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Photo credit: Ronrosano (CC BY-SA 3.0) [19659003] If you're like us, you've been looking forward to your chance to board a rocket and fly into space since you were a little kid. In recent years, this dream has become more and more promising as companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic have made great strides towards space tourism while battling serious setbacks. There is not yet an exact date that you can circle on your calendar for the maiden voyage, but here is a schedule updated by the main players with the kind permission of Phys.org, including a little about what each company offers.
Richard Branson's company experienced a big problem in 2014 when a pilot error resulted in an accident in which one of the two astronauts was killed. The company has since resumed testing, with its Virgin Galactic VSS Unity spacecraft seen flying over the Mojave Desert last May. The vessel will be launched aboard the WhiteKnightTwo, with six passengers (approximately $ 250,000 per ticket) and two pilots on board. It will come off at 49,000 feet, about 13,000 feet above the cruising altitude of a commercial aircraft, and then ignite its rocket. After giving the opportunity to its paying customers to experience weightlessness, the craft will begin its descent to the Earth. The trip will take between 90 and 120 minutes, which amounts to about 2000-2700 dollars per minute. In an interview with BBC Radio 4 in May, Richard Branson said he was taking astronaut training because he would be taking part in Virgin Galactic's first trip. "We are talking about months, not years, so it's close," he said. "There are exciting times ahead."
Six is also the magic number of Blue Origin (the company of Amazon Jeff Bezos), but instead of flying in a jet-shaped boat, passengers will be in a capsule with windows at the top of the boat. ;a rocket. The capsule will come off and give the same feeling of weightlessness to about 62 miles in the sky, then float to Earth with giant parachutes. A new Reuters report indicates that Bezos will charge a similar price to its passengers ($ 200,000 – $ 300,000) with the first trip planned for 2019, but tickets are not yet available. An aerospace analyst told Reuters that a single flight would cost about $ 10 million to these companies, although the actual operating costs were not shared.
SpaceX already has two tourists in space for a trip around the moon later this year. are and how much they have paid have not been disclosed. The company is also working with NASA to attract astronauts to ISS, so hopefully with these two projects, they could offer more tourist flights in the future.
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