Virgin Galactic will allow you to reserve your place on board its suborbital aircraft. If you’re a little ric-rac, no need to call your banker right away: the down payment is “only” $150,000.
Since February 16, you can do like Richard Branson and board Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, heading for space. The total price of the ticket amounts to 450,000 dollars, which is equivalent to approximately 396,000 euros.
In the footsteps of Richard Branson
The deposit to be paid therefore amounts to 150,000 dollars (132,000 euros). The date of the first expeditions open to the public is not specified, but they should not be before a few months.
Recall that Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, made the first “touristy” suborbital flight last July. The two pilots Dave MacKay and Michael Masucci, at the controls of the VSS Unity rocket plane had transported it, along with three other passengers, to an altitude of approximately 50 miles (80 km). The company also looks back on this first tourist flight in the video below.
From now on, Virgin Galactic aims to further democratize this type of experience by opening it up to a wider audience… At the very least, to an audience likely to spend a few hundred thousand dollars in the experience.
If you have enough to pay such a sum and you are interested in the adventure, you can fill out the form available from the company’s website. The number of places is naturally limited. The sales target set by the company is 1,000 tickets, of which 700 have already been reserved in the previous months.
A few minutes in weightlessness for Sunday astronauts
The reserved ticket will allow you to experience a “ a 90-minute journey including launch and Mach-3 acceleration to space “. Once in the air, astronauts will enjoy several minutes of zero gravity out of the seat and unobstructed views of Earth from the spacecraft’s 17 windows “says Virgin Galactic.
A journalist from The Verge explains that the VSS Unity will be transported by a carrier plane White Knight Two at an altitude of approximately 15 km. It will then be released to begin its ascent, up to an altitude of 80 km. There, the passengers will then be able to float in weightlessness for a few minutes before descending to the ground.
If you will have to offload 150,000 dollars to hope to be part of the trip, the date of future launches remains unknown for the moment. The first flights should not take off before the end of 2022 at the earliest.
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Why don’t you pay for a private space program?
Sources: The Verge
, Businesswire
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