In the race for space travel for wealthy tourists, British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has its first commercial flight Galactic 01 started successfully.
A carrier aircraft brought the spacecraft from a runway in the US state of New Mexico VSS Unity up. There, the occupants spent several minutes in zero gravity before returning to earth.
At Galactic 01 the company had announced before departure that it was a research mission with two members of the Italian Air Force, another Italian researcher and an employee of Virgin Galactic. The next flight, scheduled for early August, will have “private astronauts” on board, it said. From then on, commercial flights into space are scheduled to start on a monthly basis.
A screenshot of a video showing the inside of the spacecraft during its stay in space. The Italian crew members can be seen waving an Italy flag.
(Photo: JOSE ROMERO/AFP)
The company had started selling tickets for the tourist flight into space years ago. The approximately one-and-a-half-hour tour including weightlessness costs several hundred thousand dollars per person.
Branson’s company isn’t the first to enable wealthy private individuals to travel to space. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his company Blue Origin have already sent several passengers into space. Another competitor is Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX, which has so far carried out two completely private missions to the International Space Station (ISS).
Richard Branson founded his company Virgin Galactic almost 20 years ago.
(PHOTO: JOE SKIPPER/REUTERS)
Nevertheless, the 72-year-old Branson is considered a pioneer in the field of private space travel, he founded his company Virgin Galactic for this purpose in 2004. In July 2021, Branson made it in a virtual race among billionaires ten days ahead of Jeff Bezos in his own spaceship into space. However, the test flight with the Italian Air Force, which had previously been planned for the third quarter of 2022, had been postponed indefinitely due to technical improvements.