Who will be the first to do it: British entrepreneur and adventurer Richard Branson or Amazon founder Jeff Bezos?
Branson is ahead and plans to launch into space today, Sunday, exactly nine days before Bezos. In addition to fulfilling personal dreams, the two of them want to open up a potentially highly lucrative future market: space tourism.
Branson is said to be part of the test flight of the “VSS Unity” spacecraft of his space company Virgin Galactic as a “mission specialist”. A somewhat grandiose description: Basically, the 70-year-old will test what the trip into space feels like and what can be improved about the experience for future space tourists.
The bustling businessman pushed his way past Bezos to a certain extent. At the beginning of June he announced that he would be on board for the first manned flight of his space company Blue Origin on July 20. At the beginning of July, Branson announced his own space flight for July 11th, mind you “depending on the weather and technical checks”. The start is planned on Sunday at 3 p.m. CEST.
Whether he wanted to get ahead of the richest man in the world is an open question. The entrepreneur, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, has repeatedly announced in recent years that he will soon fly into space.
First space tourist took off in 2001
Admittedly, Branson and Bezos are not the first space tourists. This is the title of US entrepreneur Dennis Tito, who was brought to the International Space Station in a Russian Soyuz rocket in 2001.
However, Branson and Bezos now want to fly into space with systems developed by their own companies – and are relying on very different concepts. At Virgin Galactic, the “VSS Unity” spacecraft, which looks like a sleek jet jet, is first brought from the state of New Mexico to an altitude of 15 kilometers by a transport aircraft. It then disengages and flies to an altitude of around 90 kilometers. In the USA, the official limit to space is 80 kilometers.
Blue Origin offers an eleven-minute flight with its “New Shepard” carrier system, which is named after the first US astronaut in space, Alan Shepard. A launch vehicle launched in Texas brings a futuristic passenger capsule into space. The capsule will reach a height of around 100 kilometers and thus the Kármán line, which, according to international definition, marks the boundary to space.
“The universe belongs to all of us”
Despite all the differences, the goal is the same for both missions: a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of the curvature of the earth. “I firmly believe that space belongs to all of us,” Branson said recently. He and Bezos are betting that many people will be willing to pay a lot of money for this experience.
And Blue Origin’s first flight already proves them right: In an online auction, a previously unknown bidder paid a full 28 million dollars to be there on July 20th. Bezos will also take his brother Mark and the 82-year-old US pilot Wally Funk into space as a guest of honor. The 57-year-old Amazon founder recently relinquished the operational management of the online giant and now has more time for his hobby of space travel.
In the race for space, Bezos and Branson aren’t the only billionaires. Tesla founder Elon Musk is at the helm with his space company SpaceX and has already brought astronauts to the ISS. Musk also wants to give wealthy tourists an excursion into space – and is aiming for the end of the year as the date. (SDA)