Tag: space tourism
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Video: SpaceShipTwo rocket plane soars on supersonic test flight
Virgin Galactic’s commercial SpaceShipTwo rocket plane made its highest and fastest flight to date Thursday, moving the company’s space tourism ambitions closer to reality more than three years after a fatal accident suspended powered test flights. This video shows the SpaceShipTwo vehicle, named VSS Unity, dropping from the belly of a carrier jet at 9:01…
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Virgin Galactic completes first rocket-powered test flight since 2014
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo vehicle fires its hybrid rocket motor on Thursday. Credit: MarsScientific.com & Trumbull Studios / Virgin Galactic Virgin Galactic’s second piloted suborbital spaceship made its first rocket-powered test flight Thursday, three-and-a-half years after the loss of an earlier model in an accident that killed one test pilot and injured another. Designed to ferry…
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Orion Span says it’ll put space hotel in orbit by 2022, but some details are up in the air
An artist’s conception shows Orion Span’s Aurora Station. (Orion Span Illustration) A startup called Orion Span says it’s planning to open a luxury hotel in orbit in 2022, but a lot of the details have yet to be filled in. The plan to launch the module into space, and take reservations from customers for multimillion-dollar…
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Get a dummy’s-eye view of a suborbital ride on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spaceship
An instrumented test dummy, nicknamed “Mannequin Skywalker,” sits next to one of the huge windows in the New Shepard crew capsule. (Blue Origin Photo) What will people experience when they rocket to the edge of space on the New Shepard suborbital spaceship that’s currently being tested by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin venture? An 11-minute video, recorded…
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Photos: Upgraded New Shepard booster flies from West Texas
Blue Origin’s Crew Capsule 2.0 carried a crash test dummy on Tuesday’s flight. Credit: Blue Origin Blue Origin’s third New Shepard suborbital booster lifted off on its first brief up-and-down test flight Tuesday, soaring to an altitude of 322,000 feet over West Texas to prove out the rocket and its automated crew capsule, which flew…
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Blue Origin launches New Shepard test flight
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, launched a reusable New Shepard sub-orbital rocket from the company’s west Texas launch site Tuesday, boosting an unpiloted crew capsule out of the dense lower atmosphere for a brief foray into space before a parachute descent to Earth. The booster,…
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Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo plane glides through a ‘dry run’ for blastoff
Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity glides through a test flight. (Virgin Galactic Photo) Virgin Galactic said its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane today executed a successful gliding flight test that was “essentially a dry run for rocket-powered flights.” “Our major first today though was that with the exception of the rocket motor fuel grain … we flew with…
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XCOR Aerospace lays off all employees, throwing rocket projects into limbo
XCOR Aerospace had to put work on the Lynx suborbital space plane on hold. (XCOR Illustration) After more than a year’s worth of workforce shrinkage, XCOR Aerospace has laid off the remainder of its employees – putting projects ranging from its Lynx suborbital space plane to its work on rocket propulsion systems into deep limbo.…
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Virgin Galactic’s new SpaceShipTwo space plane flexes its wings in flight for first time
Long-range imagery shows the SpaceShipTwo plane known as VSS Unity with its wings in the feathered position for braking. (MarsScientific.com / Trumbull Studios via Virgin Galactic) Virgin Galactic passed another essential milestone today in the flight test program for VSS Unity, its upgraded SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, by bending its wings into a “feathered” position for…
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Photos: Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster on display
Credit: Stephen Clark/Spaceflight Now Scarred from five trips to the edge of space and back, Blue Origin’s privately-developed New Shepard rocket was on vertical display this week at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. The single-stage rocket is now retired and will eventually go into a museum after a traveling “road show” around the…