Gilo Industries CEO Attends Virgin SpaceShipTwo Rollout

On the 19th of February under the blue skies of the Mojave Desert in California, Virgin Galactic was preparing for an engineering milestone moment; the unveiling of the world’s newest passenger spacecraft and its second iteration of SpaceShipTwo, the VSS Unity.

SpaceShipTwo is designed to take a crew of two pilots and up to six passengers to space. The flight experience will feature an air launch followed by a rocket-powered ascent at three and a half times the speed of sound to altitudes reaching 100km, the silence of space, several minutes of out-of-seat weightlessness and views of earth.

Gilo Industries Group CEO Jim Edmondson traveled out the Mojave Air and Space Port prior to the event with Virgin Virgin Group Special Projects Director and Gilo Industries Group Non-Executive Alex Tai, to be one of the guests at the rollout ceremony.

Professor Stephen Hawking named the new vehicle Virgin Spaceship (VSS) Unity via recorded message at the ceremony, attended by four generations of Sir Richard’s family, from his mother Eve, Richard himself, his son Sam, to his grandchild Eva Deia who celebrated her first birthday by christening the spaceship in the traditional way but with milk in place of champagne.

The rollout ceremony of SpaceShipTwo marks a change for Virgin Galactic’s operations. In an enthusiastic and passionate introductory speech, Virgin Galactic’s Commercial Director Stephen Atenborough celebrated the hard work of the engineers and technicians as they reach the end of the critical research and development phase of work and mark the start of a new phase, one focused on manufacturing and production, further testing and, ultimately, the first commercial human spaceflight program in history.

In the same vein, Gilo Industries Group has undertaken numerous products lifecycles and can relate to transforming concepts from the drawing board to the marketplace requires clever ideas, lots of hard work, and above all else, lots of passion and dedication. From paramotor products such as the Volution 3 and Zenith through to the range of Rotron rotary engines, which has entered a shift towards a manufacturing, production and testing phase. The Group is also experiencing growth and change on a daily basis right across the business, as the company gears up for its AS9100 audit and certification in September.

To conclude his visit to Mojave, Jim also met with executives from Scaled Composites and Northrop Grumman to discuss potential for Rotron’s range of innovative propulsion system solutions.

Please visit this link for full coverage of the event from the Virgin Galactic website ::  http://www.virgingalactic.com/richard-branson-unveils-virgin-galactics-new-spaceship-named-vss-unity-by-professor-stephen-hawking/