On Monday, another test was conducted for the suborbital spacecraft SpaceShipTwo Unity, developed by Virgin Galactic. During the test flight, the engineers tested the system, which should help the ship to perform aerodynamic braking during the landing approach. The test was successful, so the next time specialists will start testing other Unity nodes.
Representatives of the company report that the eighth flight was held in normal mode, and the flight reports were called “inspiring”. On board the spacecraft Unity were two pilots, the carrier WhiteKnightTwo also led two pilots, in addition to which there was an engineer on board.
The previous model of the ship from Virgin Galactic crashed in the desert south of California in the fall of 2014 during the test flight. Recall that as a result of the crash, one pilot died, and the second received serious injuries.
Since then, the developers have drawn the necessary conclusions and studied the flaws in the previous design. The new ship has become much safer than the previous version, so Virgin is building quite optimistic plans for its commercial operation.
The spacecraft Unity is intended primarily for suborbital tourists. Those who wish, and there are already more than 700 of them, can already purchase a ticket, the price of which is about 250 thousand dollars.
