Saturday, June 26th 2021
Catching up into space
Virgin Galactic is allowed to fly tourists into space
The billionaires’ race for space tourism business is getting closer. A few weeks before Jeff Bezos lets himself be launched into space with a rocket from his company Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s company also receives the license for tourist flights into space. Will he steal the show from Bezos?
Billionaire Richard Branson is allowed to take tourists into space with his space company Virgin Galactic. The US aviation authority FAA granted the appropriate permission, such as Virgin Galactic announced. It evaluated data from the test flight of the Virgin spaceplane “VSS Unity” last month. The spaceship had flown to the space limit in June with two pilots and returned safely to Earth.
The SpaceShipTwo has space for a total of six passengers. Branson himself has also flown into space. Virgin Galactic chief executive Michael Colglazier said the FAA’s permission was encouraging. The first fully manned test flight is now planned for the summer.
With the FAA approval, the race between three billionaires for tourist flights into space is heating up. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wants to be the first non-astronaut to fly into space with a rocket from his company Blue Origin on July 20th. It is unclear whether Virgin Galactic Bezos will now steal the show. The rumor mill is boiling violently: Allegedly, Branson wants to precede Bezos and set off into space on July 4th – 16 days in advance.
The third billionaire who is also reaching for his tears is Tesla boss Elon Musk with his company SpaceX. However, he shouldn’t get in the way of the two. So far, he has only announced that he will start a first flight with space tourists by the end of the year. So far, astronauts have already flown to the International Space Station ISS with SpaceX.
$ 200,000 for zero gravity
Interesting in the race between Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin: Virgin flights don’t come quite as high as Bezos’ Blue Origin – so it’s a matter of opinion whether they count as space flights.
While Virgin sees the boundary between the earth’s atmosphere and space just like the US space agency NASA at 50 miles (a good 80 kilometers) above sea level, Blue Origin follows the definition of the Fédération Internationale Aéronautique. Accordingly, space has only been reached 100 kilometers above the earth, which Blue Origin achieves, but Virgin Galactic does not.
Either way, investors seem to like the space race: On Friday they were ready to shoot Virgin Galactic shares into higher spheres in advance. After the FAA approval was announced, the course took off by around a third at times. In total, more than 600 people are said to have bought one of the roughly $ 250,000 (about 205,000 euros) tickets for the 90-minute flight and a few minutes in weightlessness, including celebrities.
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