Last year, Cobra emphasized in one of his posts that the launch of private space flight would be an important step for the end of the quarantine and triggering the Event. This happened yesterday and the mainstream media also wrote about it, ergo really something significant happening behind the scene?
A Virgin Galactic rocket plane blasted to the edge of space on Thursday, capping off years of difficult testing to become the first US commercial human flight to reach space since America’s shuttle program ended in 2011.
Virgin’s airplane-like SpaceShipTwo took off on Thursday morning from California’s Mojave air and spaceport, about 90 miles (145km) north of Los Angeles. The test flight had two pilots onboard, four Nasa research payloads and a mannequin named Annie as a stand-in passenger.
The flight landed safely back on Earth just over an hour after it took off. Virgin Galactic said it reached a height of 51.4 miles and traveled at 2.9 times the speed of sound.
According to Virgin, SpaceShipTwo is hauled to an altitude of about 45,000ft by the WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane and released. The spaceship then fires its rocket motor to catapult it to at least 50 miles above Earth, high enough for passengers to see the curvature of the planet.
The 50-mile mark is high enough to earn astronaut wings from the air force and the Federal Aviation Administration, though other agencies define space as beginning at 62 miles above Earth.
More than 600 people have paid or put down deposits to fly aboard Virgin’s suborbital flights, including the actor Leonardo DiCaprio and pop star Justin Bieber. A 90-minute flight costs $250,000.
Other firms planning a variety of passenger spacecraft include Boeing Co, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch.
In September, SpaceX said the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa would be the company’s first passenger on a voyage around the moon on its forthcoming Big Falcon Rocket spaceship, tentatively scheduled for 2023.
No, no Galactics spaceship there :(
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