Feathers for the shuttlecocks used at the badminton matches of the just completed Tokyo Olympics are produced at a factory in Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan province.
vertical ascent, that it shuts down, you re looking out the windows, looking at the zero gravity, the momentum is keeping you going higher and higher and higher until in this case about 56 miles, just short of where the 100 kilometer altitude for the x prize was. and because earth s gravity is strong and you haven t given it enough energy, earth s gravity starts pulling the spaceship back down, and one giant parabolic arc. in that time when you re out of the atmosphere, the feather mechanism, which is the back half of the vehicle, winging over, a beautiful innovation by bert butan, to implement what he calls a carefree reentry, meaning you take your hands off the wheel, the aerodynamics, shape of the wing, like a shuttlecock in badminton always
rocket for one minute, carrying it to speeds of 2300 miles an hour, three times the speed of sound to an altitude of about 55 miles above sea level. they will spend about four minutes, maybe five minutes weight less. that plane will turnover onto its front. it will put it in wings hopefully like a shuttlecock and return to earth. the whole thing should take maybe 90 minutes. as you guys said, the launch moved back to 10:30 eastern, 8:30 here in the morning. again, according to our tom costello, they do think this will be the only delay. they do think that we will see this happen this morning, guys. and, cal, at what point will we see that things are actually in play? of course there is a count down, but before that count down takes place, how long beforehand do we see richard branson and the other crew members? reporter: so, that crew should actually get into that craft about an hour before the count down kicks off. so you figure about 9:30 eastern. we ll start to see pictures