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Richard Branson has officially declared the Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space (previously known as the Spaceport America) is open for business in the New Mexico desert. Spacemen, rev your engines.
The extremely fancy £133 million hub for all of Virgin’s Galactic enterprises is finished and ready for action. 450 of the first 2.5 hour flights, which offer five minutes of weightlessness and promise ‘views of earth only seen by astronauts’, have been sold for £127,000 each — ouch.
Unfortunately fights won’t be taking place until sometime in 2013, after testing of the Mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, and SpaceShipTwo have been completed next year. Virgin Galactic is set to be the first commercial enterprise to ship ordinary people into space, and I for one would love to be on-board one of their flights — just have to find £130k from somewhere. Euromillions, you are my only hope. [BBC, Telegraph]
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This Is LauncherOne: Virgin Galactic's Mothership-Launched Space Rocket
Win the euro millions and you can take me too!!!
fingers crossed that my career path will being be close to these brilliant aircraft/spacecraft!!
Is it ever gonna get cheaper or is this always going to be the domain of the rich and lottery wankers
Of course it will get cheaper, within a generation people on the dole and illegal immigrants will be able to afford the trip. Mind you, if the Tory’s are in power that will only be a one way ticket.
If history is anything to go by, we’ll be blasting our prison population into space sometime soon.
If History OR Science Fiction are to go by… I mean what could go wrong…
I think I’ll just take the conventional route and wait about 50 years for it to become more affordable… it shall be a thing to put on my bucket list when I’m an old, old man!