So you can follow Richard Branson’s space flight in the live stream
It starts on Sunday at 3 p.m. And while Branson and his Virgin Galactic team prepare for their flight, Jeff Bezos’ competition is etching on Twitter.
The time has come on Sunday: the entrepreneur Richard Branson, together with three crew members and two pilots, will board the SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity and, if everything goes well, take off for space. It is the next milestone in the space tourism business. Branson is by no means the first civilian in space, but experts believe that the flight could stimulate the industry – especially since Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will follow him nine days later, on July 20, with his company Blue Origin.
Branson’s company Virgin Galactic will launch on their YouTube channel as a live stream and the official homepage show that it should start around 3 p.m. German time. Talk show host Stephen Colbert and singer Khalid will accompany the webcast, which underlines the show character of the whole thing. The name of the mission is Unity 22, which is why you also use the hashtag on Twitter # Unity22 can follow.
The launch site is the Spaceport America space airport in New Mexico. In addition to the 70 year old Richard Branson, the astronauts Beth Moses and Sirisha Bandla, the astronaut Colin Bennett and the two pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci are on board.
They will initially be attached to a mother aircraft called the VMS Eve, which will transport them to an altitude of around 15 kilometers. There the 18-meter-long VSS Unity fades out, ignites its own engine and then climbs up to 80 kilometers in altitude. The plane is supposed to land again just ten minutes later. So it is an extremely short excursion into weightlessness.
Nevertheless, the mission should bring valuable insights. During the flight, the experts on board want to use various experiments to measure how the cabin pressure feels and what options there are to make the experience more comfortable – because, of course, Virgin Galactic’s goal is to attract wealthy space tourists in the medium term. Even if Richard Branson repeatedly emphasizes that he has been looking forward to finally going on the trip for 17 years. “I’ve always been a dreamer. My mom taught me never to give up and reach for the stars, ”he tweeted on July 2nd.
Blue Origin spreads swipes on Twitter
Yet another aspect dominates the public presentation: the race with Jeff Bezos. The fact that Branson had decided at relatively short notice to abandon his flight a few days before the planned launch of Jeff Bezos and his New Shepard rocket could also be interpreted as personal vanity.
Anyway, Bezos’ company Blue Origin seems a bit offended, given the tone of the recent tweets. So it was said on Fridaythat New Shepard was designed from the start to fly over the Kármán Line – in contrast to the SpaceShipTwo. In addition, New Shepard is a real rocket and not just an airplane. And there is far less damage to the ozone layer.
In fact, the differences between the two missions could hardly be greater. Branson’s SpaceShipTwo is at its core an aircraft that must be manually controlled by pilots, while the New Shepard is a launcher that takes off and lands vertically.
Due to its construction, the VSS Unity only rises to a height of around 80 kilometers, while Bezos wants to reach more than 100 kilometers. The aforementioned Kármán line lies exactly on these 100 kilometers above sea level and is generally regarded as the boundary to space, including the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, responsible for aviation records.
Virgin Galactic, on the other hand, relies on one somewhat loose definition from the USA, according to which space begins at an altitude of around 50 to 80 kilometers. It is precisely this fact that Blue Origin uses for a few swipes. Richard Branson shouldn’t care. If the weather is okay on Sunday and the mission is successful, he can definitely say that he got ahead of Jeff Bezos.
