Billionaires and their spaceships: what’s next for space tourism? | Business and Economic News

Sir Richard Branson is now an astronaut. The 70-year-old billionaire flew to the stars on Sunday morning in a fully manned Virgin Galactic spacecraft, at least nine days earlier when Spanish rival magnate Jeff Bezos hopes to try to reach the edge of space on a Blue Origin ship.

Branson’s successful flight is more than just a victory in a space race between billionaires; it launches an initial pistol into a new era in which space travel can open up to non-professional astronauts beyond government programs, thus providing another impetus to the rapidly evolving space economy.

Following Sunday’s success, Virgin Galactic hopes to launch commercial flights into suborbital space next year. To date, the company has sold approximately 600 tickets, earning a price of approximately $ 250,000 each. Paid travelers include celebrities like Tom Hanks and Lady Gaga and billions of people to strengthen the Elon Musk space.

“I’ve wanted to do it since I was a kid,” Branson said after returning to the terra firma on Sunday. “But the truth is, nothing will prepare you to see it from Earth’s space.”

Always a salesman, Branson has achieved a great victory for the Virgin Galactic he created. But the richest man in the world – Jeff Bezos – it is competing in part of the commercial space market with its Blue Origin company.

And Bezos ’intentions don’t end there. Blue Origin wants to help build infrastructure in space and return NASA to the moon, like Elon Musk’s private company SpaceX.

He was a member of a team that lost a multi-billion dollar contract against Blue Origin SpaceX to build NASA’s next human landing system to take astronauts to the moon. Bezos filed an official protest against the award. A resolution on this is expected sometime in August.

Meanwhile, Blue Origin is building a huge new rocket, called the New Glenn, that will compete with the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. This rocket is estimated to begin sometime next year.

Space race

Historically, space has been a domain that belonged only to the military or governments and their respective space agencies, such as NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos. In recent years, there has been a paradigm shift, with more and more private companies taking on a big name by putting hardware in space.

Instead of building all the hardware itself, NASA has turned to the private sector to help reduce costs and drive innovation. The U.S. space agency is reaping the fruits of that work with its commercial crew and cargo programs.

SpaceX has launched three different astronaut missions into space, lowering the cost of space travel by millions. Right now, the Crew Dragon capsule seats are estimated to cost NASA $ 55 million, and NASA paid $ 90 million for Roscosmos to ride on the Soyuz for each seat.

Although Musk, Bezos and Branson are currently receiving headlines, it was another billionaire named Peter Diamandis who took the first important steps in opening the space to commercial players in the late 1990s, creating a competition that would spark a thriving private space industry: the X Prize.

This initial competition challenged teams around the world to build a spaceship capable of carrying humans into space several times. The first team to successfully launch (and do so twice in the short term) would win a $ 10 million prize.

It would take almost a decade for the award to be won. A team led by Burt Rutan built a small rocket-powered vehicle called the SpaceShipOne, designed to be fired from an airplane, much like NASA’s old X-15.

It was the inspiration for many of the successes of the craft, as Diamandis had hoped, and attracted the attention of a particular space enthusiast – Sir Richard Branson. He bought Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, and founded his own space company, Virgin Galactic in 2004. Then the next generation spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, began construction.

The refurbished vessel would carry a total of six passengers into space and launch a thriving space tourism industry. Or at least he hoped that would happen. Building something that will fly in space was quite a challenge. Virgin Galactic suffered losses in 2014 in the catastrophic failure of SpaceShipTwo, and as a result, one of its pilots was killed.

But Branson and his team of engineers insisted. This decision bore fruit when the company finally arrived in space in 2018. Additional test flights, including astronaut professor Beth Moses at the company, laid the groundwork for Branson’s historic flight on Sunday.

“Today has been the result of many years of hard work and tremendous sacrifice,” George Whitesides, chairman of the Virgin Galactic Space Advisory Board, told Al Jazeera. “Increasing spaceflight will change the future of humanity for the better, and this flight will help make that happen.”

