TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES (US): A three-man crew from Italy is set on Thursday to board a passenger rocket plane operated by Virgin Galactic, the venture British billionaire Richard Branson founded in 2004, for the company’s first commercial flight to the edge of space.

The two Italian air force officers and an aerospace engineer from the National Research Council of Italy were to join their Virgin Galactic instructor and the spaceplane’s two pilots on a suborbital ride taking them about 80km above the New Mexico desert.

The flight, dubbed Galactic 01, comes two years after Branson himself rode along with five other Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc personnel for the company’s first fully crewed test spaceflight of its rocket plane, VSS Unity.

Back then, Virgin Galactic officials said they expected to begin regular commercial operations in 2022 following additional test flights. But completion of the test campaign took longer than anticipated after federal regulators grounded the rocket plane for 11 weeks while the company was under investigation for deviating from its assigned airspace on ascent during the July 2021 flight. A final crewed test flight to space was conducted successfully but with less fanfare five weeks ago.

Virgin Galactic is one of a handful of private ventures, including SpaceX and Blue Origin, catering to wealthy would-be citizen astronauts willing to pay large sums of money to experience the exhilaration of supersonic rocket speed, weightlessness and the spectacle of spaceflight.

The mission of the Italian team flying on Thursday, however, was touted as a scientific one, with the three men planning to collect biometric data, measure cognitive performance and record how certain liquids and solids mix in microgravity conditions.

Published in Dawn, June 29th, 2023