Space tourism company Virgin Galactic announced on Monday the resumption of suborbital flights with a mission to take place at the end of May involving four of the company’s employees, and commercial flights to resume at the end of June, AFP reported.

The Unity 25 mission will take place at the end of May, the company, founded by British Richard Branson, who made the company’s last space flight, said almost 2 years ago (July 2021).

Since then, the company has made changes to its carrier aircraft and spacecraft, changes designed to improve engine performance and enable more frequent launches.

Unity 25 will be “the final evaluation of the full space system and crew experience before resuming commercial flights in late June,” Virgin Galactic announced.

Unity 25 should be the fifth space flight (according to the American definition, to a height of more than 80 kilometers) of the company Virgin Galactic.

A few minutes of weightlessness

The journey, offered by Virgin Galactic, offers just a few moments of weightlessness: a giant plane takes off from a conventional runway, carrying a launch module that resembles a larger private jet into space. The latter activates its thrust after separation from the carrier aircraft and rises until it exceeds an altitude of 80 kilometers, after which it returns to the ground, gliding, and lands on the same runway.

These flights take place from the Spaceport America base in the New Mexico desert.

The crew of the Unity 25 mission will consist of two women and two men: Beth Moses (who has already participated in two space flights), Jamila Gilbert, Chris Huey and Luke Mace (who spent several years training astronauts for NASA). Two pilots are in the flight deck of the carrier aircraft and two more pilots are in the cockpit of the suborbital aircraft.

The first commercial flight called Galactic 01 took place with passengers of the Italian Air Force.

Virgin Galactic’s space program has been plagued by years of delays, including an accident in 2014 that killed a pilot.

The company has already sold about 800 tickets to space: 600 between 2005 and 2014 for between $200,000 and $250,000 and another 200 since then for $450,000 each.

Virgin Galactic competes with American billionaire Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin, which also offers short suborbital flights and has already sent 32 people into space. But after an accident in September 2022 during an unmanned flight, launches by Blue Origin were suspended. In March, the company announced that it would resume spaceflight “soon.”

(Source: Agerpres / PHOTO: Dreamstime.com)