Virgin Galactic, having flown its first commercial spaceflight in late June, is ready to take civilians to the edge of space, briefly. The company plans to launch its first private passenger flight, Galactic 02, as soon as August 10th. Virgin isn't yet revealing the names of everyone involved, but there will be three passengers aboard, alongside crew. The company says it's establishing a "regular cadence" of flights – and it needs that. Virgin Galactic has operated at a loss for years and lost $500 million in 2022 alone.

The year 2019 marks 50 years since the first humans landed on the moon in 1969 as part of NASA's Apollo 11 lunar mission. In an interview with Managing Editor Sayuri Daimon, former Japanese astronaut Naoko Yamazaki shares her experience in space in 2010 and her views on space development in the coming years. Former astronaut Naoko Yamazaki hopes to open Asia's first spaceport, which will serve as a hub for space planes for travelers, in Japan as early as 2021. She believes that a new age of space tourism where ordinary people, not only astronauts, will be able to travel beyond Earth is just around the corner. In July, she co-founded the Space Port Japan Association, an organization to support efforts to open spaceports in Japan through collaboration with companies, groups and government institutions.

NASA has finally pinpointed the exact landing location of its new Mars explorer, thanks to a powerful camera on its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. While the space agency knew InSight had landed within an 81-mile-long (130 km) ellipse on the red planet, there was no way to determine exactly where it touched down within this region. Now, a series of images captured this week by MRO's HiRISE camera have confirmed that the lander, heat shield, and parachute all sit within 1,000 feet of each other on a lava plain called Elysium Planitia. NASA has finally pinpointed the exact landing location of its new Mars explorer, thanks to a powerful camera on its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. In the images released today by NASA, InSight and its parts appear as bright teal specks on rust-colored landscape.

What'd you do this week? If it didn't involve a historic trip into space then Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic have you beat. Other out-of-reach experiences include hopping behind the wheel of McLaren's 720S and taking a selfie on Mars, but we can all share the season-two trailer of Star Trek Discovery. First human spaceflight launched from the US since 2011.Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo reaches space for the first time SpaceShipTwo has reached space after months of testing, flying to an altitude of 271,268 feet before returning to Earth. The stay was brief (SST fired its rocket for all of a minute), but it was enough to both verify the spacecraft as well as conduct four NASA-backed scientific experiments that studied the effects of microgravity and devices that could handle life support and counteract vibration.

After a quick holiday break, we have a social-media scandal involving a Kardashian (no, the other-other-other one) and big EV news from Volvo. A 2014 crash undid Virgin Galactic's private space-travel plans, but now the company says it'll resume powered test flights. This comes after a series of glide-only trials since December, and it hopes to reach the edge of space by the end of this year. Richard Branson is targeting the middle of next year for his first trip to space, with commercial passenger flights starting soon after. The first manufacturer to step away from gasoline.

Commercial supersonic air travel could return in just half a decade after a Richard Branson-backed company aiming to replace the concord announced it will begin test flights next year. Boom Supersonic has said initial test flights for its 1,451mph (2,330kph) aircraft, nicknamed the'baby boom', will begin by the end of 2018, with both subsonic and supersonic tests taking place in the US. Supersonic flight tests will be conducted near Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California in partnership with Virgin Galactic's The Spaceship Company. If the firm's full-sized, 55-seater aircraft is approved, the first passengers could be making a supersonic journey across the Atlantic by 2023 at a top speed more than 100mph (160km/h) faster than the infamous Concorde. Boom Supersonic has said initial test flights for its 1,451mph (2,330kph) aircraft, nicknamed the'baby boom', will begin by the end of 2018, with both subsonic and supersonic tests taking place in the US.

June 1, 2017 --If all had gone according to plan, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would be celebrating its 10th anniversary of capturing stunning portraits of distant galaxies, NASA would be hard at work on its dark energy detector, Virgin Galactic would be running two daily tourist flights to the edge of space for just $50,000 a head, and a Russian company would be doing brisk business with its orbiting luxury space hotel. Of course, that's not how it worked out in reality. Last month, Virgin Galactic made its tenth annual prediction that "next year" it will finally shuttle tourists to space, joining the JWST on the horizon of 2018, and the inaugural mission of NASA's new Space Launch System slipped to 2019. As for that space hotel, don't ask. Planning for the future is part of what it means to be human, but cognitive biases, development challenges, and financing conventions conspire to make accurate predictions next to impossible.

Today on In Case You Missed It: Virgin Galactic's Unity spaceplane took to the skies once again following its earlier crash to perform its first successful "feather" maneuver. That's when the tail flaps flip up and the plane falls to Earth like a conventional crew capsule rather than, you know, a plane. We also take a look at a crazy piece of animation software developed at the University of Edinburgh which leverages machine learning neural networks to generate stunningly lifelike movements for video game characters. The science behind it is pretty tricky but the results speak for themselves.