known as the VSS Enterprise, crashed in the Mojave Desert after suffering an “in-flight anomaly” during a test flight. The aircraft not only marks Virgin Galactic’s reentry into the space-tourism race, but also the first manufactured exclusively by the company.
VSS Unity rolled out of its construction hangar in February, and since then it’s undergone extensive ground testing.
“In this configuration, WhiteKnightTwo serves as a veritable ‘flying wind tunnel, ‘ allowing the highest fidelity method of testing airflow around SpaceShipTwo while simultaneously testing how the spaceship performs when exposed to the frigid temperatures found at today’s maximum altitude of ~50,000 feet and above”, explained Virgin Galactic.
“Today’s flight test is going well”, Virgin Galactic representatives wrote on Twitter during the flight.
Once the team is satisfied with the results, Virgin Galactic will proceed to glide flight tests. A great deal of this time will be spent in rebuilding its reputation. But now, a new rocket plane from the New Mexico-based arm of the Virgin Group marks a return to near-space.
The test flight was led by four test pilots – two in SpaceShipTwo and two on the carrier aircraft.
Virgin Galactic plans to test the VSS Unity’s ability to fly independently of its launch vehicle early in 2017.
Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity space plane and its carrier plane, the Virgin Mothership Eve, take off on their first captive carry flight from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California on September 8, 2016. “Only when that analysis is done, along with detailed vehicle inspections, some already-planned work, and potentially more captive carry flights, will we be ready to move into the next phase of test flight”.
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The next step is to analyze that flight data, and to make sure that the next flight can also be done safely.
