Virgin Galactic will soon organise private passenger trips to the ISS; Read more

Richard Branson’s space tourism company, Virgin Galactic is set to organise private astronauts trips to the International Space Station. Virgin Galactic will be working on this in association with NASA for the same. The partnership will be aimed at increasing the commercial use of NASA’s orbiting outpost.

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Virgin Galactic and NASA’s new space agreement:

Reportedly, Virgin Galactic has recently entered into an agreement with the space agency. As per the terms of this new agreement, Richard Branson’s company is tasked with putting together a new private orbital astronaut readiness programme for NASA. This programme will help NASA to find companies or even organisations which are interested in sending their people to the space station, and then find the right kind of transportation to get them there. Virgin Galactic will also be responsible for arranging and coordinating for necessary resources both in space and on earth.

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Virgin Galactic’s new astronauts' training program

Virgin Galactic’s CEO, George Whitesides has revealed in an interview he gave to a science portal that, apart from finding a customer for NASA, it has started developing an astronaut training program for its future customers. The interested customers  will fly from Spaceport America in New Mexico on the space company’s spaceplane. He added that the new training program might also allow customers to ride on Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane. 

This will provide the customers some experience of space and weightlessness before they take the final leap and head to the orbit for a longer stay. After the astronaut training programme is completely drawn out by Virgin Galactic, NASA will review it and also conduct a feasibility assessment. After the prerequisites have completed the programme will be active.

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Diversifying the use of International Space Station

It is important to note that Virgin Galactic’s plans to develop a new private orbital astronaut readiness program are part of a bigger plan drawn out by NASA. It will directly support NASA’s broad strategy to facilitate the commercialisation of low-Earth orbit by United States entities. While it is no news that for decades, the ISS has mainly been used as a place for government and academic research.

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However, NASA announced last year, that it will allow private companies to access the ISS for commercial purposes as well. In fact, NASA even took the revolutionary decision of allowing filming of advertisements and movies on the space station. So far, a telecom company called Axiom is aiming at building a private space station. It also announced its plans to send its own representatives to the ISS through Space X’s Crew Dragon capsule in late 2021.