Virgin Galactic has revealed the interior of its central space plane, showing a cabin with new custom seats and a “space mirror” on a virtual tour of what its passengers can expect to experience on flights to the edge of space.
For $ 250,000 per ticket, passengers who signed up for the suborbital flight aboard the VSS Unity air-launched plane will be seated in six custom seats and will be able to peek out of the 12 circular cabin windows as they ascend 97 km (60 miles) above Earth. The plane has five other windows.
Virgin Galactic space chief George Whitesides said passengers could undo at maximum height to float around the cabin in zero-gravity conditions.
The company has 600 registered customers to fly and at least 400 more who have expressed interest, Whitesides said. No date has been set for his first commercial space flight. British founder Sir Richard Branson is expected to be on board.
Virgin Galactic has never made a profit and has been affected by successive delays. Branson said last year that he expected to make the first trip “in months, not years” after raising £ 60 million in deposits.
The cabin also features a large circular mirror at the rear “to allow our clients to see themselves in space in a way that has never been done before,” Whitesides said.
The plane, connected to a larger transport plane, is destined to take off from the company’s New Mexico spaceport and take off into the air to launch itself further towards the edge of space on a journey that lasts 90 minutes.
Virgin Galactic is vying for space tourism supremacy with the SpaceX project launched by Tesla founder Elon Musk and the Blue Origin company led by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person.
Branson floated the business in the stock market in October, securing $ 450 million of funds through a merger with Social Capital Hedosophia, an investment vehicle led by former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya.
Reuters contributed to this report
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