Virgin Galactic announced the ‘Galactic 05’ Flight window will open on November 2, 2023. This would be the Company’s sixth spaceflight this year and tenth to date. The ‘Galactic 05’ Mission would once again see Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship converted into a suborbital space lab for space-based research. This research mission reaffirms Virgin Galactic’s commitment to providing unprecedented access to space by reducing the historical barriers of time and cost associated with innovative microgravity and space-based research.

“The pursuit of scientific discovery has driven Virgin Galactic from the beginning, and we’re thrilled to offer a wide breadth of high-quality and reliable access to space-based research,” said Michael Colglazier, CEO of Virgin Galactic. “With six flights in six months, our teams have delivered on our turn time objectives for our initial spaceship, VSS Unity. ‘Galactic 05’ will be our second commercial human-tended research mission, and insights from this flight will be used to enhance and refine the research capabilities of our future Delta fleet.”

The dynamic crew of the ‘Galactic 05’ mission will include:

‘Galactic 05’ is set to become Galactic’s sixth space research mission and its second this year. Alan and Kellie are experienced researchers who plan to conduct human-tended research during the suborbital spaceflight. As a former NASA Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, Alan is a long-time advocate for commercial suborbital research platforms. Sponsored by SwRI, Alan’s mission is planned to be a training flight for a future suborbital spaceflight as part of NASA’s Flight Opportunities program. During ‘Galactic 05’, Alan will fly a biomedical harness to collect physiological data related to human spaceflight and conduct practice activities for an astronomical experiment on the NASA flight.

Kellie, sponsored by IIAS, plans to fly three payloads, two of which will evaluate novel healthcare technologies in microgravity conditions through the collection of biometric data with the Astroskin biomonitoring device, and examine how confined fluid behaves to inform future healthcare technologies in space. Her research has been developed through extensive reduced gravity flight campaigns with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and would now be advanced through a suborbital flight.