Virgin Galactic suborbital flight animation + Norman FOSTER's Spaceport.

Who said "let's keep our feet down" when we can take off? This is an animation but the all flight is set to last 2 hours 1/2, including 4 minutes at gravity zero. In the near future 3 days training at Spaceport America, designed by Norman FOSTER, will be part of this amazing experience.


During a flight, passengers will experience the same physiological stresses as professional astronauts, 3.5 Gs on launch and 6 Gs on reentry : 6 times the normal weight a person feels while at rest on Earth.

90 years old James LOVELOCK had a successful centrifuge training at the NASTAR centre. He will be one of the first passengers to attend the first Virgin Galactic commercial flight, which is now scheduled for 2010.

LOVELOCK's Gaia theory was developed in the late sixties and regarded the earth as one huge self-regulating mechanism in which all things – the atmosphere, oceans, rocks, and living organisms (humans included) – exist in an ongoing feedback loop. For decades he was not taken seriously : “Almost all the opposition has faded away now, but I did have some bad times when it all got a bit rude. But that’s what happens in science - it takes a long time to persuade colleagues it’s real. You can’t expect to do it in under twenty years.”