Virgin Galactic is a company within Richard Branson's Virgin Group which plans to provide sub-orbital spaceflights to space tourists, suborbital launches for space science missions and orbital launches of small satellites. Further in the future Virgin Galactic hopes to offer orbital human spaceflights as well. Virgin Galactic's spacecraft are launched from a large aeroplane, giving the spacecraft more initial speed and altitude than if it were launched from the ground.
Read more about Virgin Galactic: Mothership, The Spaceship Company, Competition, Fleet, Base, Corporate, Commencement of Space Flights, Potential Collaboration With NASA
Famous quotes containing the words virgin and/or galactic:
“Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn’t developed space travel were mere prehistory—horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene—and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)