Virgin Galactic's space plane has made its first commercial suborbital flight

The Virgin Galactic space plane has made its first commercial suborbital flight. This was reported on the company's Twitter page The VSSUnity spacecraft was carrying three passengers and five Virgin Galactic employees. The passengers were two Italian Air Force colonels and an engineer from the Italian National Research Council. The plane was launched from the "America" spaceport in New Mexico. WK2 carried the aircraft carrier VSS Unity to an altitude of approximately 15 kilometers, after which the spacecraft separated from WK2. It then ascended nearly vertically to an altitude of about 80 kilometers, experienced weightlessness for a few minutes, and began its descent. About an hour and a half after the flight, the ship landed safely. Sky News clarified that the next flight of the space plane is planned for August 2023. After that, Virgin Galactic plans to fly every month. According to Al Jazeera, the company sold about 800 tickets for future flights - 600 of them were sold between 2005 and 2014 at prices ranging from 200,000 to 250,000 dollars. In the following years, another 200 seats were allocated. Their price reached 450 thousand dollars. Virgin Galactic has been working on suborbital tourist flights for several years. The company planned to send the first tourists on a flight in the mid-1910s, but the development and testing of the spacecraft was delayed. In July 2021, Virgin Galactic owner Richard Branson made a successful suborbital flight aboard the VSS Unity.