Elon Musk will fly into space on the Virgin Galactic tourist ship.
Virgin Galactic owner Richard Branson’s space flight yesterday caused a lot of media buzz. The billionaire completed a suborbital flight onboard a ship of his own company and aroused genuine interest in his project from the owner of SpaceX Elon Musk.
According to recent reports, Musk has reserved a seat on Virgin Galactic’s commercial flights, which the company intends to launch shortly. Branson not only confirmed the ticket reservation but added: “Elon is a friend, and maybe I will one day fly on one of his ships.”
There is no exact date when exactly Musk intends to fly on the Virgin Galactic ship. However, the flight, which provides up to four minutes in zero gravity, is reported to cost $ 250,000 for each passenger, and the booking itself will cost $ 10,000.
It is noteworthy that the news about Musk’s reservation follows a series of desperate tweets from rival company Blue Origin, which also plans to develop space tourism actively. It by another billionaire, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who will only go into space on his company’s ship on July 20. Now Blue Origin has erupted in a series of posts criticizing everything at Virgin Galactic – from the size of the portholes in Branson’s ship to the evacuation system and the level of environmental impact. In addition, Branson a “fake astronaut” because he allegedly did not reach the “Pocket Line” – the invisible border beyond which “real space” supposedly begins.
If the space race was mainly between the USSR and the United States in the last century and was one of the side effects of the Cold War, now space research is often fueled by competing billionaires.
