Virgin Galactic plan a suborbital flight of their SpaceShipTwo vehicle VSS Unity for 2023-08-10 around 15:00 UTC. As this is an air-launched rocket plane, there is not a precise time for the launch, which occurs when the carrier aircraft, White Knight Two, reaches the drop altitude and location.
The flight, designated Galactic 02, will carry six people: two Virgin Galactic pilots, three passengers, and a Virgin Galactic “Astronaut Instructor” making her fourth Virgin Galactic flight. Those on this flight will become “asterisk-nauts” for having flown higher than the 50 mile (80 km) definition of “space” used by the United States and nobody else. Virgin Galactic flights do not reach the Kármán line of 100 km, which is the internationally accepted definition as the edge of space. (Blue Origin’s New Shepard space tourism vehicle does fly above the Kármán line, except when it doesn’t.)
This is Virgin Galactic “Galactic 02” flight astronaut* Anastatia Mayers of Antigua and Barbuda. She is 18 years old and a student at Aberdeen University in Scotland, where she is studying philosophy and physics, hoping for a career in astrobiology. Her mother, Keisha Schahaff, also on the flight, won seats for herself and daughter Anastatia in a fundraising raffle conducted by something called Space for Humanity.
With this mother-daughter flight, the two becoming the first people from their country to fly in space*, the Antigua and Barbuda space* programme now counts more voyagers in the void than Afghanistan, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Denmark, Egypt, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Hungary, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Slovakia, South Africa, and Syria.
I’m sure young Anastatia’s flight set some kind of record for hardware flown in space.
