Featured Image Credit: Virgin Galatic
Topics: News, Space, Technology, Travel, Richard Branson
Joe Harker
Topics: News, Space, Technology, Travel, Richard Branson
Virgin Galactic is set to start a regular service launching tourists into space next month, but if you fancy yourself a budding astronaut, it's going to cost you.
The first commercial flight of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space launch was successfully completed in June with a team of Italian researchers being flown up to the edge of space.
Now the goal for Virgin Galactic is monthly space launches which will take paying customers on the same journey and the idea is for those regular commercial space flights to begin in August.
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Less than three years ago, the company was launching its first manned flight to space. Two years ago, Branson beat Jeff Bezos and became the first billionaire with a space program to make it up there themselves.
Now with the Virgin Galactic flight carrying the team of researchers having succeeded, the plan is to make the launches a regular occurrence.
If all goes to plan next month will be the starting point for these regular commercial launches, though it'll take them a while to get through the waiting list of everyone who already bought a ticket.
If you want to get on board a Virgin Galactic space flight it'll cost you $450,000, but there's about 800 other potential passengers who've also paid up for the chance to fly to space.
With several hundred passengers having bought a ticket and finite space on the spacecraft, it'd take several years of regular monthly flights to get through the backlog, so before you blow the life savings on a trip to space be confident that you'll still be around in a decade or so.
Perhaps with time things will get a little bit quicker and Virgin Galactic will be able to provide more regular trips for passengers.
Earlier this year, Branson told LADbible that the goal was to eventually make commercial space travel something available and affordable for the general public.
Unfortunately he thinks it's gonna be a long, long time until that's a reality, saying they're only 'at the start of making it more accessible to more people'.
Branson explained that it was 'gonna take some years' before the cost of commercial space travel might come down and it might be something like a 'few decades' before we're really there.
It's something he'd like to see in his lifetime and presumably something space travel aficionados would love to have the chance to do.
Considering where our ability to fly was about a century ago, the leaps and bounds we've made since then have been incredible, so who knows what advancements we'll make in the coming years?