Virgin Galactics

For 200.000 dollars you can be an astronaut. Sounds funky, doesnt it? Now Virgin Galactics offers it.

After the Ansari X Prize in 2004 (like GoogleMoon X Prize, but for launching cheap and reusable spaceships out of the Earth ), Virgin decided to invest in the winning group. Since then, they have been working hard to offer travels out in space.

The travel consist of the following:

- duration 2,5 hours.

- A big plane carries the small spaceship until 18km altitude, then the small spaceship is launched with a rocket until 120km altitude (only in 90 seconds!, match 3 speed). Then the spaceship is out of the atmosphere, and it will describe a suborbital flight. That means that the spaceship will be launched out of the Earth, but the gravitational forces of the Earth are strong enough to make the spaceship to return again. Like throwing a stone to the sky that returns.

-In the apogee(point where the spaceship stops going further of the Earth, and starts to come back), there is no gravity then for the passengers. For 40 min they will be experiencing the Zero Gravity. They can leave their seats and belts, in order to play around in the room (just watch the following video). There are also some windows to observe the Earth. The spaceship will not be so far that the whole Earth is visible, but at least, the roundness of Earth will be noticeable.

Well, I leave you two videos to enjoy and understand a bit more about Virgin Galactic. The first is a the official trailer(with the hateful Richard Branson). The second one is about the SpaceOne flight, the winners of the first X-Prize, impressive :)





For further information: www.virgingalactic.com !