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  Virgin Galactic Unity 22 fully-crewed flight

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Author Topic:   Virgin Galactic Unity 22 fully-crewed flight
Robert Pearlman
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Posts: 46586
From: Houston, TX
Registered: Nov 1999

posted 07-01-2021 05:26 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Robert Pearlman   Click Here to Email Robert Pearlman     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
collectSPACE
Richard Branson to join 'Unity 22' crew on Virgin Galactic test flight

Billionaire Richard Branson will become "Astronaut 001" aboard Virgin Galactic's first fully-crewed test flight of its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, set to lift off this month.

The space tourism company on Thursday (July 1) announced the long-expected news that Branson, who founded Virgin Galactic in 2004, would join the next flight of its SpaceShipTwo "Unity," flying with two pilots and three mission specialists. Branson's role leading up and through the flight test will be to evaluate the private astronaut experience.

Robert Pearlman
Editor

Posts: 46586
From: Houston, TX
Registered: Nov 1999

posted 07-10-2021 05:16 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Robert Pearlman   Click Here to Email Robert Pearlman     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
NASA release
NASA-Supported Plant Experiment Flies to Suborbital Space with Virgin Galactic

On Sunday, July 11, Virgin Galactic will attempt its first fully crewed spaceflight and the crew will have NASA-supported technology with them.

Three Kennedy Space Center Fixation Tubes (KFTs), like the one shown here, will contain Arabidopsis thaliana plants during the crewed Unity 22 flight to space. Virgin Galactic’s Sirisha Bandla will activate the tubes to release a preservative that will capture the plants’ biochemistry at specific points during transitions into and out of microgravity, and co-investigators from the University of Florida will conduct gene expression analyses on the plants in the weeks following the flight. (University of Florida)

Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs and research operations at Virgin Galactic, will operate the experiment on the "Unity 22" flight on behalf of co-investigators Dr. Robert Ferl and Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul from the University of Florida in Gainesville. Bandla will activate three plant-filled tubes to release a preservative at critical data-collection stages during the flight: at 1 g before the rocket boost, just before entering microgravity, and after the conclusion of microgravity.

While the university researchers have flown similar experiments supported by NASA's Flight Opportunities program on suborbital flights, data collected during the Unity 22 flight will provide a first look at human-tended payloads on SpaceShipTwo.

Robert Pearlman
Editor

Posts: 46586
From: Houston, TX
Registered: Nov 1999

posted 07-11-2021 11:18 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Robert Pearlman   Click Here to Email Robert Pearlman     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
collectSPACE
Richard Branson soars to space on Virgin Galactic Unity 22 test flight

Billionaire business mogul Richard Branson has safely landed back on Earth after joining five of his Virgin Galactic employees on the company's first fully-crewed suborbital flight into space.

Branson's "Unity 22" crew touched down aboard Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane at Spaceport America in New Mexico on Sunday (July 11), just an hour after they took off from the same runway. The flight marked a milestone for the company, which since 2004 has been working to provide space tourism and suborbital research flights to the edge of space.

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