14 DAY TRIAL // SpaceX is not the only company conquering space these days. Orbital Sciences Corporation, which has been around for decades, is getting ready to send its Cygnus capsule to dock with the ISS, becoming the second ever company, after SpaceX, to do this.
But other companies with space ambitions are less interested in getting their hands on fat government contracts and more interested in putting the average Joe, with a couple of hundreds of thousands dollars to spare, into space or, at least, into low Earth orbit, at the very edge of space.
We're talking, of course, about Virgin Galactic which, after quite a few delays, is getting ready for the first passenger flights, hopefully sometime next year.
In the meantime, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo (SS2) is still being put through its paces. Virgin owner Richard Branson has recently shared some footage of one of the latest test flights.
SS2 soared to an altitude of 21,031 meters (69,000 feet) going supersonic in the process and then all the way to 1,000 mph (1,600 km/h) or about 1.43 Mach at that altitude. But Virgin Galactic plans to carry passengers to five times that altitude.