Booking a Flight…to Space

Holiday travel reports estimate about 8,000 fewer flights and 600,000 fewer seats this season, but one new route is on the horizon. This venture can take you to a much more exotic place than Thanksgiving dinner and you’ll be in good hands along the way.

Virgin Galactic, the private spaceflight company that plans to offer sub-orbital spaceflights to the paying public, announced last week that it had chosen Keith Colmer MIT ’89, as its first astronaut for commercial spaceflight.

Colmer, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force who has logged more than 5,000 flight hours in more than 90 aircrafts, was selected by Virgin founder Richard Branson over more than 500 applicants for the position.

From Wired:

Virgin says that Colmer was selected due to his 12 years of operational, developmental, and experimental aircraft test flight experience, as well as more than 10 years of combined military experience in U.S. Air Force spacecraft operations and flying.

A veteran of two service tours of Iraq with the call sign “Coma,” Colmer has served as the director of engineering for the Air National Guard’s Air Force Reserve Command Test Center. He will soon join chief pilot David Mackey at Virgin’s spaceport in California’s Mojave Desert for planning, testing, and analysis.

From The L.A. Times:

In the past, the way people have reached outer space is aboard a high-powered rocket.

Instead, Virgin Galactic will depart from Spaceport America in New Mexico using a WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft. It will fly with the reusable SpaceShipTwo rocket plane under its wing to 50,000 feet, where the spaceship will separate, blast off, and, after their journey, be flown back to New Mexico.

When the rocket motor engages, high gravitational forces will pin the pilot to the back of his seat as he steers the craft—and up to six passengers—to the edge of space, or about 60 miles above the Earth's surface.

Once they reach that suborbital altitude, passengers will experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth. Then they will re-enter the atmosphere and coast back to a runway and land.

Virgin Galactic Chief Executive George T. Whitesides told The L.A. Times that the company hopes to start commercial flights within two years.  And while the price will be high, there’s definitely one thing passengers will be happy about: no layovers.