these are 600 people that have already paid for seats. that right now the spaceship is only taking about four people originally it was designed for four passengers and six pilots, now there are seats for four passengers and two pilots. and the suppositions that they re going to open up reservations after this today and you re going to get another flood of people. we re talking a long time in the future before, you know, a ticket price is less than a business class ticket, you know, $10,000 one way across the atlantic. that s a ways, ways, ways off. and no one is very few people are paying for business class tickets across the atlantic. so i think that is a reality that we need to sort of keep in mind. i think that branson is aware of that. he s not totally tone deaf to
tawny. damon, describe the moments they re feeling right now. it s locked in my head. it s just fantastic. in my case in the shuttle, we were strapped in pretty hard, so when you re strapped in, you re not flown out of your seat but you feel things. you hold up your pencil and your book, let go and it floats there. visually, it was an amazing thing, but getting out and floating, just a fantastic sensation. now it s speeding autopsy the 17,000 miles an hour. they re now heading quickly back to earth. the period of weightlessness is now over. tell us what s going to happen next, daniel. it s not clear it s over. what s happening is they were thrown up and they and the airplane are falling down to earth at the same time, so they re going to picking up speed as they fall down to earth. but inside the airplane, that s them floating inside the spaceship. so it is picking up velocity,
2004, there s a spaceship that flew to space three times in the summer and fall of 2004. the idea was you d take spaceship 2 and make it bigger and more powerful and be up there doing the same thing. what they found is that building a prototype is one thing. building a vehicle that can do this on a weekly basis, eastern making three flights a week which is what they re talking about for the tempo of their program. so can they do that? and can they do this in a way that shaves sort of undermines this 3% fatality rate that human space flight that s been affected by human space flight. so 3% if every hundred people that go up, three people die, there s a lot of informed consent going on in terms of assuming liability. that s a question that i feel like future astronauts will have to reckon with. virgin galactic wants to cut
behind me, the hit that moment. they are coasting to the edge of space here. and viewers on your television, you re actually able to see what rachel described a moment ago where you see the rocket burn actually happening. kristin fisher, what does this moment feel like to you on the ground as well? reporter: unbelievably exciting. brian, we can actually see spaceship 2 rocketing up into space right now. we can see the moment when spaceship 2 released from the mother ship. you could see the smoke, the contrails from the ground as it rocketed up. everyone on the ground here cheering, and now this spaceship is in the very capable hands of the two pilots on board this flight, dave mckay, michael masuki. this is what they trained their entire lives for. these are two very highly trained test pilots. they ve been with virgin galactic for quite some time, and now they are responsible for the company s founder, richard branson, achieving his life long
but inside you re still floating relative to the spaceship. so that s the zero g feeling that you get. once they dom back to the atmosphere skand engage all the arrow surfaces, that s when they pick up the g s and that zero time will be over for them. miles o brien also with us. viewers know you ve been covering the space programs, plural, for decades. what feels different about this one for you, miles? brian, takes me back to 2004 when we watched the space flight three times and at that time we thought, oh, this is going to be widely adopted for a lot of people within five years. here we are 17 years later, and this is finally happening. space is hard. some people died along the way, and the question we have to all ask ourselves, is this worth it,