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IPFS News Link • Space Travel and Exploration

Watch live: Virgin Galactic is unveiling the interior cabin of its SpaceShipTwo rocket...

• https://news.yahoo.com, Dave Mosher

Sixteen years after Richard Branson founded Virgin Galactic, the company plans to unveil the interior design of its centerpiece suborbital rocket ship, SpaceShipTwo.

The vehicle is designed to fly to supersonic speeds and pierce the unofficial boundary of space some 62 miles above Earth.

At the pinnacle of such flights, six passengers — either a group of space tourists or science researchers — and two pilots would experience a few minutes of weightlessness before returning and landing at Spaceport America in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Virgin Galactic is now in the final stages of a test-flight program before the company attempts to start commercial operations.

As those final experimental flights take place, the company is announcing that it has finalized the interior cabin of SpaceShipTwo.

Virgin Galactic has seen repeated setbacks to its goal to carry paying passengers, which founder Richard Branson had predicted could start as long ago as 2009. A prototype ship failed over the desert in 2014, killing a test pilot and further hampering the project.


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