Unity 22: So you can follow Richard Branson's space flight in the live stream

Sunday from 3 p.m. it starts. And while Branson and his Virgin Galactic team prepare for their flight, Jeff Bezos’ competition is etching on Twitter.

On Sunday the time has come: the entrepreneur Richard Branson will, together with three crew members and two pilots , get into the SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity and, if everything goes well, take off towards space. It is the next milestone in the space tourism business. Although Branson is by no means the first civilian in space, experts believe that the flight could stimulate the industry – especially since Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will follow him nine days later, on July 20, with his company Blue Origin.

Branson’s company Virgin Galactic will be launching on their Youtube channel as a live stream and the official homepage show that it should start around 3 p.m. German time. Talk show host Stephen Colbert and singer Khalid will accompany the webcast, which underlines the show character of the whole thing. The name of the mission is Unity 22, which is why you can also follow the hashtag # Unity22 on Twitter.

The launch site is the Spaceport America space airport in New Mexico. In addition to the 70-year-old Richard Branson, the astronauts Beth Moses and Sirisha Bandla, the astronaut Colin Bennett and the two pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci are on board.

You will first be attached to a mother plane called the VMS Eve, which will transport you to an altitude of about 15 kilometers. There the 18-meter-long VSS Unity fades out, ignites its own engine and then climbs up to 80 kilometers in altitude. The plane is supposed to land again just ten minutes later. So it is an extremely short excursion into weightlessness.

Nevertheless, the mission should bring valuable knowledge. During the flight, the experts on board want to use various experiments to measure how the cabin pressure feels and what options there are to make the experience more comfortable – because, of course, Virgin Galactic’s goal is to attract wealthy space tourists in the medium term. Even if Richard Branson repeatedly emphasizes that he has been looking forward to finally going on the trip for 17 years. “I’ve always been a dreamer. My mother taught me never to give up and reach for the stars, “he tweeted on July 2nd.

Yet another aspect dominates the public presentation: the race with Jeff Bezos. The fact that Branson had only decided at relatively short notice to abandon his flight a few days before the planned launch of Jeff Bezos and his New Shepard rocket could also be interpreted as personal vanity.

Bezos’ company Blue Origin seems a bit offended if you look at the tone of the recent tweets. It was said on Friday that New Shepard was designed from the outset to fly over the Kármán Line – in contrast to the SpaceShipTwo. In addition, New Shepard is a real rocket and not just an airplane. And there is far less damage to the ozone layer.

In fact, the differences between the two missions could hardly be greater. Branson’s SpaceShipTwo is essentially an aircraft that must be manually controlled by pilots, while the New Shepard is a launcher that takes off and lands vertically.

Due to the way it is built, the VSS Unity only rises to a height of around 80 kilometers, while Bezos wants to reach more than 100 kilometers. The aforementioned Kármán line lies exactly over these 100 kilometers the sea level and is generally regarded as the boundary to space, for example also at the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, which is responsible for aviation records.

Virgin Galactic, on the other hand, relies on a somewhat loose definition from the USA, according to which space begins at an altitude of around 50 to 80 kilometers. It is precisely this fact that Blue Origin uses for some swipes. Richard Branson shouldn’t care. If the weather on Sunday cooperates and the mission is successful, he can in any case say that he got ahead of Jeff Bezos.

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