Thirty years ago when Sir Richard Branson called up Boeing and asked if
they had a spare 747, few would have predicted the brash entrepreneur
would so radically transform the placid business of air travel. But
today, Branson flies airlines on six continents, employs hundreds of
jets and, in 2014, was predicting that his spaceship company - Virgin
Galactic - would soon open the space frontier to commercial astronauts,
payload specialists, scientists and space tourists. With more than 600
seats sold at $250,000 each, what started off as a dream to send people
just for the excitement to look back and marvel at Earth, was on the
cusp of finally being turned into a business.
Then, on October 21, 2014, tragedy struck. SpaceShipTwo was on its most
ambitious test flight to date. Seconds after firing its engine, Virgin
Galactic's spaceship was breaking through the sound barrier. In just the
three seconds that it took for the vehicle to climb from Mach 0.94 to
Mach 1.02, co-pilot Mike Alsbury made what many close to the event
believe was a fatal mistake that led to his death and the disintegration
of SpaceShipTwo. Miraculously, the pilot, Peter Siebold, survived the
16-km fall back to Earth.
Soon after the event Branson vowed to continue his space tourism venture
in spite of this. Already a second SpaceShipTwo is being built, and
ticket-holders eagerly await the day when Virgin Galactic offers quick,
routine and affordable access to the edge of space. This book explains
the hurdles Virgin Galactic had and still has to overcome en route to
developing suborbital space travel as a profitable economic entity, and
describes the missions that will be flown on board SpaceShipTwo Mk II,
including high-altitude science studies, astronomy, life sciences, and
microgravity physics.
