WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic completed its sixth and final suborbital spaceflight of the year Nov. 2, flying two researchers and a private astronaut.
The company’s VSS Unity spaceplane took off from New Mexico’s Spaceport America at 9 a.m. Eastern, attached to the VMS Eve mothership aircraft. Unity separated at about 9:45 a.m. Eastern, igniting its hybrid rocket motor to fly to a peak altitude of approximately 87.2 kilometers and top speed of Mach 2.96. Unity glided back to a runway landing at Spaceport America nearly an hour after takeoff.
The flight, designated Galactic 05 by the company, was its fifth commercial spaceflight since late June, and the sixth overall this year when including a company test flight in May. On board were two researchers, Kellie Gerardi and Alan Stern, and a space tourist, Ketty Pucci-Sisti Maisonrouge.
Stern, vice president at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and a longtime advocate for suborbital research, flew on Galactic 05 primarily as a training mission for a future NASA-funded research mission on VSS Unity. He tested a biomedical harness and a mockup of a camera.
Gerardi flew on Galactic 05 sponsored by the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences (IIAS). She conducted three experiments in fluid dynamics and biomedical research that had been tested previously on parabolic flights operated by the National Research Council of Canada.
In an interview after the flight, both said they were able to complete their experiments during the few minutes of microgravity on the flight. Gerardi, who said she has flown on hundreds of parabolic aircraft flights that provide much shorter durations of weightless, said she was “pleasantly surprised” by the quality of the microgravity on Unity.
Stern, in an article he wrote before the flight, provided a detailed timeline of what he planned to do in those three minutes. “I got everything done,” he said afterwards, although a couple minor…
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