Virgin Galactic touches the edge of space with Mach 2.9 test flight of SpaceShipTwo

The fourth test flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo took its test pilots to the very edge of space this morning, reaching just over 52 miles of altitude and a maximum speed of Mach 2.9. It’s another exciting leapfrog of the aspiring space tourism company’s previous achievements.

Takeoff was at 7:30 AM against a lovely sunrise in the Mojave:

The actual spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, was strapped to the belly of WhiteKnightTwo (VSS Unity and VMS Eve specifically) as the latter gave it a ride up to about 45,000 feet.

At that point SpaceShipTwo ignited its rocket engine and started zooming upwards at increasing speed. The 60-second burn of the engine, 18 seconds longer than the third test flight’s, took the craft up to Mach 2.9 — quite a bit faster than before.

After that minute-long burn SpaceShipTwo deployed its “feathers,” helping slow and guide it to a controlled re-entry. It had at this point reached 271,268 feet, approximately 51.4 miles or 82.7 kilometers.

Now, space “officially” begins by international consensus at 100 km, at what’s called the Karman line. But space-like conditions begin well before that, and a planned altitude of around 80 km was good enough for NASA to load a set of microgravity experiments onto the craft. And some have suggested the line should be 80 km instead. So while it’s debatable whether Virgin Galactic truly went to space (the company is saying so), it definitely got close enough to get a taste.

And the pilots, Mark ‘forger’ Stucky and CJ Sturckow, are definitely astronauts.

If this flight isn’t the one that makes Virgin Galactic the first to get to space without a national space organization’s help, chances are the next one will be. I’m awaiting more images from the flight and will update this post with them as soon as they’re available.