It’s a hive of activity here at Spaceport America as preparations to deliver our first spaceflight from New Mexico later this Fall continue to progress well. Here’s a flight test update from our President of Space Missions and Safety, Mike Moses https://virg.in/a6m 

The flight will carry three NASA payloads in the cabin, flown through NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program, demonstrating our commitment to facilitating regular, accessible space-based scientific research.

Unlike our Future Astronauts, the payloads aren’t on board for the view, so instead of positioning the vehicle for the best views of Earth, we’ll pitch 270 degrees following boost to get to the entry attitude sooner. This maximizes time for the payloads in data-collection mode.

The Pilots for this spaceflight will be Dave Mackay and CJ Sturckow. CJ is set to become the first person to fly to space from three different U.S States. This is his sixth spaceflight in total - he flew four Space Shuttle missions with NASA before joining and flying SpaceShipTwo

This will be the first time in flight where we actively recline the passenger seats once in space, this creates extra space when Future Astronauts are floating in zero gravity. We will have instrumented test mannequins strapped in for this test.

While on the subject of customer experience, it’s also worth noting that we’ll be testing the full suite of internal cabin cameras and our future capability to stream live footage from the spaceship down to the ground

Since our last flight to space, we’ve refined and upgraded a few other elements on the spaceship and we are now ready to test them on a rocket-powered flight.

Managing this spaceflight is our President of Space Missions and Safety, Mike Moses. Mike previously spent 16 years at NASA where he oversaw the launch of 12 spaceflights. This will be his third with us so will mark 15 in total!

It’s a great time to be part of Virgin Galactic, as we work together to bring the wonder of human spaceflight to the state of New Mexico for the first time this Fall – and, even more exciting - many more times in the years ahead.