BRANSON ROCKETS TO WIN IN BILLIONAIRE SPACE RACE
▶ Dubai resident who bought $200,000 ticket for own trip watches take-off from New Mexico
British businessman Richard Branson has won the so-called billionaire space race, riding a Virgin Galactic rocket ship 86 kilometres above the Earth yesterday.
The 70-year-old entrepreneur, who founded the space tourism company in 2004, was joined by five others on the first fully-crewed flight of its VSS Unity spacecraft.
Slung beneath a larger carrier aircraft named VMS Eve, the gleaming spaceplane climbed into the early-morning skies above New Mexico for a flight that lasted about an hour.
Passengers caught a glimpse of the inky blackness of space, and experienced weightlessness.
“Welcome to the dawn of a new space age,” Mr Branson said after the flight, as the six crew were given badges by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.
The competition in the space tourism sector came to a head this month when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced he would be flying to space on July 20 aboard a rocket built by his company Blue Origin.
Mr Branson hopes he will be able to sell the experience of space travel to people from around the world and turn Virgin Galactic into a billion-dollar business. Watching the flight take off from Spaceport America was Dubai resident Namira Salim.
Almost 17 years ago, she paid $200,000 to travel on one of Virgin Galactic’s first tourist flights.
Now, she may not have to wait much longer.
“It is a moment I have been waiting for,” she said.
Richard Branson blasted into space yesterday aboard a rocket-powered spaceplane built by his company Virgin Galactic, in a landmark moment for the space tourism industry he has long dreamt of creating.
The British billionaire was part of a crew of six on board the spaceplane VSS Unity, which soared into the skies over New Mexico, the US, for a short, sub-orbital flight.
Footage broadcast by Virgin Galactic showed the small white spacecraft separating from the twin-fuselage VMS Eve carrier jet aircraft at an altitude of around 13,500 metres.
The pilots of VSS Unity ignited its single rocket engine, sending the craft streaking up towards the blackness of space, some 86 kilometres above the Earth.
“Seventeen years of hard work to get us this far,” said a smiling Mr Branson, as he congratulated his team on the trip back.
Those on board had a brief experience of weightlessness, before the craft glided to a landing on the same runway at Spaceport America from which it took off.
The entire flight, from takeoff to landing, lasted about an hour.
Mr Branson, 70, founded Virgin Galactic in 2004 with the dream of making space travel more accessible, and is betting on building the experience into a billion-dollar-a-year business.
The businessman’s participation in yesterday’s flight fitted well with his public image as the maverick executive whose Virgin brands – which include airlines and music companies – have long been associated with adventurous exploits involving hot air balloons and sailing boats.
In making the successful flight, Mr Branson also beat Jeff Bezos to the honour of becoming the first person to reach space in a craft built by their own company.
The Amazon founder, who has also set his sights on sub-orbital space tourism, is planning to make his own trip to space on board his company’s New Shepard spacecraft on July 20.
The competition between the two entrepreneurs was popularised as a “billionaire space race”, and Mr Bezos’s company Blue Origin continued to disparage the Virgin Galactic attempt in the days before yesterday’s flight. This prompted debate over where the boundary of space lies.
At 85.9 kilometres, Mr Branson’s flight met the definition used by Nasa and the US Federal Aviation Administration, which say outer space begins 80km above Earth.
But he did not cross the Karman line, another definition that says space begins at 100km, which Mr Bezos has set out to cross.
“New Shepard was designed to fly above the Karman line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name,” Blue Origin said in a series of Twitter posts on Friday.
Mr Branson has insisted, however, that he and Mr Bezos were not engaged in a personal contest.
Virgin is planning to carry out at least two further test flights of its space plane this year, before regular commercial operations begin in 2022.
Demand for tickets is apparently strong, with several hundred wealthy would-be citizen astronauts already having reserved seats. These cost around $250,000.
Earlier yesterday, Mr Branson revealed that his fellow billionaire and space entrepreneur Elon Musk, who also watched the flight in person, had reserved a seat on a flight.
Another major player in the emerging space tourism industry, Mr Musk’s company is planning its first all-civilian space flight later this year.
Proving Virgin Galactic’s service is safe was also a key objective of yesterday’s flight.
Its flight programme has suffered several setbacks.
An earlier prototype of its space plane crashed during a test flight over the Mojave Desert in 2014, killing one pilot and seriously injuring another.
Mr Branson’s role in yesterday’s flight was to “evaluate the private astronaut experience,” Virgin Galactic said.
Also on board were the spaceplane’s two veteran test pilots, Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, and three mission specialists: Beth Moses, the company’s chief astronaut instructor; Virgin Galactic’s lead operations engineer Colin Bennett, and Sirisha Bandla, its vice president of government relations.
Swiss-based investment bank UBS has estimated that the space tourism sector could be worth as much as $3 billion a year by 2030.
Mr Branson dreamt of making space travel more accessible and is betting on building a billiondollar-a-year business