[ad_1]
Virgin Galactic CEO Richard Branson has long claimed that one day he would travel to space aboard his company's space plane, and he knows when.
The British billionaire announced on Thursday that he intended to make his first trip to space over the next six months. This flight will coincide with the anniversary of the first landing of astronauts on the moon, one of the greatest achievements of spaceflight.
"My wish is to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, this is what we are working on," he told AFP at an event organized at the National Air and Space Museum of Washington, DC
The first landing on a moon took place on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their landing gear on the lunar surface.
Branson's remarks come two months after the company's last SpaceShipTwo spacecraft test, in which a pair of pilots had flown the aircraft at an altitude of 51 miles above the Mojave Desert. California before landing safely. Most experts agree that the space begins at the Karman Line, an imaginary boundary located at the extreme limit of the Earth's atmosphere, about 62 miles above level. of the sea.
"I'm looking forward to it," Branson told CBS News after this successful test.
The December test flight was part of a series of four flights so far for the Virgin Galactic space plane, including a disastrous test in October 2014 in which the aircraft crashed into flight. The accident killed one crewmember and seriously injured another.
Despite the accident, Virgin Galactic reports that hundreds of customers have signed up for a brief suborbital flight into space. A ticket to ride costs $ 250,000.
But will the company be ready in time to meet Branson's ambitious timetable? "I have to wait for our team to say they are 100% happy," he told AFP. "I do not want to push them."
"I think they're ready," Richard Garriott, a video game developer who spent $ 30 million in 2008 to spend 12 days orbiting Earth, told NBC News MACH in an e-mail . "They will probably still have some test flights from here, but they are basically ready now by publicly available measures."
Space
Virgin Galactic is not the only company to embark on aspiring astronaut dreams.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, said in September that the company would fly a Japanese billionaire around the moon aboard its Big Falcon spacecraft in 2023. Jeff Bezos rocket company Blue Origin planned to charge customers between $ 200,000 and $ 300,000 Shepard spacecraft this year.
Garriott said Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin would probably have a lot of customers in the years to come. "The real question is sustainability after the first few hundred leaflets," he added. "I have price elasticity issues once the price becomes multiples of hundreds of thousands."
Branson said the next SpaceShipTwo test flight was scheduled for Feb. 20.
Want more stories about spaceflight?
FOLLOW NBC NEWS MACH ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM.
[ad_2]
Source link