A crew of six from the Unity 22 team [Courtesy of Virgin Galactic]

Destination space

Branson and three other crew members joined SpaceShipTwo on Sunday morning after a 90-minute delay in bad weather in the New Mexico desert. The astronaut quartet, along with its two pilots, successfully completed the suborbital test flight at the edge of the seat, designed to prove that Branson’s space plane is ready for passengers who are ready for the ultimate thrill.

The multimillionaire crew at Unity was rounded out with pilots David Mackay and Michael Masucci, astronaut coach Beth Moses Beth aircraft, aircraft engineer Colin Bennett and vice president of government relations Sirisha Bandla.

Branson’s journey began dramatically when he was a massive carrier of Virgin’s Galactic aircraft – a VSS Unity rocket-powered spacecraft under the wing – took off from the company’s Spaceport America launch site around Truth or Consequences (New Mexico) at 8:40 a.m. local time. locally (14:40 GMT) due to bad weather due to a 90 minute delay.

The company pulled out all the live play stops offered by Stephen Colbert and included a live performance by R&B musician Khalid after the crew returned to Earth. It was bright, it was clear, it was all you could expect from a growing commercial tourism company.

Backed by the success of the theater’s true mission, the ship, named Unity, approached a height of more than 80 km (NASA’s definition of space), giving Branson and his five crew a three-minute weightless weight to make a spiral descent before immersing the Earth in the atmosphere again. Virgin Virgin to touch the site for the launch of a new Mexico.

The successful flight was mainly passed by Bezos, who is planning a suborbital space flight next week.

Bezos announced that he would go with his brother and an as-yet-unnamed mystery man who won a seat on the plane at a private auction last month at the Club for the Future, Blue Origin science, technology, engineering and math.

The winner brought in $ 28 million.

Along with the trio, 82-year-old Wally Funk will be a great aviator who has waited six decades to get into space. Originally called Mercury 13 in NASA’s Women’s Space Program, the group of female astronaut candidates in 1961 received the same tests that the original NASA team of astronauts, Mercury 7, underwent.

Funk, who is ready to become the oldest person to ever fly in space next week – a record when John Glenn flew on the space shuttle Discovery at the age of 77 – did not give up his dream of becoming an astronaut.

“I never give up on anything,” Funk told Al Jazeera. “I know that my body and mind can take on everything that space suits want to give me: a high-altitude chamber test, that’s fine; centrifuge test, I know I can do five to six G. These things are easy for me. “

Funk holds a record, set in 1961, for the longest time in an isolation tank – recorded for more than 10 hours and breaking John Glenn’s record. This experience will come in handy because Blue Origin flight participants must pass certain medical qualifications within the requirements of the flight.

Funk, along with another big name in the space industry – Elon Musk – has bought tickets to Virgin Galactic. It’s unclear when it will fly or whether Funk will save it as it purchased before Blue Origin was selected.

In response to what Musk bought over the weekend, Branson said he would claim a day off and buy a ticket for the SpaceX trip. And Musk was there on Sunday to sideline Branson.

The Unity 22 spacecraft as it flies over the Earth, crossing the boundary of space [Courtesy of Virgin Galactic]

Competing for customers

As a sign of the warm-up competition for the commercial space flight market, Blue Origin took to Twitter on July 9 to highlight the differences between Virgin and Galactic – noting the differences in altitude and the number of test flights. Blue Origin also boasted that it has “the biggest windows” in space. (That is, until you look at the dome of the International Space Station.)

Former NASA astronaut Tom Jones helped shed light on which design is really better. Four times according to the space brochure, both designs have advantages. “It may be cheaper to develop and fly a simpler capsule design than a space plane, but a space plane can fly more often because it doesn’t need parachutes, but is based on a runway,” he told Al Jazeera.

Despite being proud of his company’s Twitter, Bezos took to Instagram to land to congratulate Branson and his team, posting the release “congratulations on the flight. Can’t wait to join the club!”

On Monday, the FAA took a further step in giving Blue Origin its final approval to take humans into space in its New Shephard launch system.

If all goes well, Bezos will become the second private tycoon to join the “billionaires in space” club on July 20 – the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar eclipse.