Monday, April 29, 2013

Today Is Virgin Galactic's First Rocket-Powered Test Flight

Earlier this month, Virgin Chairman Richard Branson announced at the launch of Virgin America's new route through Newark that his other flying endeavor would be hitting a huge milestone this month: Its first rocket-powered test flight.

From the looks of Virgin Galactic and Branson's Twitter feeds this morning, it looks like that time has come.

In late February, Virgin successfully tested the very rocket that would power its first rocket-powered test flight.

While neither account has specified that this test is, in fact, of the rocket-powered variety, Galactic PR did confirm to me earlier this month that the test would take place before the end of the month and, well, it's the end of the month. Not to mention all the buzz on Twitter from various Virgin groups and notable individuals, I think it's safe to say that this is the day the whole team at Galactic and space traveling enthusiasts have been looking forward to for some time.

Updating...

Looks like SS2 has been released but still no mention of a rocket being fired.

Scratch that. Here we go!

And she's back on the ground. We'll update with images and videos as soon as they become available.

There she is.

Pilots Stucky and Alsbury confirm that SpaceShipTwo broke the speed of sound on its test flight. Still waiting on official images and videos.

Well, this is rather interesting. Today's test touched on many a milestone for Virgin Galactic, but I didn't know that a commercial vehicle had never broken Mach 1.

As it turns out, Galactic is not, in fact, the first commercial vehicle to break Mach 1, it's just the first commercial spaceship to do so.

And here's your first shot of SpaceShipTwo firing its rocket.

Here's another shot of SS2. This is epic.

Source: http://gizmodo.com/today-might-be-virgin-galactics-first-rocket-powered-t-484341889

c mitt romney mark zuckerberg mark zuckerberg maurice jones drew Yash Chopra George McGovern

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