Galactic 05 was a crewed

sub-orbital spaceflight A sub-orbital spaceflight is a spaceflight in which the spacecraft reaches outer space, but its trajectory intersects the surface of the primary (astronomy), gravitating body from which it was launched. Hence, it will not complete one orbital ...

of the

SpaceShipTwo The Scaled Composites Model 339 SpaceShipTwo (SS2) was an air-launched suborbital spaceplane type designed for space tourism. It was manufactured by The Spaceship Company, a California-based company owned by Virgin Galactic. SpaceShipTwo was ...

-class VSS ''Unity'', which launched on 2 November 2023. It was the fifth

commercial spaceflight Private spaceflight is any spaceflight development that is not conducted by a government agency, such as NASA or ESA. During the early decades of the Space Age, the government space agencies of the Soviet Union and United States pioneere ...

and tenth overall spaceflight for American aerospace company

Virgin Galactic Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. is a British-American spaceflight company founded by Richard Branson and the Virgin Group conglomerate, which retains an 11.9% stake through Virgin Investments Limited. It is headquartered in California, and opera ...

Crew

Galactic 05's crew included three private passengers and three Virgin Galactic employees. Stern performed studies of human body's reaction to zero-gravity by wearing a biomedical monitoring harness. He also wanted to develop in-space operation of a particular high-tech camera that is planned to be used on an astronomical research mission in the future by NASA. His flight and research were financed by

Southwest Research Institute Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, is an independent and nonprofit applied research and development (R&D) organization. Founded in 1947 by oil businessman Tom Slick, it provides contract research and deve ...

. Gerardi flew the Galactic 05 mission as a

payload specialist A payload specialist (PS) was an individual selected and trained by commercial or research organizations for flights of a specific payload on a NASA Space Shuttle mission. People assigned as payload specialists included individuals selected by t ...

doing scientific research with

Alan Stern Sol Alan Stern (born November 22, 1957) is an American engineer, planetary scientist and space tourist. He is the principal investigator of the ''New Horizons'' mission to Pluto and the Chief Scientist at Moon Express. Stern has been involved ...

, a private passenger also on board. Onboard, Gerardi operated three biomedical and thermodynamic fluid experiments on behalf of IIAS (International Institute for Astronautical Sciences, a private international education and research facility). Gerardi operated a fluid cell designed to help better predict and control the shape and location of fluid within a container in microgravity. She also wore the Astroskin biomonitoring device to collect a wide range of biometric data during her flight. A third experiment studied insulin-resistance during spaceflight, and Gerardi wore a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) to measure and store glucose readings. Her flight was paid for by IIAS and the research done was developed by National Research Council of Canada.

References

{{Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo Aviation history of the United States Suborbital human spaceflights Private space missions Suborbital space tourism flights 2023 in spaceflight 2023 in New Mexico 2023 in aviation

Crew

See also

References