Hasta La Gadget!

Virgin Galactic is celebrating the third successful supersonic test flight of VSS Unity, the passenger spacecraft it intends to make available for space tourism in the near future. This flight took the craft higher and faster than ever, stressing the system and providing useful data for the rocket plane’s engineers.

Virgin’s two-part flight system uses a traditional jet-powered plane, the WhiteKnightTwo-class VMS Eve, to carry the spacecraft up to about 45,000 feet, after which the latter detaches and zooms ahead (and upward) on rocket power.

Each of Unity’s flights has pushed its specs a bit further: The first one, in April, achieved Mach 1.6 and just over 84,000 feet of altitude. The second, in May, hit Mach 1.9 and reached 114,500 feet.

Today’s went to Mach 2 and got up to 170,000 feet, touching the Earth’s mesosphere before gliding down to a soft landing. It’s still not nearly to space; the Karman Line, where space “officially” begins, is about twice as high. But at this rate it sure just seems like a matter of time before they get up there.

Importantly, the rocket powering Unity’s flight burned this time for 42 seconds, well over the 30 seconds or so it’s been fired for until now. These tests necessarily have to advance degree by degree, but going from 30 to 42 is a big jump that the engineers are probably thrilled about.

“Having been a U2 pilot and done a lot of high altitude work, or what I thought was high altitude work, the view from 170,000 feet was just totally amazing,” said one of the pilots, Mike “Sooch” Masucci, in a Virgin Galactic press release. “The flight was exciting and frankly beautiful. We were able to complete a large number of test points which will give us good insight as we progress to our goal of commercial service.”

The team is working on analyzing the data from this flight, and of course inspecting and tweaking the spacecraft, and we can probably expect another test flight in the next few months.

While Epic’s Fortnite Battle Royale was already somewhat popular before it launched on mobile, it seems that its release on iOS catapulted it to the next level where last we heard, the game had made $100 million from its iOS release alone. Now according to the latest data from Sensor Tower, it seems that Fortnite is pulling in $2 million a day from the iOS version of the game alone.

Stats from earlier this month revealed that overall, Fortnite has made Epic a whopping $1 billion from in-game purchases to date, but the fact that it is now reported to be raking in $2 million a day from just its iOS app alone is impressive. Sensor Tower’s data also reveals that players have spent $150 million on the iOS version of the game, meaning that the game made an extra $50 million since we last reported on it.

It also seems that the release of Season 5 could be one of the reasons behind the insane amount of money the game is making. The publication claims that with Season 4, players spent about $1.2 million a day, but that has changed where it now averages at $2 million spent in the first 10 days of the release of Season 5.

Fortnite is expected to eventually make its way onto Android, but when exactly is anyone’s guess. Epic has promised a release in the summer but no dates have been confirmed yet.

Fortnite Is Reportedly Earning $2 Million A Day On iOS , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

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