The General Staff of the Italian Air Force has announced that the VIRTUTE-1 mission, the first Italian suborbital mission with a crew of the Armed Forces and the CNR, has been successfully completed.
It started yesterday at 16.30, from the spaceport America of Virgin Galactic (in New Mexico – USA), the mission VIRTUTE-1 (Italian Flight for Research and Technology sUborbiTalE) which saw the Italian crew, composed of two Air Force Officers and an engineer of the National Research Council (CNR), take off on board the VSS Unity spacecraft (SpaceShipTwo class), for a flight with a total duration of ninety minutes.
The Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. S. A. Luca Goretti commented: “The Ministry of Defense and in particular the Air Force, with its wealth of skills, is naturally projected to the enhancement and protection of space defense and security. Space flight is an aeronautical domain to be explored and represents a technological challenge where national technical and industrial skills can play their part in their own right. Scientific, business and military development must work together to ensure the right relevance in this area too. This will ensure the maintenance of excellence in the National Aerospace sector” concluded General Goretti.
At the command of the VIRTUTE-1 mission, born from a commercial agreement between the Italian Air Force and Virgin Galactic, Col. Walter Villadei, space engineer and cosmonaut, who also coordinated the operational and training activities of the Italian crew, which includes Ten. Col. Angelo Landolfi, aerospace doctor with the role of responsible for the medical aspects of the Italian crew and the medical experiments proposed by the Air Force, and Dr. Pantaleone Carlucci, engineer and researcher of the National Research Council (CNR), with the role of head of the on-board experiments proposed by the CNR itself.
During the suborbital flight, following the engine shutdown, the cabin of the VSS Unity has in fact become a scientific laboratory in which the crew has been able to conduct tests – in microgravity conditions – related to medicine, advanced materials, fluid physics, physiology. The research projects were coordinated by the Institute of Aerospace Medicine of the Italian Air Force (IMAS) in Milan; the Maggiore Policlinico Hospital and the University of Milan; from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Mathematical Sciences of the Faculty of Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Marche.
The information acquired will provide useful data for scientific research applicable, as well as to the technological sector, to the medical one: the results will allow to study the effects of agents such as radiation, free radicals and oxidative stress, at the base of many diseases and main cause of cellular aging. The VIRTUTE-1 mission, which for Virgin Galactic inaugurates the era of commercial flights, is in line with the Defense Space Plan, which aims to increase – with the support of the world of research and industry – the current knowledge in space, aerospace and suborbital flight, verifying and evaluating the possible developments of the technologies available today.
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