Billionaires rush into space: in July, two star entrepreneurs will fly there at once

Virgin Galactic CEO Richard Branson has announced that he will make the first flight into space on his Unity rocket. The flight will take place on July 11. Thus, he will outrun Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who will enter orbit in the New Shepard capsule on July 20 along with 82-year-old astronaut Wally Funk. Writes about it with the BBC.

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The British businessman Branson's company was one of the first in the world to announce about the intention to develop a system for tourist flights into space and has been developing the technologies necessary for this for more than 20 years.

Virgin Galactic with Branson on board will climb to an altitude of 90 kilometers, which will allow you to experience the feeling of weightlessness within minutes. In addition, passengers and crew of the spacecraft will be able to see the outline of the rounded Earth from orbit.

Virgin Galactic recently received a license from US authorities to conduct commercial space missions. The flight will take place on July 11, because on this day there is a flight "window", and the weather will be favorable. However, this does not exclude the possibility that the trip may be postponed due to bad weather or possible technical problems.

About 600 people have already reserved tickets to space on the Virgin Galactic rocket plane. The cost of such pleasure is quite impressive - $250 thousand.

“I truly believe that space belongs to all of us,” Branson said when announcing the date of his first flight. “We've spent 17 years developing, designing and innovating, and now a new commercial spaceflight industry is poised to open up the universe to humanity and change the world for the better.”

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“It’s one thing to simply dream about making space more accessible to all people, but quite another to make that dream a reality through the collaboration of our fantastic team,” he noted.

Flight of Bezos

In parallel with Branson, the founder of Amazon, the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, announced the start of tourist flights into space. Back in 2000, he created the Blue Origin company, which develops space rockets and capsules, and a little earlier announced that he would fly into space on July 20.

After Bezos' announcement, Branson decided to speed up. Initially, it was assumed that it will go into orbit only after four Virgin Galactic employees make a test walk into space. Now he himself will be among the four test passengers, while the apparatus will be operated by two pilots.

The New Shepard Bezos capsule will rise to an altitude of about 100 kilometers above the Earth, that is, slightly higher compared to the Virgin Galactic apparatus.

In addition to Bezos, three more people will become passengers: the businessman's brother Mark, a still unknown person who paid $ 28 million for the ticket, and the 82-year-old astronaut Wally Funk.

At the same time, petitions appeared on the network for keep Bezos out of the way... They call him "the real Lex Luthor." More than 165 thousand people have already collected two petitions.

Bezos posted a two-minute video on his Instagram in which he informs Funk that she will be among the first space tourists.

“I no longer hoped that I would ever fly,” the astronaut says in the video.

Wally Funk was born in 1939 in New Mexico and has dedicated her entire life to aviation. During her pilot career, she spent 16,6 thousand hours in the air and trained about 3 thousand pilots as instructors.

In 1961, Funk was one of 13 participants in the private program Women in Space, also known as Mercury 13. Within its framework, female volunteers underwent enhanced physical and psychological tests to prove that they, too, are capable of flying into space. However, the American space agency NASA had nothing to do with this program, and the first American woman went into space only in 1983.

Interestingly, Funk bought a ticket for Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic spacecraft for $ 200. Whether it will now also carry out a space flight to New Shepard has not yet been announced.

“I can’t even tell those watching right now how happy I am that Blue Origin chose me for this flight,” Funk says in the video.

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If her flight succeeds, she will become the oldest person ever to go into space. In the past, Funk made history as the first woman to become an aviation investigator for the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and an inspector for the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Space tourism

The flights of Bezos and Branson could mark the beginning of a new era of space tourism - a sector that has been “idle” for about 10 years.

In the 2000s, seven people paid between $ 20 million and $ 40 million for visits to the International Space Station. However, this program, which was carried out by the Russian space agency, was phased out in 2009.

Now, several American companies are simultaneously developing their own programs for tourist flights into space, and some of them intend to rise well above the boundary of space, where the Branson and Bezos vehicles will go.

In particular, SpaceX founder Elon Musk is already planning several private missions aboard his Dragon ships, which are now being launched into orbit by Falcon-9 rockets. Such flights will last for several days and will become suborbital, that is, tourists will find themselves in open space.

Roscosmos has also announced its intention to resume its space tourism program, with the next two tourists to be flown to the ISS in 2023. In addition, in June of this year, the Russian space agency announced that its "tourist" division, Glavkosmos, was ready to send people to the International Space Station for a period of 10 to 30 days.

There are also plans to create a special private space station that ticket holders can visit. They are being developed by the American company Axiom Space, which was founded by Michel Suffredini - from 2005 to 2015, he headed NASA’s program for flights to the International Space Station.

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