The take-off is set for next 25 September, from the runway of Spaceport America, in the Mojave desert in New Mexico. From there, from Virgin Galactic headquarters, two Air Force officers – the colonel Walter Villadei and the lieutenant colonel Angelo Landolfi – together with Pantaleone Carlucci of the National Research Council (CNR), will leave the building in which they will improve in the coming days – the “Gateway to Space” designed by the Foster + Partners studio – and will reach the limits of the atmosphere, becoming the crew of “Virtute 1 “, the first suborbital scientific flight of Richard Branson’s space company.
Space tourism
Richard Branson’s Great Flight
by Emilio Cozzi
With two pilots of the company, the Italians will take off aboard the SpaceShipTwo, the space plane that last 11 July brought Branson to 86 kilometers of altitude. This time, however, the mission will not be demonstrative, but will allow 12 experiments to be carried out in conditions of microgravity in the fields of aeronautical medicine, advanced materials, fluid dynamics and the physiology of extra-atmospheric flight.
Towed at an altitude of 15 kilometers by the special White Knight Two transport plane – a four-engine turbojet with double cockpit – the Virgin Galactic spacecraft will fire up its thruster and aim for the limits of the sky, where the scientific tests will begin. After about an hour and 40, the aircraft will return to rest on the same runway from which it started.
“Virtute 1” and its logo were presented today in a conference at the Palazzo dell’Aeronautica in Rome, which was also attended by the crew members. The mission is in fact the result of framework agreements signed in October 2019 by Virgin Galactic and the Italian Air Force. It was a first: never before had a government agency funded a human flight for scientific research purposes in a private spacecraft. A sign of a paradigm shift that reaffirms how misleading it is to think of tourism and the marketing of space only as an activity for the select few.
“Thanks to the suborbital mission, the Air Force will be able to acquire important skills to replicate this form of flight also on the national territory” the colonel commented a few days ago. Marco Galgani, Deputy Head of the Air Force General Space Office. It is no coincidence that to achieve this result, the Air Force will collaborate with the National Civil Aviation Authority (ENAC) and with the Italian Space Agency (ASI).
The implications of suborbital flights are in fact so vast that they also motivated a meeting, in July, between the president of the Transport Regulatory Authority (Art), Nicola Zacchaeus, and that of ASI, Giorgio Saccoccia, called to discuss the prospects of transport through suborbital and space launches and on the opportunities in their respective areas of expertise.
Saccoccia recalled “the innovative technological frontiers shared between space and the future civil transport”, citing topics such as materials and advanced propulsion, thermal control and autonomous flight and return techniques. “The future”, he said, “will see an ever greater sharing of interests between space and transport with the affirmation of commercial suborbital flights and for this reason it will be increasingly important to establish a system with all the institutions involved”.
Concept reaffirmed by Zacchaeus, according to which “transport, in addition to the return of supersonic transatlantic flights, will see the affirmation of suborbital and space flights of passengers for commercial purposes. Their economic regulation will constitute one of the new and most exciting frontiers of activity. of Art “. In this context, cooperation with ASI, continued Zacchaeus, “will be fundamental for the exchange of know-how and for the technical synergies that will be required to address a picture profoundly modified by the real and concrete availability of new space technologies, of which recent experiences, such as those of Blue Origin of Jeff Bezos or Branson’s Virgin Galactic, are a clear demonstration. “
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