Fourth Virgin Galactic Spaceflight Slated for 08 September

The launch-window for Virgin Galactic’s Galactic 03 mission—which, if successful, will mark the company’s fourth spaceflight in four-months—will open on 08 September 2023.

The Galactic 03 crew comprises three Virgin Galactic Founder 'astronauts' — which is to say, individuals whose belief in Virgin Galactic and early ticket purchases helped actualized the company’s ambition to operate regular commercial spaceflights.

The Galactic 03 crew purchased their tickets as early as 2005 and have since remained active in the company’s future-astronaut community—a group comprising some eight-hundred inchoate spacefarers hailing from upwards of sixty nations.

The cockpit crew-members under whose control VSS Unity will carry out the Galactic 03 flight are mission commander Nicola Pecile and pilot Michael Masucci. Colin Bennet will serve as the mission’s 'astronaut' instructor.

Virgin Galactic asserts that over the past 12-weeks, by dint of three successful spaceflights, it has facilitated the making of 11 new 'astronauts.' The company further states the passengers scheduled to fly aboard Galactic 03 will become Virgin Galactic 'astronauts' 14, 15 and 16.

In the United States, professional, military, and commercial astronauts are eligible to be awarded astronaut wings after making flights above an altitude of fifty-statute-miles (264,000-feet or 80.47-kilometers). As Virgin Galactic flights have attained apogees of 55-miles (290,400-feet), the company’s assertions may be looked upon as true.

However, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), the international aerospace record-keeping body, holds the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space is, in fact, the Kármán line—a perimeter lying one-hundred-kilometers (330,000-feet or 62-statute-miles) above Mean Sea Level (MSL).

The Kármán line has no particular physical characteristics—no noticeable change in the characteristics of the Earth’s atmosphere. Nevertheless, the boundary is important for legal and regulatory purposes insomuch as the aircraft and spacecraft are subject to separate jurisdictions and legislations.

The Kármán line lies well above altitudes attainable by conventional atmospheric aircraft and high-altitude balloons, and is the province, more or less, of satellite orbital decays.

While experts disagree on exactly where the Earth’s atmosphere ends and space begins, most regulatory agencies, to include the United Nations, accept the FAI's Kármán line definition or something close to it. Established in the 1960s, the Kármán line is named for Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963), a Hungarian-American engineer and physicist who, in 1957, was the first person to attempt to calculate a theoretical limit of altitude for fixed-wing aircraft flight.

Ergo, whether or not Virgin Galactic is minting 'astronauts' or high-altitude pilots remains a matter of contention.

FMI: www.virgingalactic.com