Watch live as Virgin Galactic launches tourists to space for the first time

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Virgin Galactic aims to alert its 2nd commercialized spaceflight connected Thursday, its archetypal carrying private-paying tourists.

Called Galactic 02, the formation is launching from Spaceport America successful New Mexico. The company's spacecraft is flown by a brace of pilots and carries 4 different people: a Virgin Galactic trainer, to oversee the ngo from wrong the cabin, and a trio of passengers.

The 3 customers onboard Galactic 02 are British erstwhile Olympian Jon Goodwin and 2 passengers from the Caribbean, Keisha Schahaff and Anastatia Mayers, who won seats done a foundation fundraising drafting by nonprofit Space for Humanity.

Virgin Galactic uses a two-step strategy known arsenic "air launch" to alert its passengers connected a suborbital spaceflight. 

This benignant of spaceflight gives passengers a mates of minutes of weightlessness, dissimilar the overmuch longer, much hard and much expensive private orbital flights conducted by Elon Musk's SpaceX.

After the jet-powered bearer aircraft, VMS Eve, carries the spacecraft into position, the rocket-powered VSS Unity is released and fires its motor to ascent past an altitude of 80 kilometers, oregon astir 262,000 feet. That altitude is what the U.S. recognizes arsenic the bound of space.

The institution completed its archetypal commercialized spaceflight, the Galactic 01 mission carrying members of the Italian Air Force, successful precocious June and present hopes to ramp up flying cadence for paying customers.

Virgin Galactic has a backlog of astir 800 passengers. Many of those tickets were sold astatine prices betwixt $200,000 and $250,000 implicit a decennary ago, but the institution reopened summons income 2 years ago, with pricing opening astatine $450,000 per seat.