Space Tourism As Of 2009
Virgin Galactic is a company which is planning to send people to outer space. The space tourism company was founded back in 2004 and has its headquarters in New Mexico, USA. Chairman Richard Branson announced on Wednesday that they will start offering sub-orbital spaceflights next year. Also, he presented a model of the spaceship called SpaceShipTwo and said that the first tests will be made later this year.
The price for a spaceflight is $200,000 and they received around 200 orders until now from, we guess, eccentric rich people who want to have a lifetime experience and who are very brave. Also, he expects that the price for the spaceflights will decrease in five years after the first launch so that everybody can afford to live this experience.
Richard Bjorklund, portfolio manager, said that the suborbital spacecraft needs to be safe first before sending passengers to go into space. The SpaceShipTwo will reach 62 miles above sea-level and it be launched with the help of the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft, its unveiling on Wednesday, which was designed by Burt Rutan.
The spaceflight will take approximately two and a half hours and it includes five minutes of weightlessness during of the lucky passengers will have some feelings impossible to match on Earth.
Virgin Galactic competes against PayPal’s founder Elon Musck with Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX); Amazon.com’s founder Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin; Europe’s EADS Astrium; Robert Bigelow’s Bigelow Aerospace; and with Rocketplane Kistler.
We don’t know if there is somebody out there who doesn’t want to go to the outer space and to see some incredible “landscapes”. We have to wait for the day when it all will be true and something tells us that they will keep their word and send us to space soon enough.
Category: Featured
super cool I what a ticket
Wow, nice!
Really cool. Although the record for an airplane is 67 miles (105 km), I think…