Soon you can fly to the edge of space, with Virgin Galactic’s new space plane. One ticket onboard the air-launched plane, VSS Unity, will cost $250,000 for passengers who have signed up for the suborbital flight, which will ascend 60 miles (97km) above Earth. The space plane’s cabin has six custom strap-in seats, twelve circular windows, and five other windows.
The best part of all, when the plane reaches peak altitude, passengers can unbuckle themselves and float around the cabin in zero-gravity conditions. The back of the cabin features a large, circular space mirror “to allow our customers to see themselves in space in a way that has really never been done before,” explained George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic’s chief space officer.
Virgin Galactic hasn’t yet set a date for its first commercial space flight. However, Whitesides claims that 600 customers have already signed up to fly (including the founder Richard Branson,) and at least 400 more are interested.
The space plane will be attached to a bigger carrier plane and is expected to launch from the company’s New Mexico spaceport and will detach mid-air to proceed even further towards space. The entire trip will last 90 minutes.
Virgin Galactic is competing for space tourism reign with the Blue Origin venture led by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and the SpaceX project launched by Elon Musk.
In October 2019, Branson put the business on the stock market, securing $450 million of funding via a merger with Social Capital Hedosophia, an investment vehicle headed by the previous Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya.
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