A former Virgin Galactic board member walks through how the company's suborbital flights work: a carrier aircraft releases a spacecraft at 50,000 feet, rockets fire toward the Kármán line at 100 kilometers up, and passengers float weightless for a few seconds at the apex before a high-G descent brings them back down in about ten minutes total.
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Steve, how do you feel about going to space? I would love to go to space. As a matter of fact, I was on the board of directors of Virgin Galactic for 4 years, and I was scheduled actually to go to space, but I left the board, things changed, but I will get up there one of these days. But how does the Virgin Galactic trip work? So what happens is you get into the spaceship which is attached to the bottom of another plane. It takes you up to 50,000 feet, drops the spaceship, the rockets get fired, it goes up to what they call the Kármán line, which is about 100 kilometers up, just short of it, and that's legally spaced. And then it goes into a parabolic sort of dip. When it's just making it, going from up to down, the whole spaceship and everybody in it enters what they call zero gravity. So basically you float inside the capsule, and you just sort of float around the whole thing. You get back in, put your seatbelt on real quick before it starts going back down, because then you get intense Gs, and you get pushed back into the chair. 10 minutes later, you're on the ground. That's crazy. I want to come too.