Tuesday, December 8, 2009

First Commercial Spaceship

If you have $200,000 to spare, you can put your name on a list for a commercial ride into space. The company doing this is Virgin Galactic a spin of off Virgin Atlantic Airways. It will not be ready for a few years, and you are only getting about five minutes of weightlessness, but they say that 300 people have already signed up.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20091207/tts-uk-space-business-ca02f96.html (via)

"Virgin Galactic, an offshoot of Branson's Virgin Atlantic Airways, hopes the winged, minivan-sized SpaceShipTwo will rocket tourists into zero gravity beginning in two or three years.
...
The project, with a $450 million (274 million pounds) budget, would see the construction of six commercial spaceships that would take passengers high enough to achieve weightlessness and see the curvature of Earth set against the backdrop of space.

A twin-hulled aircraft named Eve would carry SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of about 60,000 feet (18,288 meters) before releasing it. The spaceship would then fire its onboard rocket engines, climbing to about 65 miles (104 km) above Earth.

The trip would take about 2-1/2 hours, with passengers experiencing about five minutes of weightlessness.

Some 300 aspiring astronauts have put down deposits for the $200,000 ride, which includes three days of training.
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