Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Virgin Galactic Lands Deal With Italian Air Force

Virgin Galactic, the space launch company backed by Sir Richard Branson, has inked a contract with the Italian Air Force, to conduct science experiements in microgravity in Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity space plane. Financial details of the contract were not disclosed. According to Virgin Galactic, it will fly a research flight on the company's SpaceShipTwo system, where three Italian specialists will fly a rack of research payloads to space, with a rack full of experiments from the Italian National Research Centre (CNR). Virgin Galactic said the contract will be the first time a government department has funded a human-tended research flight on a commercial space vehicle. Virgin Galactic--which has been focused on space tourism--says its vehicles have actually been designed to fly both humans and payloads to space for tourism and research purposes.