Billionaire Richard Branson Has A Brand New Virgin Galactic Space Plane, The Virgin Spaceship Unity

A few years ago Virgin Galactic suffered a catastrophic loss when pilot Michael Alsbury died in during a test flight of the Virgin Galactic Enterprise.
Richard Branson’s “first commercial spaceline” is on the rebound, though, as the private space travel industry continues to grow.

Last week the eccentric billionaire announced the release of Virgin Galactic’s brand new spaceship, Virgin Spaceship Unity. Here’s how Virgin Galactic announced its new ship, plus elaborated on its planes for $250,000-a-pop visits to space (and back). Via:

Once that is done, we’ll be eager to get air under the wings of our new spaceship. We’ll begin first with captive carry flight, during which SpaceShipTwo stays firmly mated to her mothership, WhiteKnightTwo. Once that is completed, we’ll move to glide testing, where our new spaceship flies freely for the first time as a glider coming home from an altitude of 45,000+ feet (14 km) while our incredible pilots test out her handling.

After several glide flights have been completed and we are satisfied with the results, rocket-powered test flights are next. We will execute a thoughtful and steady progression of flights. Each mission will be designed to test something important: how the heat from the rocket motor dissipates in the rear of the vehicle, how the vehicle behaves when breaking the sound barrier on both ascent and descent, how closely our models of forces on the vehicle match reality.

Each flight will generally fly a little higher, a little faster, and sometimes we may need to repeat a test point to get additional data or confirm a result. When she first crosses 100,000 feet (31 km), SpaceShipTwo will already be above 99% of the atmosphere, and the pilots will experience true weightlessness while surrounded by a sky that has noticeably begun turning black. When she eventually reaches 50 miles (80 km), her pilots will have met NASA and the US Air Force’s requirements for official astronaut status, and they will be recognized by our team and by the US government as bonafide space travelers; when she crosses 62 miles (100 km) sometime later, they will also be recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.

When we are confident we can safely carry our customers to space, we will start doing so. We feel incredibly honored that our earliest paying customers already number more than the total number of humans who have ever been to space. Our first spaceflight with paying customers; our first flight full of research experiments; our first flight with a full complement of eight (a feat that has only been accomplished once before in all of history, by the Space Shuttle on mission STS-61A); the dozens of times we will fly the first ever astronaut from a given nation — each of these will be exciting milestones in the history of space exploration.

No one is more eager than us to complete those milestones—nor to share this journey, with all its challenges and triumphs, with a global public that craves inspiring and ambitious stories to balance out the daily barrage of the 24 hour news cycle. But this isn’t a race. We have shown we are committed to being thorough in our testing: it is the right thing to do and it is essential to our ultimate success. As a thousand year old saying goes, there is no easy way from the Earth to the stars. But finally, there is a way, and through steady testing, we will find it.

As you can see in the video above, no one is more excited for this than Professor Stephen Hawking:

It’s quite a machine:

[H/T: Business Insider]