EAN: 9783319092614

SPRINGER PRAXIS BOOKS VIRGIN GALACTIC - ERIK ...

Thirty years ago when Sir Richard Branson called up Boeing and asked if they had a spare 747 
few would have predicted the brash entrepreneur would so radically transform the placid
business of air travel. But today  Branson flies airlines on six continents  employs hundreds
of jets and  in 2014  was predicting that his spaceship company - Virgin Galactic - would soon
open the space frontier to commercial astronauts  payload specialists  scientists and space
tourists. With more than 600 seats sold at $250 000 each  what started off as a dream to send
people just for the excitement to look back and marvel at Earth  was on the cusp of finally
being turned into a business. Then  on October 21  2014  tragedy struck. SpaceShipTwo was on
its most ambitious test flight to date. Seconds after firing its engine  Virgin Galactic's
spaceship was breaking through the sound barrier. In just the three seconds that it took for
the vehicle to climb from Mach 0.94 to Mach 1.02  co-pilot Mike Alsbury made what many close to
the event believe was a fatal mistake that led to his death and the disintegration of
SpaceShipTwo. Miraculously  the pilot  Peter Siebold  survived the 16-km fall back to Earth.
Soon after the event Branson vowed to continue his space tourism venture in spite of this.
Already a second SpaceShipTwo is being built  and ticket-holders eagerly await the day when
Virgin Galactic offers quick  routine and affordable access to the edge of space. This book
explains the hurdles Virgin Galactic had and still has to overcome en route to developing
suborbital space travel as a profitable economic entity  and describes the missions that will
be flown on board SpaceShipTwo Mk II  including high-altitude science studies  astronomy  life
sciences  and microgravity physics.

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