Commercial airline passengers were treated to quite the sight as they were coming in for a landing at San Francisco International Airport when their plane was joined by Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and its carrier aircraft, White Knight II.
The space craft (the central fuselage) was carried by its mothership right next to their plane and even did a parallel landing on an adjacent runway, giving the passengers aboard the commercial airliner a great view of the space craft for a good ten minutes. Although, I don’t think anyone enjoyed the experience quite as much as the pilot. He was so pumped:
Commercial flights aboard Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo are to begin by the end of this year and more than 600 people have already signed up for the $250,000 trip. Passengers climb to 50,000ft before the rocket engine ignites and they become ‘astronauts’ when they reach the Karman line, which is the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere, at which point SpaceShipTwo separates from its carrier aircraft, White Knight II, and glides back to Earth and performs a conventional runway landing.