Virgin Galactic reports high interest in its space flights

难词探意

1. reservation /'rezə'veɪʃn/ n. 预订；预约

2. registrant /'redʒɪstrənt/ n. 登记者

The spaceflight company Virgin Galactic has received nearly 8,000 onlinereservationsof interest since its first successful test flight 14 months ago. The company reported this week on the number of people reserving seats for future space flights as it nears commercial operation and prepares to reopen ticket sales. Virgin Galactic already had more than 600 confirmed reservations, from people in 60 countries, before the December 2018 test flight. It then delayed ticket sales.

On Wednesday the company announced that it would begin a process called “One Small Step”.It is for those onlineregistrantswho are serious about becoming passenger astronauts. They are now required to pay $1,000 toward the cost of their flights. Virgin Galactic says they will get the money back if they change their minds.Confirming a spaceflight reservation will be a process called “OneGiant Leap” and those are the words American astronaut Neil Armstrong said when he became the first person to set foot on the Moon in 1969.

Virgin Galactic did not say when the new set of seats would be released. The company set the cost of the first set of seats at $250,000 each. Virgin Galactic spent years developing and testing its space flight technology at Mojave Air & Space Port in Mojave, California. Now it is moving toward starting actual operations at Spaceport America in southern New Mexico. A start date has yet to be set, however. Virgin Galactic is offering flights just outside Earth's atmosphere, as high as 80.5 kilometers up in space. There, passengers will see large parts of the planet's surface and experience a few minutes of weightlessness before the spacecraft returns to Earth.

The current number of online registrations is twice more than the number Virgin Galactic last reported in September 2019.

Stephen Attenborough is the company's commercial director. He said in a statement that the increasing demand for personal spaceflight was a good sign. Virgin Galactic's six-passenger spacecraft is called SpaceShipTwo. A carrier aircraft carries it high into the atmosphere and releases it before its rocket engine fires.

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1. What do we know about Virgin Galactic from the first paragraph?

A． Its first test flight was in January 2019.

B． It had more than one hundred confirmed reservations.

C． It delayed ticket sales because of technical problems.

D． It plans to sell tickets for space flights in future.

2. How much will you probably pay if you reserve a seat for the space flight?

A. $900. B. $1,000. C. $250,000. D. $251,000.

3. What's Stephen Attenborough's attitude towards commercial spaceflight?

A． Positive. B． Negative. C． Neutral. D． Unclear.

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Difficult sentence

Confirming a spaceflight reservation will be a process called “One Giant Leap” and those are the words American astronaut Neil Armstrong said when he became the first person to set foot on the Moon in 1969.

【翻译】__________________________________________

【点石成金】本句是一个并列复合句。 Confirming a spaceflight reservation是动名词短语作主语，and连接两个并列句，American astronaut Neil Armstrong said是定语从句，修饰先行词words，when引导时间状语从句。