Pilot Iago flies a space plane from New Zealand, accelerating down the runway before pitching up 85 degrees. The test vehicle reaches 80,000 feet, but a full-performance version with more fuel would coast above 300,000 feet, crossing the boundary to space.
The whole thing is not automated. There's a pilot that is— Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like walk me through the flight process.
Yeah, yeah, okay. So currently like we have everything at our HQ in Christchurch. We pack it all up into some trailers. We drive out to our launch site. We do basic vehicle checkouts. It's about an hour or so to do those checkouts and we do propellant loading, then like roll it out onto the runway. And then you do all your like regular traffic calls and whatnot and coordinate with air traffic control. But yeah, then you kind of like get the go and you count down from 10. And then light it up and Iago, our pilot, flies it. Yeah, you know, it rips down the runway, takes off, pulls up into about a 30 or 40-degree climb, and then it just kind of like pulls up and away into about 85-degree climb. Wow. Through 50,000 feet or so, we get supersonic. And then on this particular aircraft, burnout's at about 60-odd thousand feet, and then we coast up to 80,000 feet. On the full performance vehicle, we'll have way more propellant on board and a higher thrust engine. Burnout will be more like about 120,000 or 130,000 feet, and then we'll coast up to over 300,000 feet, like 100 kilometers.
