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.įor Italian Air Force Colonel Walter Villadei, the flight is also part of his astronaut training for a future mission to the International Space Station. 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. A final crewed test flight to space was conducted successfully but with less fanfare five weeks ago. 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. personnel for the company's first fully crewed test spaceflight of its rocket plane, VSS Unity.īack then, Virgin Galactic officials said they expected to begin regular commercial operations in 2022 following additional test flights. The flight, dubbed Galactic 01, comes two years after Branson himself rode along with five other Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. 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 50 miles (80 km) above the New Mexico desert. 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 Chinese government has not issued a statement regarding these rocket reentry events.įollow Brett on Twitter at. The Long March 5B has no such capabilities and instead must be pulled down by drag wherever it happens to fall. Other orbital-class rockets are typically designed so that their first stages can be safely pushed down into the ocean after separating from their upper stages, or in the case of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, are designed to safely land on the ground and be reused. These uncontrolled reentries are an unfortunate feature of the design of the Long March 5B. We must work on technology to better track and predict and mitigate satellites and rocket bodies heading for uncontrolled reentries," Aschbacher's statement continued. "In the past decade, about 100 pieces of large debris have re-entered the atmosphere each year, with a total annual mass of about 150 metric tons. China launches final module to complete Tiangong space station (video) 25-ton Chinese rocket debris crashes to Earth over Indian Ocean Another huge piece of Chinese space junk is falling to Earth. "They did not share specific trajectory information which is needed to predict landing zones and reduce risk." "Once again, the People's Republic of China is taking unnecessary risks with the uncontrolled rocket stage reentry of their Long March 5B rocket stage," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wrote in an emailed statement on Friday (Nov. Nevertheless, space agency chiefs denounced this latest uncontrolled Chinese rocket reentry for the possible risks it created. Luckily, the massive piece of rocket debris landed safely in the Pacific Ocean without incident. The massive piece of space junk was left to be pulled down in an uncontrolled fashion by atmospheric drag, creating worries on the ground about where it might land. As with other Long March 5B launches, there was no attempt made to safely deorbit the rocket's core stage after it reached orbit. 31) that carried the Mengtian science module to the nation's Tiangong space station. The 23-ton (21 metric tons) piece of debris resulted from China's launch of a Long March 5B rocket on Monday (Oct.
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