Apparently there's no shortage of people willing to spend enough for a nice house on a few minutes of weightlessness with a good view. I'm sort of surprised : I would expect prices to come down by design from their already-insane starting value.

Compared to its predecessor, Apeiron is larger and able to carry six passengers rather than Unity’s four-person capacity. That gives Virgin two extra paying seats per trip. Another major difference is the frequency of suborbital flights. While Unity could only fly once a month, the company claims that the Delta vehicles will require less maintenance between flights. Apeiron is designed to support up to eight flights a month.

The first tickets for flights on board VSS Unity cost $200,000 per seat when the company began selling them in 2005. The price eventually climbed to $250,000, and when the company reopened sales in 2021, a seat aboard its spaceplane cost $450,000. By 2024, the price tag had once again climbed to $600,000 before Virgin announced its $750,000 ticket prices in late March.

This niche market never truly materialized as a profitable industry, considering the high cost of developing and maintaining reusable spacecraft, which leads to soaring ticket prices. Evidently, there are still a number of people willing to pay the price for a trip to (almost) space, considering Virgin’s backlog of eager ticket holders.

#Space

gizmodo.com/richard-branson-un…

Neat !

Despite the name, the universe’s white dwarfs can glow in a wide range of colors—even green. For the first time, astronomers have spotted a star that appears green to the human eye, and the reddest ever recorded. These outlier stars help explain how certain white dwarf stars would shine in green, pink, cyan, yellow, and purple if we actually saw them up close in space. These colorful findings are described in a study recently published in the journal RAS Techniques and Instruments.

According to the team, the key to these colors is density. The atmospheres surrounding the coolest white dwarfs can reach about the same density as water (roughly 1 gram per cubic centimeter). They are also millions of times denser than the sun’s photosphere, the lowest layer of its atmosphere. Under these higher density conditions, any trace elements present (carbon, calcium, sodium, etc.) interact with the surrounding dense helium plasma. As they interact with the plasma, they can absorb light across a wider spectrum of colors than they would at lower densities. This then shifts the star’s color away from the more typical orange, white, and blue.

The most striking example is WD J1330+6435. This star is about 7,232 degrees Fahrenheit (4,000 degrees Celsius) and around 284 light-years away from Earth. Over time, it has gathered rocky material from its planetary system. All of this extra material enriched its atmosphere with calcium, lithium, and sodium. The result—a chartreuse green appearance in the team’s models. As far as the researchers are aware, no other star (living or dead) has ever been credibly reported as green.

#Space
#Science

popsci.com/science/first-green…