Virgin Galactic ― The First Ten Years

Thirty years ago when Richard Branson called up Boeing and asked if they had a spare 747, few would have predicted the brash entrepreneur would so radically transform the placid business of air travel. But today, Branson flies airlines on six continents, employs hundreds of jets, and predicts his spaceship company – Virgin Galactic – will soon open the space frontier to commercial astronauts, payload specialists, scientists and space tourists. With more than 600 seats sold at $250,000 each, what started off as a dream to send people just for the excitement of a voyage to look back and marvel at Earth, has finally turned into a business.

Anticipation is on the rise for Virgin Galactic. SpaceShipTwo is expected to offer quick, routine and affordable access to the edge of space, and the quick turnaround of this spaceship is central to realizing the profit-making potential of repeated sojourns to space. This book explains the hurdles Virgin Galactic had to overcome en-route to developing suborbital space travel as a profitable economic entity, and describes the various missions that will be flown on board SpaceShipTwo, including high-altitude science studies, astronomy, life sciences, and micro-gravity physics.

Dr. Erik Seedhouse worked as Astronaut Training Consultant for Bigelow Aerospace in 2005, a company for whom he wrote the Spaceflight Participants Flight Surgeon’s Manual. He also developed astronaut-training protocols for future spaceflight participants and wrote and edited several chapters of Bigelow Aerospace’s Astronaut Training Manual. Erik is a research scientist specializing in environmental life sciences and physiology, the subject in which he obtained his Ph.D. in Physiology while working for the European Space Agency between 1996 and 1998. In 2009, he was one of the final candidates for selection as an astronaut in the CSA’s Astronaut Recruitment Campaign. He is a certified commercial suborbital astronaut who will fly a payload mission in 2015. He is also Training Director for Astronauts for Hire and, between 2008 and 2013, served as Director of Canada’s manned centrifuge and hypobaric operations.