Purdue University will send five Boilermakers, including a professor and graduate student researcher, on a suborbital flight with Virgin Galactic.
Purdue University
Purdue University has trained 28 NASA astronauts, including Neil Armstrong. Now the university plans to send a five-person, all-Purdue team into space, thanks to a partnership with the commercial space line Virgin Galactic.
The suborbital flight is expected to take place in 2027 aboard the Delta Class spaceship, which provides space tourism experiences.
Dubbed Purdue 1, the flight will carry two pilots and five current or former Boilermakers, including Steven Collicott, a Purdue professor of aerospace engineering; graduate student Abigail Mizzi, who is studying aeronautics and astronautics engineering; and alumnus Jason Williamson. The university has reserved the final two seats for alumni.
The flight is designed to expand research on microgravity and how fluids behave in space. Mizzi and Collicott will conduct liquid behavioral experiments during the flight’s approximately three minutes of weightlessness, according to a university press release. Collicott has previously taken students into parabolic aircraft to study zero gravity, but those flights only had 20 seconds of weightlessness.
A seat on a Virgin Galactic flights can cost upward of $600,000, according to Bloomberg. Purdue 1 is funded in part by an award Collicott won from NASA’s Flight Opportunities. Mizzi’s seat is funded by private philanthropy to Purdue, and the alumni will purchase their own seats.
