WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic will conclude its schedule of suborbital spaceflights this year with a mission in early November whose crew will include a longtime advocate of suborbital research.
The company announced Oct. 18 that the next flight of its VSS Unity suborbital spaceplane, Galactic 05, is scheduled for a window that opens Nov. 2 from Spaceport America in New Mexico. It will be the fifth commercial flight for the company and the sixth flight of Unity this year, all since late May.
Galactic 05, like the Galactic 01 mission in June, is described as a research flight by the company. It will carry among its crew two researchers, Alan Stern and Kellie Gerardi. A third customer is described by the company only as a Franco-Italian private astronaut.
Stern, an associate vice president of Southwest Research Institute’s (SwRI) space science division, will evaluate a harness used for collecting biomedical data as well as test a mockup of an astronomical camera planned for a future suborbital flight. Gerardi, representing the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences (IIAS), a research and educational organization, will test a biomonitoring device and collect other biomedical data while also conducting a fluid dynamics experiment.
Stern has been a leading advocate for using commercial suborbital vehicles like Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo to conduct research more rapidly and less expensively than alternative platforms, giving scientists access to several minutes of microgravity and other aspects of the space environment. That interest has included running a series of conferences since 2010 devoted to commercial suborbital research.
Stern was the first scientist selected by NASA in 2020 for an award through the agency’s Flight Opportunities program that would allow him to go on a commercial suborbital vehicle to conduct research. This flight, though, is funded by SwRI and will serve as training for that future NASA-funded…
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